For many of us, animals are an important part of our lives. Stories and art throughout time reflect the unbreakable bond between human and animal, whether the anthropomorphic gods of ancient myth, the animal guides of folkloric traditions, or the animal heroes found in modern movies.

Arda is likewise populated by all sorts of creatures, some pivotal to the stories and others inferred. This month's challenge presents prompts as a "bestiary" of some of Arda's animals. We've selected public-domain images, modern music, and traditional songs that feature animals and invite our creators to choose one (or more!) of these prompts and use it to make fanworks. You can find this month's Bestiary of Arda prompts here.

This is a good opportunity to remind our would-be challenge participants that our challenges remain open to all Silmarillion-based fanworks, and we encourage creative interpretations of challenges and prompts. For this challenge, for example, while the prompt may be animal-based, your fanwork doesn't have to mention animals at all. And if the critters in our collection aren't inspiring any fanworks, you can use any aspect of the prompt: the title, the music video, the background in an image. Our complete challenge guidelines can be found here, but if it's Silmarillion-based and permissible on our site, chances are that you're good.

We hope this month's prompts inspire a herd (a flock? a pride? a murder?) of new Silmarillion-based fanworks!

Last Friday, May 5, more than half of the moderators were online on our mod channel on the SWG's Discord—a rare occurence—and we started talking about artificial intelligence (AI) and specifically how it might be used for fanworks and, more specifically, what we were and were not willing to allow to be posted on the SWG archive. By the afternoon, I'd started our draft policy and set aside the weekend for the mods to continue to discuss the issue so that the draft could be released for public comment in time for this newsletter.

Turns out, it was timely. The next day, May 6, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW) linked to an interview about AI and fanworks with legal chair Betsy Rosenblatt in the OTW Signal. (The link points to Archive.org because the OTW has since taken the original mention of the Rosenblatt article down.) The general fannish consensus about Rosenblatt's perceived enthusiasm over training AI on fanworks was not positive. (That's a serious understatement.) But it made our in-progress AI policy all the more salient and necessary.

The draft AI policy has since been posted on our site and is now open for comment. If you'd like to comment on the policy, there is an open discussion about it in the #town-hall channel of our Discord, or you can email the mods. (Replying to this email will email the mods, either to register your comments on the policy or request a Discord invite if you need one.) We've already received a number of comments that will help us shape the policy to better reflect our values as a group and, we hope, make our members feel like our site is a safe, welcoming place for their fanworks. If you have comments on the policy, we'd love to hear from you too.

The downfall of Númenor is one of the (maybe the?) most cataclysmic events in the history of Arda. Involving a literal reshaping of the world and the consequent annihilation of an entire people, it was brought on by the rebellious voyage of Ar-Pharazôn to Aman, against the laws of the Valar. As his (unwilling) wife, Tar-Míriel had a front-row seat to the whole slow toppling of Númenor. Yet, as Grundy notes in this month's biography of Míriel:

"The text does not record Míriel’s reaction to any of these events."

As Grundy's biography of Míriel shows, she emerges as a sort of grace note on Pharazôn's story, at first just a name but then given something of a story of her own. I say "something" because her story is still very much enmeshed in her victimhood at his hands, so much that what she thought or how she reacted (or didn't) to the decisions he made go completely unrecorded.

We've now surpassed more than 150 character biographies on our site. Our reason for beginning that project back in 2007 was to provide resources for people creating fanworks. And while, if asked at the time, we probably would have said a primary aim was making more accessible the histories of some of the more complicated characters, Míriel is a reminder that an equally important purpose is bringing to light those characters whose histories Tolkien left missing, like Míriel. (She is mentioned twice in the published Silmarillion.)

Maybe her reaction to the ending of her world will at last be recorded.

You can read Grundy's biography of Tar-Míriel here.

"Not to be dramatic," says Tolkien fan artist Busymagpie, "but art is life for me."

I suspect if you (someone who subscribes to a thing called the "Silmarillion Writers' Guild Newsletter") are reading this, you do not find this statement dramatic at all. In this month's Tolkien Fanartics column, our art editor Anérea interviewed Busymagpie about her heart-meltingly beautiful character portraits, which range from warm family scenes to much, um, warmer interactions between couples, especially her favorite pairing, Maedhros and Fingon. (I am narrowly avoiding making a pun about Busymagpie's joyfully vivid portrait of Arien, featured among the art Anérea selected for this month's column.)

As part of her art-is-life credo, Busymagpie describes working on her art every day. Although she started drawing at a young age, Busymagpie is mostly self-trained. I mention this because, as someone who regularly endures the ridicule of school-age children about my whiteboard-drawing skills, it gives me hope and underscores the value of persistence, no matter one's creative craft.

If you'd like to read more about Busymagpie's creative process, her evolution as an artist, or how she once got a job by drawing a page full of bums, you can find this month's inteview with Busymagpie here.

Also remember that Anérea is open to ideas on future interview subjects, future column topics related to art, and guest columnists. Reply to this email if you'd like to make a suggestion or few!

As the primary author of the Cultus Dispatches column, I will confess that I love the months I get to write columns for the Fandom Voices project, in part because there is really not a lot of writing involved. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of Cultus Dispatches that poses an open-ended question or two and invites Tolkien fans to share their perspectives and experiences. When the time comes to collect responses, I copy and paste the responses into a document, color-code them based on subtopic, and then string those responses (written by people who aren't me) together with a few words of my own. It makes for a easy simple column.

The responses for the "Defining Canon" Fandom Voices? Were anything but simple. There were more of them than usual, and the responses were much deeper than usual, but that wasn't the issue. The complexity around the topic is what made this topic not only challenging but illuminating to write about.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise. In the early years of online Tolkien fandom, debates over canon escalated into flame wars. Today, they have (mostly) simmered down into a more reasoned, intellectual discussion of the many ways different people turn the same vast set of contradictory facts into an understanding of the legendarium.

In the end, I decided to break the column into two parts. This first part will look at the many considerations fans bear in mind when defining canon. Next month, I'll share responses, with some light analysis, around how fans use Tolkien's canon to make fanworks. (Note that all of the responses are available now with the first part of the article.) This also means that if you missed getting your response entered before the article, it's not too late to get something in for the second part. (Response forms never close, and I will update the response collections as new responses come in, but this is the first time I've been able to extend the offer to be included in the article. The "Defining Canon" response form is here. Let's break even more records with this one.)

You can read the first part of "Fandom Voices: Defining Canon and Using Canon in Fanworks" here.

The History of Middle-earth and other texts related to how Christopher Tolkien constructed The Silmarillion out of his father's unpublished drafts can seem both a blessing and a curse to the fanworks creator. On the one hand, they give us so much raw material for our works. On the other, they muddle the water considerably where "canon" is concerned.

Fanworks creators have different views on which of these posthumous, draft, and previously unpublished works count as canon and which do not. Many, however, reject the earliest concepts when they were replaced later by different ideas (which often went on to become that "canon" that is the published Silmarillion). This isn't shocking. Tolkien's earliest writings on the legendarium date to the 1910s, when he was still in his 20s. The Book of Lost Tales, especially, seems at odds with the Silmarillion we know, in terms of plot, character, and style. Tolkien himself appears to have agreed. When he recommenced work on the first phases of what, decades later, would be published as The Silmarillion, he stripped almost all of his Lost Tales work away and began again with something termed, literally, "The Sketch of the Mythology." (Though many of these ideas would end up rejected too.) From there, decades of successive revisions, many letters, and much noodling about brought about the various materials that Christopher Tolkien used in putting together the published Silmarillion.

This month, however, we are embracing those early rejects like they were never cast ignobly out of the legendarium. Prompts for our challenge this month, called Rejects, are just what they sound like: rejected concepts from Tolkien's pre-LotR work on the legendarium. These were the days when the Silmarils had yet to achieve central status, Victorian fairy-story and the medieval Northern mythos somehow coexited, and Tolkien hadn't yet abandoned his "mythology for England" (do not laugh!) We're asking creators to pretend like their assigned event did transpire as it did in the early works and explore any aspect of the legendarium with that revised canon in mind.

If you'd like a Rejects prompt, you can reply to this email, and we'll send one along.

Also: The schedule for the Second Age Book Club hosted on our Discord server on April 29-30 has also been posted. (If you need a Discord invite, reply to this email!) And this is the last call for responses on the Fandom Voices project on defining canon, if you want your response included in the article. (Incoming responses will be added to the collection forevermore ... or as close to it as we mortals can achieve.)

April's character of the month, Salmar, is a deep character, which may seem a strange description of someone mentioned just once in the published Silmarillion. Yes, you have to go deep into the history of the legendarium to find him. Once there, you will find he was one of the many gods of the deeps (i.e., the sea ... just go with me here), where his character was a kind of everyman, doing everything from playing his violin to godding up the sea to mentoring the recalcitrant Noldor to riding off to battle with his twin brother. He was, to paraphrase Bilbo, stretched too thin, like too few fish in too big a pond. Maybe this is why Tolkien mostly got rid of him, leaving him as the artificer of the Ulumúri, a character who mostly functions to provide the sense of historical depth that Tolkien aimed to create in the legendarium.

Yet, he didn't disappear entirely. Much like the Norse giant Ymir, whose body was broken apart by the gods of Asgard and used to make the world, elements of Salmar's story resurface in other characters' tales.

Most of you reading this are probably creatives yourself, much like Tolkien. Salmar is interesting too in what he illustrates of the creative process: initially a central character in the pantheon but reduced to not much more than a footnote in the published text. Without the History of Middle-earth books, most of us would have no chance to realize that Salmar existed much beyond that very limited role. But we have this glimpse of the creative process and how deep sometimes a single name on the page can go to the one who created it.

You can read the biography of Salmar-Noldorin here.

Also make sure to note that sign ups are open if you want to have one of your stories discussed at our Second Age fanfiction book club, which will be held on our Discord server 29 and 30 April 2023. If you're not a member of our Discord and want to be, just reply to this email, and we'll send along an invite.

In 2007, the SWG newsletter quietly began including a section called Around the World and Web for announcements from groups other than the SWG. Part of our mission had always been "connectivity," which for us meant helping out other sites, groups, and events trying to get the word out about the cool things they were doing.

For many years, Around the World and Web was published monthly (as was our newsletter) and compiled by hand by our moderator Elleth. Elleth had a list of sites she'd check every month, then write up a "blurb" for each link or event. Sometimes the other mods would pop something in there too. It was a time-consuming task for Elleth and far from perfect (we definitely had the situation, more than once, where an event was announced after the newsletter was posted and had concluded before the next newsletter), but it did let us get the word out as best we could and, hopefully, generated some interest in other fandom groups and events.

When we rebuilt the site (which will be open for two years on April 6!), we discussed the fate of Around the World and Web. We decided to keep it and automate it, as the new site allowed us to do.

I mention Around the World and Web this month because, in recent weeks, it has been an extremely busy part of our site as we enter the time of the year when many Tolkien-related events run. If you're wondering how to get your (or anyone's!) event included, any SWG member can be given permission to post in Around the World and Web as a scout. If that seems too much, you can send your announcement to the mods. We also crosspost most everything that gets posted to the #signal-boost channel on our Discord and try to watch out for announcements on Tumblr too.

If you're looking for a challenge or appreciation week or swap or event to nudge your muses, check it out! Scroll down to see the current announcements in this newsletter, or find it on our site under the News menu.