A good beta-reader is one of the unsung heroes in fic fandom. They are the person brave and diplomatic enough to provide the feedback that helps you to grow your craft, who reminds you that you're not the worst writer in the world when you need to hear that, and who ruthlessly roots out every last comma splice. Betas give the time they could be using to read fic for fun or work on their own fanworks to help others improve their work.

Did you know that the SWG maintains a directory of beta-readers? If you are looking for the help of one of these wondrous humans, this can be a great place to start. You can view the whole list or search for a beta who specializes in what you write or your biggest area of need as an author.

This is also our semi-regular reminder to members who are or want to be beta-readers to update your profiles!

Any SWG member can be listed in our beta directory. Simply go to My Account, click Edit, and choose the Beta tab. You can provide as much or as little detail as you'd like.

If you already in our beta directory, we appreciate if you can check your profile to make sure it is still accurate. Go to My Account, click Edit, and choose the Beta tab. Note as well that if you need to take a break from beta-reading and don't want authors reaching out to you, all you have to do is untick the "Activate this profile" box at the top of the beta form, then click it again when you're ready to rejoin the listing. The site will save your information, so you can activate and deactivate your profile as often as needed.

We also have a #beta-finder channel on our Discord, which works well when you need help with a specific project or something with a faster turnaround (not that we're in the season where many of us may be finishing big projects at the last minute or anything ...)

And finally, a big thank-you to all of our beta-readers past, present, and future for helping to populate our archive and fandom with so many wonderful stories to read!

Today is spooky instadrabbling on our Discord server. (It's not too late to join!) Right now, at this juncture of the SWG's history, our Discord server is one of the thriving corners of our community, along with our archive. But given that the SWG is a decade older than Discord, this was clearly not always the case.

The SWG didn't originate as an archive but as a fandom community, hosted on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Yahoo! Groups, which closed in 2020, was a semipublic email list and formed the cornerstone of many early Tolkien fanfiction groups. During the heyday of the Lord of the Rings films, some Yahoo! Groups received dozens of messages a day and allowed fans to talk Tolkien using their email. LiveJournal was an early blogging platform; again, active LJs would sometimes have posts with comments numbering in the hundreds. Pre-dating Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, these early social media platforms tended to require you to opt-in to a community (versus seeing content from communities shared by others you follow or content recommended by an algorithm).

From these social communities, fanfiction archives arose. The fan scholar and archive expert Abigail De Kosnik calls them community archives because they become the more public, formal face of fan communities that were often highly informal. The SWG followed the exact trajectory De Kosnik described (as did many 2000s-era Tolkien fanfic archives): our Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal were active spaces for discussion, the foundation of the SWG, and the archive grew from there.

Fan-unfriendly decisions by the leadership of both Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal eventually led us to move away from those platforms, and neither are officially in use any longer (although the LJ community is still open for historical purposes and any SWG member who wants to use it). There was a time in the 2010s when there was no active community space for interaction and discussion on the SWG. On my endless list of fandom data projects is to trace how archive activity aligns with the moments in our history where community was vibrant and when it was essentially nonexistent.

Right now, the pendulum has swung back toward community spaces with the use of our Discord as a central meeting place for SWG members. Just like the Yahoo! Group email and LJ comments of old, discussions range from silly and irreverent to serious discussion of the texts and their implications ... and from all of this, fanworks continue to grow.

When we migrated the SWG site from eFiction to Drupal now almost five years ago, one of our goals—if we were to go through the ordeal of migration—was to be able to host just about any kind of fanwork. Drupal, because it is basically a giant box of digital LEGO blocks that can be assembled to make whatever you want with it, was particularly well-suited to that aspiration. (And even though Drupal sometimes becomes a four-letter word when Russandol and I are trying to squash a particularly troublesome bug, it has not disappointed in many regards, including this one!)

This week, I want to show some love for some of the lesser-known fanwork types that creators can share on our site (just as a reminder that the playlist you made for Celegorm/Maeglin doesn't have to disappear into the depths of Tumblr hell but can be archived for the wonderment and delight of generations of fans to come!) If you're feeling really ambitious, maybe try one out for our Jumble Sale challenge?

Link Collections are a way to gather all of the links about a particular anything in one place. It might be favorite fanworks or rec lists, resources, or all of the music and art and everything that inspired a fanwork you made. You can link works within the SWG but also outside the SWG. (The key difference between a Link Collection and a Series!) If you really, really love a topic, character, pairing, or whatever and want to do something more formal, we feature Themed Collections periodically as part of this newsletter. Hit REPLY if you'd be interested in putting one together for your fandom love! (And check out the three Themed Collections already in our archive here.)

Playlists focus on audio, such as music or podcasts. (Both of which we host as well!) Fandom and music have always gone together. Many of you reading this right now may have one or more Tolkien-themed playlists in your own music collection! If you want to share them more widely, the Playlist fanwork type allows you to link individual songs or whole playlists that you've stored on other platforms, like YouTube or Spotify. Again, the focus of your playlist, while it should be within the parameters of a "Silmarillion fanwork," can otherwise be whatever you want it to be: a soundtrack for a fanwork, songs about a character or pairing, songs that inspire you to create "Silmarillion" fanworks, or wherever your creativity takes you!

Finally, Series are the old friend in the group, having been around since our eFiction days. Series are how you collect fanworks on the SWG site into a single fanwork. Most people use series to collect their own fanworks that belong to the same arc or universe, but you're certainly not limited to your own, and Series can be used to collect favorite fanworks or resources posted to the SWG or make curated lists of SWG works. Because the series a fanwork belongs to is listed in the fanwork information, this is one way to lead readers and viewers to others of your fanworks in the same arc or universe.

Some final reminders:

Our next instadrabbling session takes place on our Discord next Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 6PM/18:00 UTC. Find out more about monthly instadrabbling sessions here.

The Shopify store will be closing on October 1, which means we are in the final days to order a print fanzine from Mereth Aderthad if you want one! Put in your order before October 1 here.

This month, we celebrated twenty years of challenges on the SWG! Our challenges have undergone lots of changes through the years. They started as open-ended, broad topics to write about. Sometimes people used them; sometimes they didn't. For a while,  thinking there were just too many and people needed more time to work on them, they were quarterly instead of monthly. And when that made things worse and participation in challenges had dropped to nearly zero, we tried in 2017 to reshape them one more time by making them monthly again and with a greater variety of formats, including the occasional interactive challenge. This worked, and our challenges have been a key part of our site since, with multiple fanworks created for each that we've run since 2017.

This month, in honor of twenty years of challenges, we have emptied the SWG attic of all of them, dumped them in our front yard, and let creators take a crack at them ... but with a twist. Prompts for this month's Jumble Sale are created by you, our members, using old challenges to make new prompts. There are currently over forty prompts that upcycle past challenges in inspiring, inventive, thought-provoking, and downright evil new ways. All you have to do to participate is find the prompt (or prompts ...) you want, create something Silmarillion-related for it, and post it to our archive. That's it! (And for the philatelists among us, yes, you get stamps for all challenges involved in the prompt. Pre-2017 challenges that do not have stamps receive a special "ancient history hunter" stamp.)

If you enjoy making prompts, you can still contribute Jumble Sale prompts here.

Speaking of challenges, the mods will be working on the 2026 challenge line-up soon, so if you have any ideas for challenges, feel free to click REPLY and let us know!

Also, there is just over a week left to get a print Mereth Aderthad fanzine if you want one! You can order your copy of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 fanzine here. The zine will always be available as a free digital download here.

Amazingly, we are almost halfway through September. Our new challenge, Jumble Sale, will begin in just two days. As a reminder, this challenge is the chance to create wonderful, inspiring, awful, and evil new challenge prompts using past challenges as inspiration. Maybe there is a prompt that you really wanted to see written. Maybe there is a challenge or past prompt that you think deserves a second life. Or maybe you just like making up impossible prompts and watching your fellow creators squirm. If you'd like your prompt or prompts to be in the challenge debut, make sure you complete the form Jumble Sale Prompts for Offer as soon as you can.

We will continue to accept and post prompts after the challenge opens. And because people will ask, yes, you will get stamps for the Jumble Sale challenge as well as any other challenges included in the prompt. If the challenge is older than 2017 (when we started giving out stamps), there will be a special stamp for you.

Hand in hand with that, our current challenge Kids These Days is active through the 15th, so post your fanwork no later than the 15th to receive that stamp.

Next, there is about two weeks left to order a print copy of the Mereth Aderthad fanzine. We will shut our Shopify store down on October 1, so make sure to place your order before that time if you'd like a copy. You can order your copy of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 fanzine here. If you want a copy but extenuating circumstances prevent you from ordering in the next two weeks, or if our store won't ship to your country, reach out to me directly. (You can reply to this email!) I am happy to work with people to make sure they get a copy of the zine if they want one.

And finally, something new for the months to come: Anna (IdleLeaves) is generously continuing to host monthly instadrabbling sessions on our Discord! The next three sessions are scheduled for the first Saturday of the month, beginning at 6PM/18:00 UTC, on October 4, November 1, and December 6. See our instadrabbling announcement to see those times in your timezone and to learn more about what instadrabbling involves. It's a low-key and incredibly fun way to socialize with other Tolkien fans while creating and enjoying fanworks!

When the SWG started in 2005, there were many, many more independent Tolkien groups, many of them hosted on platforms like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, but others on websites like the SWG is today. There were positives and negatives to this, with a downside that the fandom felt much more fragmented and siloed. And as happens any time you have multiple groups of humans trying to accomplish the same goal, a competitive feeling developed between some of these groups.

We were lucky that, as a Silmarillion group, we were well-positioned to try a different approach. Part of this was the advantage of having no other Silmarillion-only groups to "compete" with, so we could promote and celebrate what other Tolkien groups were doing. In 2008, we adopted the "Connectivity" plank in our mission: "To recognize that we are only a single small group in a vast online Tolkien fan community and to work toward connecting and sharing with the Tolkien fandom at large, as well as aiding members in finding groups and resources that meet their needs where the SWG cannot." Part of this was our Yellow Pages, a guide to other Tolkien groups. (The last updated version from 2013 is still on the site, albeit in very rudimentary form.) Part of this too was Around the World and Web, which we announced as part of opening our archive in the June 2007 newsletter.

Around the World and Web has been rudderless, without an editor, for several years now, minimally maintained by me in between more pressing site maintenance tasks. I am thrilled to announce that Elrond's Library has generously offered to take on this role and want to express my gratitude to her and others who offered assistance when I posted about it on Discord last week. It is wonderful that such a long-running part of our site will be better cared for into the future!

This is also a good time to highlight that section of our site. We try to post about as many events and projects of interest to Tolkien fans as we can, again due to that Connectivity component in our mission. We can't do it all, and don't want to, and want people to know when something awesome Tolkien-related is happening elsewhere that our members might enjoy. After all, our ultimate mission in the SWG is to build fandom friendships and grow the number of Tolkien-related fanworks being created. Whether that is for our challenges or another event, the result is still a benefit to the broader Tolkien community.

If you run an event, you can become a scout on the SWG, which gives you access to post about your event in Around the World and Web. If you'd like to know more, reply to this email! Around the World and Web lives on our website but also goes out in our monthly newsletters. It is a section of our site that I hope to continue improving into the future, but for now, if you're reading this, scroll down to see upcoming events from beyond the SWG that might interest you!

On August 31, 2005, we posted our very first newsletter and, with it, our first challenge as well. The challenge was called Strong Women and was offered by Jenni (digdigil), a founding member of the SWG and one of our early moderators:

Choose a female character from The Silmarillion or related texts. It could be someone like Galadriel, one of the Valar, or someone barely mentioned, such as Nerdanel or Elenwë. Write a story--any length--about this character, developing a strong personality for her. Her strengths could lie in many different areas: Perhaps the woman would be a good mother, perform an act of heroism, or be a healer or a teacher, but she must contribute something of value.

I went on to write about the challenge:

Tolkien is often criticized for the lack of strong female characters in his work. ... The stories of Middle-earth would be vastly different without characters like Varda, Galadriel, Haleth, and Lúthien Tinúviel.

Nonetheless, there are still many women who recieve [sic] only glancing acknowledgment or appear only as "footnote" characters--regardless, their influence on their husbands, children, and the world around them is undeniable.

This first challenge always strikes me as looking forward to what the SWG would become. Tolkien fic fandom, at the time, was not friendly toward writing female characters. The specter of "Mary Sue" loomed large and prevented many writers from venturing into writing about women about whom we know little or nothing or even writing about women for whom there is substantial material in the texts. (Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks recalls some of these experiences from fans who wrote in the first decade of online Tolkien fic fandom.) But we were, one month into the SWG's existence, still small, with only a couple dozen members and without grand aspirations, and still largely flying by the seats of our pants. The Strong Women challenge feels more significant in retrospect than it did at the time. Still, it prefigures the work of many of our creators over the past twenty years to elevate not just women in the legendarium but other groups of characters who are marginalized in both Middle- and Modern-earth (including Elleth Textual Ghosts Project, which has done much to facilitate the goal of the Strong Women challenge to encourage writing about what we termed "footnote characters").

Twenty years later, challenges are still at the center of the SWG—another legacy of this inaugural challenge. Check out our current Kids These Days challenge, join us for instadrabbling next Saturday, and don't forget we are collecting prompts for the Jumble Sale challenge!

We are in a busy time of year in the world of Tolkien fanworks, where many big events and challenges are running. Ours are always ongoing, and we wanted to highlight different ways to get inspired and involved in creating for the SWG. Also, if you are doing another (or more than one!) of the bigger events, remember that you can always use our challenge prompts in your fanwork for that event and post with us when the other event allows you to, even if it is past our challenge deadline. Just let us know when you do so that we can give you your stamp!

Our new challenge for August is Kids These Days, a bingo-card challenge filled with prompts centered on those timeless gripes about youngsters that every generation indulges in. You only need to use one prompt to receive the stamp (and the response does not need to be about kids or teens; as always, we encourage you to bend, twist, and loophole the heck out of our prompts to make them work for you), but if you're feeling like someone who can walk uphill both ways in shoes stuffed with newspaper, you can complete rows, columns, or diagonals for special stamps. And if you're so powerful that you can get a job with just a firm handshake and a confident look in the eye and you want to do all the prompts, there is a card blackout stamp too. (Let a mod know if you need one of those stamps.)

We are also looking for help creating prompts for September's Jumble Sale challenge, where you will have your chance to offer up past challenges and prompts to other creators to work their magic! You can offer up to five items "for sale" at the jumble sale by combining past challenges and prompts and even set an additional "price" by adding your own conditions to those prompts. You can send in your prompts for Jumble Sale here.

Finally, Anna (IdleLeaves) hosts instadrabbling every month on the first Saturday. The next session is coming up not next weekend but the weekend after on September 6, 2025 at 6PM/18:00 UTC on our Discord server (find this in my timezone). If you're new to instadrabbling, learn more about this long-running Tolkien fandom creative tradition here.

We are glad to now have most of the Mereth Aderthad presentations available as videos and transcripts for those who missed them or just want to revisit them a second (or more!) time. Having had the chance to rewatch them all as I've archived them, I can say that I enjoyed them all a second time and was again so impressed by the insights and quality of each of them! Everything Mereth Aderthad-related—videos, fanworks, art, transcripts, full papers, presentations—can be found here.

The Aromantic in Tolkien by Shadow (video | transcript)
Presented at Mereth Aderthad 2025, this paper makes the case thata, although the term "aromantic" had not yet been coined in Tolkien's day, many of his characters can be read as aromantic. The paper takes a closer look at Aredhel, Bilbo, and Boromir as three examples of characters who can be read as aromantic.

By Guile Committed: Comparing Tolkien’s Thieves to Beowulf by Savannah Horrell (video | handout)
Theft is heavily stigmatized in the Old English legal literature. This stigma carries over to fictional sources, including Beowulf. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien was heavily influenced by these sources. Multiple characters in Middle-earth shy away from the label of "thief", even as they take actions which many would describe as stealing (see Bilbo, Beren, Lúthien). The balance between historical stigma and the more modern hero thief is mediated by judicious word choice and framing.

Twilight, Child Of: Comparisons Between Tinúviel, Lómion, and Undómiel by Jaz (video)
This presentation for Mereth Aderthad 2025 discusses the many similarities between Tolkien's three "twilight children," Tinúviel, Lómion, and Undómiel (Luthien, Maeglin, and Arwen) in terms of appearance, plot, and cultural background. Yet these three characters play very different roles in the text.

We also have thirty print Mereth Aderthad 2025 fanzines left. If you'd like a copy, you can now order one for the cost of printing ($7.70 USD) and shipping. If the online service we are using cannot ship to your location, contact us (you can reply to this email!) so that we can try to make alternate arrangements. You can order your copy of the Mereth Aderthad zine here.

Mereth Aderthad featured twelve meticulously researched presentations about Tolkien. That's three full hours of scholarly research! Even if you could attend the full event, it was a lot to take in. However, many presenters have agreed to make videos of their presentations available, along with transcripts or sometimes the full paper, and we're excited to have posted the first round of them this week! A second round will follow next week.

Cherished Antagonist, Despised Protagonist- a defence of Elu Thingol by Stella Getreuer-Kostrouch (video and full paper)
Elu Thingol is a complicated character in The Silmarillion. Faced with tough choices, he makes both good and bad decisions. But, as this paper argues, the Silmarillion fandom tends to file Thingol away as a convenient villain. This paper makes the case that many of his decisions are more complex than fans tend to assume and defends his place as one of the legendarium's complex characters and deserving of empathy.

The Mythmakers vs. the made myths: Exploring a reader’s levels of religious alienation and connection in works about and by J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis by Acha Rezak (Quente; video and full paper)
Or, a critical reading and primary source reinterpretation of documents that contributed to John Hendrix’s The Mythmakers.

Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor by Maglor (video and transcript)
This Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentation considers what we know of Gil-galad beyond his primary role in the text as king. While we have some information about his character, such as his appearance, other facts—names and parentage, for instance—remain unsettled. In other areas, we know almost nothing about Gil-galad, especially compared to the other Noldorin kings, which "leads to him feeling unmoored in the narrative." Gil-galad does not speak, performs no actions outside of kingship, and is given no meaningful relationships. Basic facts, such as his burial, are missing. He is seen from the outside, becoming a side character despite being the longest-reigning Noldorin king. It becomes the task of fans to answer the question Merry asks in "The Lord of the Rings": Who was Gil-galad? Fan creativity plus tantalizing glimpses of his character have filled in the blanks Tolkien left.

"Kidnap Fam" and the Living Legendarium by polutropos (video and transcript)
This paper looks at the origins of the popular fanfiction "kidnap fam" trope in the editorial history of the published "Silmarillion." With much of the attack on Sirion written in 1930, prior to Tolkien writing The Lord of the Rings, Christopher Tolkien was faced with an editorial choice in how to reconcile this event with the later invention of the character of Gil-galad. Adding Gil-galad and Círdan to the tale of Sirion's destruction, however, raises questions for many readers about the motives and choices of Maglor and Maedhros in choosing to take Elwing's sons. Survey data, shows that readers tend to interpret characters' morals and motives based on what they believe those characters knew. The introduction of Gil-galad and Círdan by Christopher Tolkien, therefore, generates the moral complexity that drives the wealth of fanfiction about the "kidnap family." These many layers of intervention in the story—by Tolkien, by Christopher, by fan creators—mimics the storytelling tradition and creates a living legendarium: not a mess, as some readers despair of the multiple contradictory "Silmarillion" texts, but an opportunity.

Love, Grief, and Alliterative Verse in Tolkien's Legendarium by Paul D. Deane (video and transcript)
Presented at Mereth Aderthad 2025, this paper considers how the themes of love and grief run parallel throughout The Silmarillion and are central to Tolkien's imagination. Also central is alliterative verse, and the paper discusses Tolkien's use of alliterative verse in the legendarium, his literary and scholarly influences, and his professional interest in alliterative verse. The paper draws parallels between alliterative verse in the legendarium and in the English literary tradition, making the case that alliterative verse was used in-universe by the Elves. Finally, the paper uses this evidence to advocate for fanworks that use alliterative verse.

Paul will also be presenting at Oxonmoot 2025 on "Alliterative Verse in Arda," including an overview of alliterative verse, Tolkien's role in its revival, and a chance to share fan-created alliterative poems. Event attendees can find more information on Paul's session here.

In some other Mereth Aderthad news: The financial report for Mereth Aderthad is also available here, showing how donations were used and what expenses the event had. If you were a contributor, donor, or attendee, remember that there is one more week to reserve your printed zine copy, if you want one, before the remaining zines will be made available to anyone who wants one. If you are in this category and need information on how to reserve your zine, reply to this email, and we'll help you out. If you weren't able to attend but would like a print zine, watch for more information (and the second round of videos and papers!) in next week's newsletter.