In a lot of communities, you can get a sense of who is present just by looking around yourself. In online communities—especially online fan communities, where pseudonymity is a cultural norm—it can be harder to know just who you share your online spaces with.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column looks at Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data from 2015 and 2020 to answer that question: Just who is in this fandom? Who is present? Who is missing? And why are some groups of people heavily represented in the fandom while others are barely present or absent altogether?

Finally, as this newsletter attests, we are back online after an important but tricky software upgrade last weekend. We are currently repairing about a dozen small issues with the site, and please keep us posted if you find a problem not on the Known Site Issues list. (And remember you can always reply to newsletters to reach the moderators directly!)

If it feels like you shouldn't be reading this now (possibly while at work) on a Friday, you're correct. Our newsletter normally goes out on Saturday, but sending this addition is our last act before putting the site into read-only mode for the weekend.

Yes, you read that correctly: The site will be in read-only mode 16-18 September while we do a major and somewhat complex software upgrade. There may be times where we need to take the site offline altogether. We hope to be back up and running by the end of the day on Sunday (whether the upgrade was successful or not!)

While we are in read-only mode, the fanworks below are there for your enjoyment. (Maybe jot down your comments in a document to share with the creators when the site is back up again?) If you're in more of a creative spirit, we have just unveiled our new challenge, Major Arcana, which is based on tarot cards. You can use any aspect of the cards—the titles, the images, the descriptions, the readings—to inspire your fanwork.

We appreciate everyone's patience while we complete this majorly arcane software upgrade!

Think of how often oaths appear in everyday language. We swear, we promise, we invoke the names of deities whom we fear or find false.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Angelica reveals how deep the historical roots of oaths run. A component of mostly oral societies found around the world, oaths gave a sense of weight to agreements and laws that couldn't be written down. They often involved magic and contained an air of the numinous.

Tolkien was very familiar with this history (which often involved societies he researched as part of his scholarly work, such as Germanic cultures), and this familiarity reflects in the legendarium. The first oaths were uttered before the rising of the Sun, and when the dust settled after the Ring War, characters were still using oaths to show they were serious.

You can read this month's column, "On Oaths," here.

And before you go, please note the announcement below that we will be putting the site into read-only mode (and perhaps taking it offline entirely) next weekend, 16-18 September 2022, to complete several important upgrades.

The SWG's very first creative challenge was Strong Women, first featured seventeen years ago this month in September 2005. This was a very intentional and not-at-all-neutral choice, given that writing about women in Tolkien fanfic in 2005 felt often like a nature walk through Nan Dungortheb. The SWG moderators at the time very much wanted to send the message that, on the SWG, we viewed writing about women to be a good thing.

The last seventeen years have seen evolution in how women characters are seen in fanworks, thanks to the work of fans who were willing to encourage and celebrate fanworks about women and challenge the sexist assumptions underlying the undue criticism those works and authors often received. This month, we open a new Fandom Voices project about women in fanworks. We are looking for both creators and readers/viewers to respond, so if you'd like to share your experiences with Tolkien-based fanworks that include women characters, you can do so here.

Also, our Reference library has several pieces related to women and fanworks:

The Textual Ghosts Project by Elleth
Women Find a Room of Their Own in Tolkien Fanfiction by oshun
And the dozens of character biographies about women

Earlier this week, we were thrilled to open our Beyond the Silmarillion section. This section is open to creators who already post with us and exists to provide a means to share non-Silmarillion fanworks based on Tolkien's books and their adaptations. If you want to learn more about the new section, our Beyond FAQ has all the details.

The debut of our Beyond section also marks the conclusion of an eight-month stretch of work expanding the site to more readily welcome a greater variety of fanworks on the SWG. In 2022, we have created the tools needed to post artwork, link collections, playlists, videos, and multimedia fanworks, and we've included all of those in our new Beyond the Silmarillion section.

All of this seems timely given that, by the time we send our next newsletter in a week, the Amazon Rings of Power series will have premiered. While our organization has officially chosen not to become involved with the new series, we absolutely welcome the fans who will come our way, curious about The Silmarillion because of the show, and we hope some of them will join our community and post their work with us, just like the Hobbit film fans who came before them.

On that note, this month's Cultus Dispatches column wraps up our four-part series on the impact of the films on the Tolkien fandom. This month's article, Fandom Voices: Filmverse Fans, compiles the responses of more than thirty fans who joined the Tolkien fandom entirely or partly due to the two Jackson film trilogies. As in all Fandom Voices columns, several big takeaways are presented, but we also provide the complete responses so that you can draw your own conclusions. Finally, if you missed the original call for responses, you are not too late: Fandom Voices forms always remain open. If you joined the fandom because of the films and want to respond, you can do so here.

Because we are a relatively specialized archive for this day and age, this week we look outward, to the bigger Tolkien fandom world of which we are part.

Many years ago, when the SWG newsletter was a monthly hand-coded HTML affair, moderator Angelica started a column called "A Sense of History" that aimed to provide short, readable articles connecting the legendarium to real-world history. Angelica is a history teacher, and while the column was short-lived, it was because she went back to school for her Master's ... in history! We are pleased that, after several false starts, "A Sense of History" is back in our newsletter.

This month's article, by MirienSilowende, considers hostages. This is a term that, used in the modern sense, has a chilling connotation. Historically, it wasn't much better: a device used by a more powerful ruler to control subordinate peoples and establish cultural dominance among the children of a subordinate realm.

MirienSilowende details how medieval Welsh history parallels that of the Easterlings. Both peoples had young hostages taken and fostered by more powerful rulers: the English and the Gondorians, respectively. While there is no evidence of a violent end for any of those Easterling children, history illuminates the possibility of a bloody demise and suggests that the relationship between the realms was more than benevolent fosterage. Most tantalizing, how did these hard feelings toward Gondor possibly push the Easterlings into the clutches of Gondor's enemy, Sauron?

You can read MirienSilowende's article, illustrated by bunn, here.

And "A Sense of History" is open to contributions! Many of us have a corner of history where we see parallels with Middle-earth, and if you'd like to share your ideas in our newsletter, find out more about contributing to "A Sense of History" here.

It is with great sadness that we report that longtime SWG author and the friend of so many of us, Keiliss, passed away from cancer on August 11.

In the day since, many have shared their memories of Kei. She was a leader in the Tolkien fandom, modding the Slashy exchanges for many years. She was one of the original SWG members who joined seventeen years ago, when we were still just a Yahoo! Group and an LJ community, and whose wise, kind counsel helped shape who we are now. She was a heartbreakingly talented author, whose work was a comfort and delight to so many of us. Many remember her as one of the first to welcome them and make them feel at home in the fandom. And she was a beloved friend to so many, and her loss can never be filled.

Kei's MSV comoderator Red Lasbelin will share information about charitable contributions in Kei's name as they become available. In the meantime, if you don't know Kei's work, you should, and you can find her stories here. If you're looking for a way to honor her memory and all that she gave to our community, our art editor Anérea found a 2019 post from Kei, written for the annual Fandom Snowflake challenge, that sums up well her approach to fandom:

Fandom will go on, because as long as there are tales that have gaps that ask questions like 'what then?' and 'why?', people will fill those gaps as we have since time out of mind. The shape that will take further down the road—who knows? Whatever happens, I hope we don't fragment too far because one day we'll lose touch so completely that the only place we'll occasionally connect will be in the comment threads on AO3. And that would be so sad because fandom is about the writers and artists and the magic they create and the way imagination sparks from one to the other. This is our sandpit, we need to treasure it.

Go forth and make something beautiful or offer a kind word to someone who needs it. In loving memory of Keiliss.

In his lecture-turned-essay On Fairy-stories, Tolkien coins the term eucatastrophe: that emotional thrill when catastrophe is averted and, against all odds, the story winds up with a happy ending. August's character of the month, Túrin Turambar, is the precise opposite. Firstamazon, the author of this month's biography, notes that he embodies the idea of dyscatastrophe. No matter what he does, Túrin's life ends up in the dumpster in the back alley of Doom.

Túrin's is one of what Tolkien considered the three great tales, and Tolkien spent more time on his story (of which several versions exist) than he did on many other parts of the legendarium. As such, Túrin's biography will be in three parts, with the first part focusing on his childhood sorrows, his fosterage in Doriath (and the dyscatastrophic turn that took), his fall (or Saeros's fall, if you want to be literal about it), and finally, his years of outlawry. Firstamazon untangles Túrin's story from the various versions that exist to bring forth the story of a young man beset by the worst luck ever (and—spoiler alert!—it will only get worse). Check out the first part of Túrin's biography here.

As the SWG celebrates its seventeenth birthday this week, we think about the fans and communities who came before us who made our existence possible. The Library of Moria is one such archive.

Founded in 2002, it was already five years old when the SWG opened its website in 2007. But more importantly, the Library had done a lot of the hard and foundational work that allowed the SWG to be as open and accepting as it would become. Those who were part of early to mid-2000s fandom know that it was not always welcoming, and slashfic was a particular target. Authors on the Library of Moria not only wrote about LGBTQ+ relationships at a time when their very existence in the legendarium was a subject of strident debate, but they did it with joy, love, and a seemingly bottomless sense of humor. By the time we came into the fandom in 2005, minds were already beginning to change, thanks in part to the Library.

As the Library prepares to close its doors after twenty years—the fanworks will move to AO3 as part of the Open Doors project—we salute the archive that was a centerpiece of the fannish experience of so many. You can read this month's article here:  A Tribute to the Library of Moria.

This is also an open article, which means that we are willing to continue adding to it to include the voices of fans who want to preserve their memories of the Library of Moria. Was the Library important to you? Reply to this email to share your memories or, if you're not sure where to begin, to request a list of questions to get you started.

For the past few weeks, we've been soliciting ideas and then voting on a name for our forthcoming new site section. The vote was close but we have a name: Beyond the Silmarillion, a name that not only centers our group's ongoing purpose as a community for discussing and sharing fanworks about The Silmarillion but communicates the breadth of Tolkien's works able to be the focus of fanworks in the new site section.

In the News section below, you can learn more about what we are working on for the remainder of the year as far as adding new features to the site. Within the next several weeks, we anticipate opening the Beyond the Silmarillion section, which will allow creators who have archived five fanworks or 10,000 words of written fanworks with us to post all of their Tolkien-based fanworks on our site, regardless of whether they are Silmarillion-centric or not. (For those of you here for the Silm stuff, do not despair: This is truly a separate section of the site.)

Over the years, we've heard from a number of our creators that they wish there was a small archive that accepted all of their fanworks. As small Tolkien-centric archives continue to close, this wish is rapidly becoming a need. Large archives offer a certain degree of security, but there is also something to be said for keeping a copy of your work on a site that can be managed financially and technically by a single person. Our new site section is a way to hopefully meet the need for a small archive that can take all Tolkien fanworks while honoring the original purpose of our community as Silmarillion-centric.

The new site section originated in discussions between SWG moderators and creators about the creators' needs. We originated as and remain a site and community committed to serving the needs of Silmarillion fanworks creators. Is there something we're not doing yet that you'd like to see? Hit reply on this email and let us know.