Tolkien was a World War I veteran and nurtured a lifelong interest in ancient and medieval history. As such, the battle scenes in his books are some of his most powerful writing, as well as some of the most fertile ground for historical comparison.

In multiple places, the legendarium depicts siege warfare: a martial tactic that seeks to wear down an opponent by hemming in a population and leaving them subject to the slow diminishment of provisions. There are, of course, well-known sieges such as the Siege of Angband and the War of the Last Alliance, as well as several lesser-known sieges. In this month's A Sense of History column, S.R. Westvik looks at the historical analogues for the sieges seen in Tolkien's works. Drawing from ancient history through the present-day War in Ukraine, they consider the strategy behind successful siege warfare, the resistance tactics of a besieged opponent, and the humanitarian issues that arise whenever a civilian population becomes an integral part of a military strategy.

You can read S.R. Westvik's Sieges in the First and Second Ages here.

Because November and December are typically busy months for people—in addition to the array of seasonal holidays, there are numerous fandom events at this time—we usually offer one challenge that spans both months, ideally with various points of entry to satisfy both the creator who wants a full challenge and the time-stretched creator who wants something quick that can be completed in an afternoon.

This year's November/December challenge, Manwë's Mailbag, was constructed with this goal in mind. Prompts for this challenge will be postcards including both an image and text. The twist, however, is that the intrepid participant is invited to help us create these postcards. You can take whatever approach you want to your postcard. (And based on the chatter on the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord, those of you flush with ideas for the image but coming up short on what to write for the text can rest assured that the mods will ensure that no postcard goes out without text! Just send the image along and we'll come up with suitable text for it.)

And yes, participants who request a postcard prompt will have the option to have the postcard mailed to them, so your creation could cross the world to inspire the work of another fan.

Because of the extra work involved with mailing prompts, we've opened this challenge early for postcards, so if you'd like to create a postcard, the first round will be going out on the 15th of November. We very much appreciate those who have turned in postcards early so that we have a ready supply for the challenge's opening date! The deadline for postcards is December 1 (postcards received after that point will be used in the digital-only collection for the January amnesty).

Some FAQs we've been seeing:

• No, you do not need to create a postcard to participate. This is a two-part challenge; you can participate in one part (create a postcard or respond to one) or both—your choice!
• The part of the challenge where you request a prompt (a postcard) will open 15 November, per the usual schedule.
• Everyone will get their postcard digitally right away. If you want your postcard mailed, we'll get it out as soon as we can, at which point it will be in the hands of various international postal authorities.

For complete information on the challenge, see the Manwë's Mailbag challenge page.

Ulfang and his son Uldor are notorious in the legendarium as two of the family of Mortal Men upon whose betrayal at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears the defeat of the Noldor and their allies seems to hinge. For this month's Character of the Month, Himring explores what we know of these two characters. What led to the betrayal? Who knew about it and when?

As is typical for the legendarium—especially the Silmarillion materials—the stories of Ulfang and Uldor raise questions as well. There is the ever-present matter of race in the legendarium, and Tolkien's casting of the treacherous Ulfang and Uldor as Easterlings. But there is (again in typical Tolkien fashion!) the matter of names too: Namely, why these characters have names suggesting negativity and betrayal.

You can read Himring's biography of Ulfang and Uldor here.

Please note too that we are requesting postcard designs for the November/December challenge. Check out the News section below to learn more!

If you have been writing or reading Tolkien fanfiction for any length of time, you probably remember Mary Sue. In the early-mid 2000s, she haunted the margins of our stories: the specter of a woman permitted into Tolkien's world to an extent that she changed the plot or even the characters. (Cue horror-movie scream.) Worry about Mary Sue—and whether our carefully crafted female characters were actually a Mary Sue, much like the slasher-film villain you only think is dead but is actually traipsing toward you with insidious purpose—permeated discussions of female characters and led some writers to abandon the idea of writing women at all. It just didn't seem worth it.

This month, in our Cultus Dispatches column, we begin a series on writing women in fanfiction. The first article in the series looks at data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and what it shows us about the once fraught endeavor of adding a person with a uterus to your fanfiction.

Thankfully, the data shows, it is far less fraught today. Most fanfiction writers endeavor to add women to their stories, according to the data, and many use fanfiction as a vehicle to critique and repair Tolkien's depiction of women in the legendarium. But the fandom's historic distaste for seeing women in fanfiction lurks in the data as well.

You can read the article Writing Women in Tolkien Fanfiction: An Analysis of the Data here to learn more about what analysis of the survey data revealed. And if you create or read/view fanworks with women characters and wish to contribute to our latest Fandom Voices collection, you can contribute your memories of writing, creating, and reading about female characters here. Finally, don't forget that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions, so if you would like to contribute to our series about women characters in fanworks, reply to this email and pitch your idea!

Every year, we run a challenge that we have termed (because, as far as we know, we invented the concept) a Matryoshka challenge. Like the nesting dolls after which it is named, this challenge involves a series of prompts, each opened only after the previous prompt has been completed, meaning that the fanwork is shaped by challenge prompts even as it is being created. We typically offer the option to complete two, three, five, or seven prompts.

This month is the month for our annual Matryoshka challenge, offered with a twist. Instead of sending prompts via email, prompts this year are based around a map, which you will navigate around in order to choose your prompts. This makes the Matryoshka a bit easier by removing the element of surprise. It makes it a bit difficult because now you have to choose!

Please note that your fanwork does not have to include the locations you choose on the map, only the prompts for each location. As in the past, you can complete two, three, five, or seven prompts. Note also that some special rules may apply if you are creating fanworks about specific characters. You can find the full X Marks the Spot guidelines, the map, the prompts, and hopefully answers to your unanswered questions here. (If you still have a question we haven't answered, just hit Reply and ask!)

A very special thanks goes out to Grundy this month for her work designing this challenge and creating the map!

Also, the Novelette Book Club is coming up on our Discord server in just about a month. The book club schedule has been posted, so you can get a start on reading the fabulous novelettes that will be on offer for discussion that weekend.

We've all had the experience of plague in recent years, and going back in history, it is an experience with significant historic precedent. We've all heard of the Black Death and other plagues and pandemics, but to what extent did this history inform Tolkien's own writings on plague in the legendarium?

In the mid-Third Age, Gondor was stricken by a plague that spread northward. In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at parallels between this event and real-world history of plagues, especially the Black Death. What historical elements might Tolkien have drawn from as he developed this event in Gondorian history?

Check out MirienSilowende's article "The Plague in Gondor" here.

Also, don't miss our new challenge X Marks the Spot, a twist on our annual Matryoshka challenge, and the upcoming Novelette Book Club!

We've been running challenges on the SWG since September 2005. The timing and format has varied widely across the years, but the central concept has remained the same: We want to see more people engaging creatively with The Silmarillion and its related works, and we hope that challenges will do just that by inspiring fanworks, building community, and encouraging comments. We on the moderator team always get a lot of questions about our challenges, so if you've been wanting to jump in but not quite sure where to start, here is a quick rundown of how challenges work.

Who: Anyone with an SWG account. Register here if you don't have one yet. You can, of course, post your responses to our challenges anywhere (so you don't have to have an account, really), but if you want a stamp, you need to post to the archive. (More on stamps below!)

What: Any Silmarillion-based fanwork is eligible. We accept all fanwork types on our archive. (Not sure what counts as "Silmarillion-based"? Check out our Silmworks FAQ.)

Where: All challenge fanworks must be posted to the SWG archive to receive a stamp. Beyond that ... it's your work, so you can post it wherever you please, whenever you please.

If you came up with something so wildly unique as your response that you don't think it can be posted to the archive, contact the mods and we'll help you figure out how to post it to get your stamp.

When: New challenges come out on the 15th of the month. The previous challenge also ends at the end of the day on the 15th. (If it is still the 15th somewhere in the world, you are still good, even if it is the 16th where you are.) Yes, that means that there is one day each month with two active challenges. Go wild.

Challenges are generally monthly but there are exceptions to that rule. For example, we generally do a two-month November/December challenge because stressing our creators out with One More Thing to Do at the Holidays is not on our agenda.

Note that due dates apply only to stamps for creating fanworks. You can post a fanwork for a challenge any time. We have hundreds of them by now, so if you are having a creative block, our Challenge page can be a place to start to break it down. (Don't forget we have a Random Silmfic Prompt Generator too.)

There is no due date for comment stamps, but we ask that if you've commented on a fanwork from a challenge more than two months old and want the stamp, please contact us to let us know.

So ... Stamps? Yes. Challenge participants (which includes commenters) receive a postage stamp graphic each month on their profile. We always offer stamps for creating a fanwork for the challenge or commenting on a challenge fanwork. Sometimes, we award additional stamps as well for special events or achievements.

Due Dates: Are pretty firm most of the time. (Remember, though, that they only apply to stamps!) There are some exceptions.

If you have created a fanwork for another challenge or event outside the SWG using an SWG challenge prompt, but your fanwork will not be revealed before the challenge due date, we will still award your stamp. Just let us know when the work is posted on our archive.

Of course, please contact us if you would have met the deadline but extenuating circumstances prevented it. We're not keen on penalizing people for family emergencies, sick pets, power outages, natural disasters, and so on.

We accept works in progress, so if the issue is that you can't tame the fanwork that you thought would be a ficlet but is somehow now a novella with accompanying art and a soundtrack, all you need to do is post a bit of it to get your stamp. If you really can't stand the thought of not posting the whole thing at once (or just didn't get a chance to finish/start for whatever reason), every January is an amnesty month when we award stamps for all the previous year's challenges (plus a special amnesty month stamp!) that are posted that month.

The Prompts: Vary from month to month. We try to offer a variety of formats. Yes, we are open to suggestions for challenge ideas. In fact, we love suggestions for challenge ideas.

We get asked from time to time if people can use our prompts for non-Silmarillion Tolkien stories, other fandoms, original fiction, writing groups, etc. Absolutely! Just keep in mind that the only works eligible for stamps are Silmarillion-based fanworks posted to our archive. We appreciate credit with a link back to our site if you post our prompts somewhere else online but we're also not going to hunt you down if you don't. If you're having fun and being creative, keep on keeping on.

Full challenge guidelines can always be found on the Challenges page. All the information here was rounded up from our FAQ page. We have a really unique new challenge scheduled for one week from now, so we're hoping that anyone thinking of joining us who hasn't yet might give that one a try!

Stars and starlight are one of the most common images in the legendarium, and not surprisingly, characters associated with stars get a ... well, starring role. This month's character biography stars a figure who might be overlooked in the constellation of star-kindlers and star-sailors and star-crossed lovers: Tinfang Warble.

Tinfang in fact is older than the legendarium, first appearing in poems penned before Tolkien began writing the Lost Tales. He represents an early form of the legendarium more closely tied to fairy lore and of a much more whimsical tone than it would become. In this context, Tinfang Warble tempts mortal listeners to wander out to follow him beneath the stars.

As the legendarium evolved in geography and tone, many factors made Tinfang fit less comfortably into the story. Yet his role lingered for a while and in fact may have inspired one of Tolkien's most famous tragic musician-wanderers: Daeron. For more on this forgotten star, check out this month's biography of Tinfang Warble.

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!