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].)

A common way to teach children about narrative structure is through the concept of the story mountain: a character climbs through the rising action, reaches the turning point at the summit, and then lets gravity take hold as their choices pull them through falling action and resolution. The metaphor can be extended further when we consider that every story—every mountain—arises from the strata beneath, from the stories and myths and beliefs of a culture that came before.

Our upcoming Mereth Aderthad 2025 event on July 19 will feature twelve presentations of meta and scholarship, each accompanied by fanworks that tackle the same topic. Each week, we are featuring interviews with the fanworks creators whose work will be presented at Mereth Aderthad, and this week, Shadow spoke with two creators whose work draws deep from around the roots of the mountain.

Bunn is writing a story for cloudyhymn's presentation "The Design of Dragons and the Doom of Dwarves" and creating art for Savannah Horrell's presentation "By Guile Committed: Comparing Tolkien’s Thieves to Beowulf," both of which rely heavily on Germanic myth, folklore, and literature. Bunn's story draws on cloudyhymn's theory that Dwarves and dragons share the same origin, with dragons a corrupted form of Dwarves, similar to one of Tolkien's theories that Orcs derive from Elves.

Likewise, bunn is making art for Savannah Horrell's presentation on thieves in Beowulf, the best-known work of Anglo-Saxon literature and a source of Tolkien's inspiration. (The Hobbit can certainly be understood as Beowulf fanfiction!) "People often feel that Tolkien kind of appears out of nowhere with a bunch of ideas," they told Shadow, "but I think he's very much rooted in a tradition, it's just the tradition is ... about a thousand years old, and not much had been written in it in the intervening period. I feel Elrond would have loved Tolkien." For this one, bunn is drawing on Savannah's connection between the thief in Beowulf and Tolkien's numerous thieves.

Shadow likewise interviewed me. I am writing fiction for Savannah's presentation, likewise drawn to her identification of the connection between thieves in the two works, though I spoke more to Shadow about planning Mereth Aderthad than the "thieves' triptych" that will be my creative contribution.

You can read Shadows interview with bunn here and Shadow's interview with Dawn (me) here.

If you want to catch up on other interviews you might have missed, you can find all of the Mereth Aderthad interviews here.

The vision behind Mereth Aderthad 2025 is one where, as Tolkien fans, we build our understanding and appreciation for his world through both study (scholarship) and creativity (fanworks). Both are valid ways of "knowing," and most members of the SWG community engage in both in a process where they are so intertwined that it is hard to separate them from each other. As we wind down our interviews of the scholars presenting their research at the event—Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan's interview this week is the next to last—we begin speaking with the artists, authors, poets, and performers whose work for Mereth Aderthad will respond to these presentations and the ideas they convey.

Saelind spoke to Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan about her presentation "Exile, Ruin and Resistance: Beleriand as Postcolonial Palimpsest." To say that The Silmarillion is a violent work is like saying the ocean is wet, but as Zara discusses with Saelind, there are particular acts of violence in The Silmarillion that stand out as ruptures, events that upend the dominant order. "The acts at Sirion mark a moment of rupture in that they expose a faultline in the narrative’s presumed moral and civilisational order," Zara explains, bringing the third kinslaying—one of the most discussed and controversial events in the Silmarillion fandom—into focus as the subject of her paper.

Like all of the scholars presenting at Mereth Aderthad, Zara also creates fanworks. In fact, as she explains, the idea for her paper came from a longfic. Zara spoke about the role each plays for her as a Tolkien fan, concluding that "through fiction, I can step inside the ruin" at Sirion in a way that isn't permitted through the more precise approaches required of scholarly inquiry. Both have their place and result in different modes of understanding the legendarium.

You can read Saelind's interview with Dr. Zara Ashkenazi-Khan here.

With that in mind, we also feature two interviews this week by creators whose fanworks will accompany Shadow's presentation "The Aromantic in Tolkien." I had the honor to speak with both chrissystriped and Silmalope, the respective featured author and featured artist for Shadow's presentation, about their work and the pieces they've created for Mereth Aderthad specifically.

Shadow's presentation is a prime example of a fan who doesn't identify as a scholar (yet!) finding an area where fanworks have gone but scholarship has not (yet): aromantic characters in Tolkien's work. Both chrissystriped and Silmalope, who identify as aro-ace themselves, spoke of being excited by the possibilities to foreground aromantic characters in their work and the importance of being able to see characters like themselves in their work.

"We are so much freer in fanworks than mainstream media because we do not have to cater to what big publishers or studios think is their reader-/viewership and we should use that freedom," chrissystriped told me. She is one of the SWG's most prolific and wide-ranging writers, and if you can't find one of her stories about a character you like, you probably don't like Tolkien! We also spoke about her process as a writer that allows her to achieve such an impressive range.

Silmalope also makes art about a diverse array of characters (they credit "a very short attention span"!). The art featured alongside their interview includes characters as different as Goldberry and Túrin. We also spoke about the importance of seeing more aromantic characters in fanworks. "I know firsthand how impactful it is to see yourself in a story and feel recognized," Silmalope told me, but they also emphasized the importance of fiction and art as ways "to empathize with and relate to characters whose lives are different from ours, in a way that we don’t necessarily have the opportunity to do in the ordinary scope of our day-to-day."

You can read the interview with chrissystriped here and the interview with Silmalope here.

We also started a new challenge this week: Period Drama, a Matryoshka challenge where the prompts are tropes from period dramas. And Mereth Aderthad is two months and two days away! We'd love for you to join us! You can register for Mereth Aderthad here.

It is a truism to say that Tolkien's languages are vital to the shape of his world. No one reading this is likely surprised by the well-known facts that Tolkien adored languages, invented his own languages across his entire life, and created Middle-earth to serve as a playground where he could speak those languages. Yet the importance of language to the legendarium is such that, when noticing oddities related to names and language, it is hard to dismiss them as coincidental or unintended—or at least unobserved—by Tolkien himself.

Speaking of Lúthien, Maeglin, and Arwen, JazTheBard realized, "At one point I noticed that the three of them (plus Tindómiel) have, sort of, the same name, and then I brought out the red string corkboard!" Her observations, connections, and theories about these three "children of twilight" form the basis for her upcoming Mereth Aderthad paper, "Twilight, Child Of: Comparisons Between Tinúviel, Lómion, and Undómiel."

Maglor recently spoke with Jaz about her paper and her theories about the names of these three characters. Observing that Tolkien himself defined Lómion as "'child of twilight' when 'lómë' is usually 'night'," it is likely that he made this connection as well, Jaz notes, "but he probably wouldn't agree with the conclusions I'm drawing from it!" While Lúthien and Arwen naturally invite comparison, Maeglin—the intentionally named "child of twilight"—not "child of night"—seems an outlier. In their conversation, Maglor and Jaz discussed some of the gender dynamics, particularly surrounding inheritance, that exist with the characters centered in her paper.

But the bigger takeaway is how tiny oddities, inconsistencies, and connections can invite speculation that turn into worlds of fanworks, whether meta or fiction or art.

You can read Maglor's interview with JazTheBard here.

Some reminders: We now have a nice collection of Mereth Aderthad 2025 interviews. All interviews can be found here. The Mereth Aderthad program has been posted. If you want to attend, you can register here.