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!

With Mereth Aderthad 2025 now a week away—which means we're approaching twenty years since the SWG opened for members—I've been thinking a lot about starting things and Bilbo's observation that it's dangerous business to go out your front door. Twenty-three-year-old me—a newly minted adult, recently out of university and living on my own for the first time—had no idea, when I set up a Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal community for what I planned to be a writer's workshop, what lay on the road ahead and that I'd still be caring for this group in middle age. Dangerous business, indeed!

But that initial "dangerous act" has in fact been amplified many times over by the "dangerous individuals" who populate the SWG. Do you know that you all have created and posted 6,100 fanworks on the SWG? (It's actually many more, as I know I am not the only one who collects shorter works within a single "story.") That's more than 6,100 acts of saying something about Tolkien, channeling the creative energy to bring your ideas to life for someone else to experience, and then having the bravery to put it up in public for commentary by others.

When the SWG formed in 2005, the Tolkien fandom was not always very kind, and it was especially unkind to people from marginalized groups. I don't want to pretend that we've since entered a fannish utopia where everyone is happy all the time and people are always nice to each other, but things are better, and while the SWG was only part of the shift toward change, there are more than a few fanworks among that 6,100+ that did their part, representing the perspectives of characters and groups of people who weren't always heard and doing this at a time when it was risky to do so.

Then there are those for whom sharing their writing or creative work felt terrifying, but they did it anyway. In talking with SWG members, I am constantly surprised at the number of creators whose work I adore and who were scared to put it out there. Am I ever glad they did! (And I shouldn't be surprised, as I was frightened to share my early fanworks as well.) Likewise for lurkers (and there is nothing wrong with lurking!) who take the step of speaking to a fellow fan, whether in a comment or in joining a discussion. All of you contribute toward making the SWG and the Tolkien fandom a lovely place to be.

As the year settles into the doldrums of the more extreme seasons—baking in the North and shivering in the South—if you can, grab a moment to escape to Middle-earth and continue doing dangerous things:

• We are wrapping up our Gates of Summer challenge. We keep our challenges intentionally low-key at this time of year due to the number of big fandom events. Remember that you can work our challenges into fanworks for other challenges and events, and if you will miss the deadline for the creator stamp due to the rules of the other event, just let us know, and we'll award the stamp when you are able to post with us.
• A new challenge will debut on Tuesday!
• If you don't make fanworks but enjoy reading on our site, consider signing up for an account and letting your favorite creators know you enjoy their work.
• If you want to join in discussions about the legendarium and fanworks, consider joining our Discord!
• And we are always looking for volunteers, for those who have some time to donate to keeping the SWG running.

And hopefully we will see many of you at Mereth Aderthad next week! Virtual and in-person reservations are still available! Register here.

Many of us have favorite characters from Tolkien who really stretch the term "minor character" to its extreme. These people of the footnotes and fragments are often little more than a name, but with a fully realized history behind (and sometimes in front) of them, it is possible to turn a few actions into a fully fledged character. (We also cannot neglect that this is Tolkien: names are rarely "little more," and the name itself is likely full of meaning!)

This month, we are excited to see a return of our occasional column Character of the Month with a new biography by Secondborn about Marhwini. Marhwini is a hallmark "minor character" for Tolkien: He doesn't appear in any of the major books, we know little about him—and yet he matters, both in terms of the story and its theme. Representing a proto-Rohirric alliance with Gondor, he is important to the histories of both peoples and helps establish the relationship between Gondor and Rohan that will feature so prominently in The Lord of the Rings. Secondborn encourages us to think of Marhwini's actions, though not successful militarily, not as a failure but in terms of what they tell us about the value of relations between peoples in the legendarium.

You can read Secondborn's biography of Marhwini here.

With Mereth Aderthad 2025 only two weeks away, we also have two interviews with fanworks creators to share. Idrils Scribe and Flora-lass are, respectively, the featured author and poet for the presentation "Cherished antagonist, despised protagonist - a defence of Elu Thingol" by Stella Getreuer-Kostrouch. Relatively new to fandom, Flora-lass was compelled by the legendarium that is "so real it hurts" to begin composing poetry about it, and her lyrical poems capture the musicality of Middle-earth. Her sonnet for Mereth Aderthad concerns Thingol and the Silmaril.

Idrils Scribe is the featured author for the same presentation, having written a story that centers on the Quenya ban. Idrils Scribes' stories tend to focus on characters, like the Doriathrim, who don't receive the same attention from fanworks creators as the Elves of Valinor do. Building on Stella's observations of the fandom's tendency to pigeonhole Thingol as a convenient villain, Idrils Scribe describes her motive in writing her story as, "I’m trying to peek inside his head, speculate what his intentions were, and hopefully provide an interesting perspective on one of the more controversial episodes."

You can read and listen to Anérea's interview with Flora-lass here, and you can read Shadow's interview with Idrils Scribe here.

And! In case you missed it, Mereth Aderthad is only two weeks away! We welcome registrations right through the day of the event, and even if you can only attend part of it, we'd love for you to join us if you can. You can register here, if you have not already!

Mereth Aderthad is now just three weeks away, and we are excited to share the full calendar of events that weekend! The website has been updated to what will most likely be its final form before it switches over to the day-of-event program, and this includes the weekend schedule.

If you will be joining us in-person, we will gather on Friday evening at the North Beach in Burlington to watch the sunset together and get acquainted! Saturday, of course, is the event itself; register to join us in-person or online! And finally, on Sunday, we will have a create-in at 10:30 AM EDT that is open to both in-person and virtual participants. (Find this event in your timezone.)

If you will be joining virtually and would like to set up additional virtual events, both the SWG's Discord and Zoom are available options. Reply to this newsletter and we can discuss ideas!

One last housekeeping note: If you created a fanwork for the Mereth Aderthad zine, you will have received a final proof this week. If you are presenting or sharing a fanwork at the live event, you will have received a final check-in confirming your information and asking for any additional details that we need to move forward. If you think you should have received one (or more!) of these communications and did not, reply to this newsletter and let us know.

First and foremost, if you are joining us in-person for Mereth Aderthad 2025 and would like to join us for dinner on July 19 and breakfast on July 20, tomorrow is the last day to RSVP.

Mereth Aderthad is now less than a month away! If you've missed the last several months of these newsletters, we are gathering, both in-person and virtually, in honor of the SWG's twentieth birthday on July 19, with social events on either side of that event. We have twelve presenters sharing their research on various aspects of the legendarium with fanworks that respond to each presented alongside. The program and more on Mereth Aderthad can be found here, and you can register here.

As we approach the event, we've been interviewing presenters and creators about the work they will be sharing. We are bringing those interviews to a close, but this week, have conversations to share with two artists and a writer working on fanworks to accompany Mereth Aderthad presentations.

The featured artist for polutropos' "'Kidnap Fam' and the Living Legendarium," Tang Wen Xi creates artwork using vivid colors and a 3D style that often makes it seem that his landscapes and his warriors are pushing out of the page. Dawn spoke to him about his work; like many of our artists, he developed his unique style through studying tutorials (always comforting to those of us who are artists only in our dreams!) He also pushes beyond the Eurocentrism traditional to Tolkien fanart, depicting characters in dress and armor from cultures throughout the world. Tang Wen Xi finds this approach to be keeping with Tolkien's own work. "Haradrim and Easterlings are part of his worldbuilding," he said, "so it's apparent that he's not locked to the European side of Middle-earth."

You can read Dawn's interview with Tang Wen Xi here.

Anérea and Shadow are the featured artist and featured writer, respectively, for Zhie's "How To Make a Star From a Tree: The Science of Telperion and Laurelin," and they are both also interviewers for Mereth Aderthad. Therefore, it made sense that they interview each other about their fanworks for Zhie's upcoming presentation! There conversation spanned the various interpretations of light in Tolkien's world, the cartography of creating fanworks, and the challenges of pushing past imposter syndrome.

You can read and listen to Shadow and Anérea's conversation with each other here.

In other news, Anna (IdleLeaves) is generously continuing with monthly instadrabbling sesssions on the first Saturday of each month on the SWG Discord: July 5, August 2, and September 6 are the next three scheduled. Learn more about these instadrabbling sessions here and join the Discord here if you'd like to come create with us!

What passage in Tolkien made you see the world with fresh eyes or experience Middle-earth as though you were in it? Tolkien's rich worldbuilding is one of the qualities of his work that fans consistently identify as drawing them into the story. Many of us have scenes that took our breaths away and made the barrier between our world and Tolkien's Secondary World dissolve.

This week, as part of our ongoing series of interviews of fanworks creators for Mereth Aderthad, Shadow spoke with two artists whose work will be featured as part of the event. Varda delle Stelle is our assistant art editor, whose input helps to bring us the artwork featured each week with newsletter articles, and she is also the featured artist for cloudyhymn's presentation The Design of Dragons and the Doom of the Dwarves.

"One of the first memories that I have of reading The Silmarillion is about Varda Elentari lighting the starry vault," Varda told Shadow, "... it was like I saw the Stars for the first time too and I fell in love with them from the deepest part of my soul." Varda's pen name reflects her deep connection with the stars in Tolkien's work, a connection reflected in the luminous quality of her artwork. Varda spoke with Shadow about her inspirations, her approach to art, and her not one but two Mereth Aderthad artworks.

You can read Shadow's interview with Varda here.

For fish, the featured artist for Stella Getreuer-Kostrouch's presentation "Cherished antagonist, despised protagonist - a defence of Elu Thingol," it is appropriately enough the shades of gray that draws him to Tolkien and inspires his art. Like Tolkien himself, fish sees the turn to eucatastrophe as an essential and inspiring element of the legendarium. "I think I've always been something of a romantic in the literary sense, or at least a believer in what Tolkien called 'fairy-stories,'" he told Shadow. "That eucatastrophe is what keeps me coming back to Tolkien—it can't exist without dyscatastrophe, and that feels real to me." But he also loves the complexity of character that Tolkien draws in The Silmarillion and other works.

For Stella's presentation, fish was drawn to the concept of grayness in conjunction with Thingol's character, who cannot be seen solely as a villain or a hero, like most Silmarillion characters.

You can read Shadow's interview with fish here.

Today was also our third and final installment in our So You Want to Present at a Tolkien Conference? series and focused on giving the presentation: how to practice, plan, and prepare to deliver a presentation and Q&A that is effective and fun while taking mishaps in stride. You can find the entire series on YouTube here and on the SWG as part of our Master Class column.

And finally, our new challenge, the Gates of Summer, debuts tonight with prompts from Tolkien's life and books that focus on summer, as half of the world welcomes the summer and the other half bids it farewell. As always, we invite creative interpretation and use of the prompts. If you're new to our challenges, find the full challenge guidelines here.

Mereth Aderthad 2025 is just over a month away, and we are introducing as many of our talented presenters, authors, poets, artists, and performers as we can before the event. (If you have missed any of our interview series, you can find it here!) This week, we share interviews with two creators working on different presentations who nonetheless share some key overlaps.

The existence of Tolkien fanworks in the year 2025—especially in the prodigious quantity in which they continue to be produced—is a marvel. The first Tolkien fanworks were document in 1958, almost seventy years ago. And while there have been surges and lulls, new Tolkien fanworks have continued to be produced across the entirety of that time. When asked, fanworks creators tend to cite the complexities of the legendarium—all those unanswered questions—and the sense of untold stories linging just beyond the margins of the page.

As far as unanswered questions and ever-evolving fandom discussions, perhaps no two receive more attention, at least in the Silmarillion fandom, than the questions posed by Gil-galad and the fostering of Elrond and Elros by Maglor and Maedhros—the kidnap fam trope. Reese is the featured author for polutropos' presentation "'Kidnap Fam' and the Living Legendarium." Already an author of a kidnap fam story (which also features the Silm fandom "Crablor" trope!), reese describes the many complexities of Tolkien's world as an inspiration for fanworks about it. She also cites the many interpretations those fanworks advance. Speaking specifically of kidnap fam stories, reese writes, "We're given so little detail in the text, and yet that silence has clearly inspired so many people. There's tragedy and complexity, tenderness and trauma, and I love seeing how different creators fill in the blanks and sheer variety of interpretations, ranging from deeply emotional and tragic to wildly fluffy."

You can read Dawn's interview with reese here.

Kai is the featured artist for Maglor's presentation "Gil-galad was an Elven King: Kingship and Personhood in the last High King of the Noldor." While Gil-galad's uncertain parentage is a long-running joke in the Silmarillion fandom, Maglor seeks to reveal the Gil-galad's character beyond the perennial question of his ancestry, and Kai found this line of inquiry instantly appealing. (He completed his Mereth Aderthad sketch the day he received confirmation of the assignment!) Like reese with the complexity of kidnap fam fanworks, Kai finds appeal in the many ways fans choose to approach the questions surrounding Gil-galad. "What I love most is that there are so many versions of Gil-galad in fanworks and all of them are possible to explain with the lore," he told Shadow. "All we really know is from this song and with the rest we can do what we like."

You can read Shadow's interview with Kai (and see a selection of his art!) here.

Finally, next Saturday, we will hold our final "So You Want to Present at a Tolkien Conference?" session on doing the actual presentation. All are welcome, whether you are on the brink of presenting at Mereth Aderthad (or any one of the number of summer Tolkien events) or just have a glimmer every now and then that maybe someday you might (or are just curious about the topic!) If you'd like an email invite, RSVP to have a reminder emailed to you. Otherwise, this post will include the link to the final session (and has more information on the session, plus links to past sessions).

"The news today about ‘Atomic bombs’ is so horrifying one is stunned. The utter folly of these lunatic physicists to consent to do such work for war-purposes: calmly plotting the destruction of the world!"

Tolkien wrote these lines to his son Christopher in 1945 (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 102, page 168 in the expanded edition), and they form the basis for Cindy Gates' upcoming Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentation "Tolkien, Lunatic Physicists, and Abnegation." Cindy, who has long been familiar to SWG members under her pen name pandemonium_213, has been exploring—and challenging—Tolkien's depiction of science and scientists on the SWG since 2007. This week, as we continue our series of interviews of presenters and creators whose work will be featured at Mereth Aderthad, we turn over the stage to the scientists. Cindy is retired scientist in the "bad industry" (in her words!) of pharmaceutical research and development, and the creators for her presentation—Azh, Admirable Monster and Grundy—are both scientists as well, as is their interviewer, Shadow.

In 2006, Cindy read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin and reread Tolkien not long after. "[T]he theme of well-intentioned science that is turned into something that damages, sometimes profoundly, hit me like a ton of bricks," she told Grundy, her interviewer, pointing out that Tolkien's approach to this issue—highly relevant to modern life—is often to make an object lesson out of the legendarium's scientists.

You can read Grundy's interview with Cindy here.

Azh, Admirable Monster is a physicist whose found fiction "Lightborn" will accompany Cindy's presentation. "Now I'm in the middle of doing research into the use of artificial intelligence techniques," Azh told Shadow, their interviewer, "and quite frankly the question of at what point do you need to abnegate, step away from a piece of research, is haunting me in a professional capacity." Azh's professional background also touches upon the development of the atomic bomb, and their story draws on the same questions as Cindy's work, around the moral obligations of scientists doing work that can be turned to destructive ends.

You can read Shadow's interview with Azh, Admirable Monster here.

Shadow also interviewed Grundy, who is the featured artist for Cindy's presentation. Grundy is best known to us as one of the SWG's moderators (the bestower of hundreds of tiny, colorful challenge stamps each year among many other unsung behind-the-scenes roles!) and author of over one hundred stories posted to our archive. However, she is also a skilled glass artist, and her work for Mereth Aderthad will be done in glass. Grundy is also interested in the development of the atomic bomb and the questions it raises. "I've been reading about the Manhattan Project almost as long as I've been reading Tolkien," she told Shadow.

You can read Shadow's interview with Grundy here.

Remember that these incredible presentations, stories, poems, performances, and artworks will be shared on July 19 at Mereth Aderthad 2025. Both in-person and online attendance options are available, and registration is free. If you'd like to join us, you can register for Mereth Aderthad here.

(Note that the title for this edition of the newsletter comes from Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman [Letter 131, page 204 in the expanded edition of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien].)