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.

Within the past two months, we've welcomed forty new members to the SWG site, as well as many more to our Discord. As we just turned twenty years old, this makes it a good time to introduce ourselves to our newcomers and, for those of you who have been around longer but maybe aren't entirely sure what we're about or how you fit in, to run down the many ways you can participate in the SWG.

The Silmarillion Writers' Guild was founded in March 2005 and opened its doors in July 2005 on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. We were originally a community for sharing and discussing fanworks, but I (Dawn) happened to mention in my very first post to that community about the future possibility of building an archive, and we did. In June 2007, our eFiction-powered archive opened for the first fanworks. At the time, there were dozens of Tolkien fanworks archives, but we were the only one that focused solely on The Silmarillion.

Today, twenty years later, we are still centered on that website and archive (now Drupal-powered), which contains more than 6,000 fanworks of all types, from fiction to playlists and art to essays. If you create fanworks, we welcome you to archive your new and past Silmarillion-based fanworks with us. (Once you post five fanworks or 10,000 words, you will gain posting access to the Beyond the Silmarillion section and can archive anything Tolkien-related with us.) Use the My Account dropdown to post a fanwork or access things like your fanworks list, favorite, and comments. If you'd like to check out eighteen years of fanworks but don't know where to start (understandable!), Find a Fanwork can help you locate fanworks about characters, relationships, and genres you enjoy while avoiding what you don't. We hope that if you find something you love, that you will let the creator know!

The archive is the backbone of the SWG, but our community and its discussions are its heart. The original space where we socialized with each other, Yahoo! Groups, shut its doors some time ago. Our social space is now located on Discord, and if you want to talk Tolkien and get to know your fellow SWG members better, we welcome you to join us there.

The SWG has always sought to blend fanworks with research and scholarship on Tolkien, written by and for fans of his work. The Silmarillion is an immensely complicated work, and we want anyone who wants to build castles in our sandbox to feel empowered with the resources to do so, even if they are new to The Silmarillion. Our Reference Library contains more than 300 reference works written by SWG members about Tolkien studies and adjacent disciplines, aimed at an audience of fanworks creators. If you love to research and write meta or scholarship, we are always looking for new contributions. We welcome newsletter articles and are revamping our peer-review process for the Reference Library post-Mereth Aderthad.

Fanworks creators looking for regular inspiration should check our our monthly challenges, which vary in format from month to month. If our challenge isn't doing it for you this month, we also cross-post event announcements from around the Tolkien fandom in our Around the World and Web section. We also hold group events on our Discord server, including monthly instadrabbling sessions on the first of each month. You can see any upcoming events we are hosting under SWG News.

All of this comes with a culture that values inclusivity and openmindedness. We've been around a while. We've seen a Tolkien fandom where gatekeeping was normal and some genres and topics of fanworks received hostility, if they were permitted at all. We didn't set out to be fandom revolutionaries and change the old order, but we did find that our strength wasn't in the quality of our fanworks or our knowledge of Tolkien trivia but in the diversity of perspectives our members brought to discussions and to their fanworks. If you're new, we welcome you to share your own perspective on Tolkien with us, and if you've been with us a while, we hope you will continue doing so.

If you have questions or need assistance from our moderators, you can always reply to these newsletters or email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.

Last weekend was Mereth Aderthad 2025, and it was a truly excellent experience! Eighty-eight of you were able to join us, both in-person and virtually for a day of incredible fanworks and presentations.

Enough happened that day that, even if you were there for all of it, you probably weren't able to take it all in. Our interactive program contains All The Links to every Mereth Aderthad presentation (when available) and fanwork on the archive. If you enjoyed a fanwork or presentation, please consider letting the creator know! If you haven't read my Mereth Aderthad Thank Yous, make sure you check them out! This event was a big undertaking, requiring the help of many volunteers!

Mereth Aderthad also included a fanzine of stories, poems, and art created in response to the twelve presentations shared at the event. You can download a digital copy for free here.

And we had a pair of interviews posted to the site the week of the event that didn't get their proper due in last week's newsletter. Himring interviewed Zdenka, who shared her poem The Death of Bëor the Old and sang the hauntingly beautiful song "Repair the World (Dwarvish Hymn)" at the event last week. You can read their conversation here. And I spoke with sesame, who did a pair of artworks for Jaz's vibrant presentation on the "children of twilight" in the legendarium. You can read my chat with sesame here.

To answer some questions I've been asked: Some presenters requested that their presentations be recorded. I will be working on getting those videos edited and sent out to presenters for final approval. Likewise, some presenters hope to archive their papers in our Reference Library. As videos and papers become available, I will update the interactive program and announce the new material here in the newsletter as well.

Contributor and volunteer zines will go out very soon. (My printer ran out of ink, so as soon as that's in and I can print address labels, they will go out!) Our "store" for ordering zines is ready to go, so if you attended virtually, you will have information soon about getting your copy of the zine. Virtual attendees only pay shipping; the zine itself is free. If you attended virtually and missed the link to request your copy, reply to this newsletter, and I'll get you headed in the right direction.

Once those zines go out, whatever is left will be available for "purchase" at the cost of shipping and printing.

Shifting away from Mereth Aderthad, we did a major software update this morning. If you notice a problem, report it to the moderators.

Our Swinging 40s challenge is also ongoing. As we are in the season of the year where several big Tolkien fanworks events are gearing up or in full swing, remember that you can combine our challenge prompts with other challenges or events. We intentionally plan our summer challenges so that they are easily combined with other events. If the other event requires you to post your work after fanworks for our challenge are due, just let the mods know and post with us when you can. Tell us when you archive your fanwork, and we're happy to award you the stamp.

No, it is not Saturday, but we are sending the newsletter a day early since our moderators will be busy with our Mereth Aderthad event tomorrow. This event will showcase presentations from twelve Tolkien scholars along with stories, poems, music, and artwork that creatively respond to the topics of their presentations. So what will the weekend look like?

The big event is Saturday, at 9:00AM Eastern (find this in your timezone) with both in-person and virtual attendance options available.

We will have both in-person and virtual social events throughout the weekend. Find the social event schedule here!

Some of the presentations and all of the fanworks created for Mereth Aderthad are available on the archive beginning on Saturday the 19th. Beginning on the 19th, you can find the interactive program here, which includes links to all of the fanworks, presentations and materials when available, and interviews with most of the presenters and creators. Some presenters will be sharing their presentations, papers, and transcripts after the event; you will find those here when they do.

Mereth Aderthad has a fanzine, which includes many of the creative works you will see and hear at the event, as well as several that were created especially for the zine. You can find those works linked on the interactive program, where you can also download a digital copy of the zine, beginning on Saturday the 19th. Attendees will receive information on how to get a print copy at the event, and any leftover print zines will be made available after the event.

If you want to join us and haven't registered yet, you can register here. You will receive a link to the virtual event when you do (unless you're joining us in-person, in which case we'll see you at the South Burlington Public Library!) Even if you can only join for a short while, you're more than welcome; we have upgraded our Zoom account to have room to accommodate anyone who wants to attend. If you have issues with your registration or have trouble getting into the event, email the mods or use the #mereth-aderthad channel on our Discord. SWG moderators will be monitoring both throughout the event to assist when needed!

A huge thank you to everyone who is making this weekend possible: event volunteers, presenters and fanworks creators, donors, and attendees!