Tolkien famously wrote that The Lord of the Rings was a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work." Of course, he was writing to a Catholic priest when he said this (and when it was less expedient to emphasize possible religious connections, he wrote that a weakness of the Arthurian tradition was that it "explicitly contains the Christian religion").

Over the next few months, we will be featuring interviews by presenters and fanworks creators who will be sharing their work at Mereth Aderthad. "[Tolkien] accidentally made a mythology that is so inclusive, and draws upon so many sources of diverse history and his own invention, that his audience became all of us," said Acha Rezak in a recent interview with Shadow about her forthcoming Mereth Aderthad presentation "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." Acha goes on to say, "By 'us' I mean—myself and all the other non-English—a half-Asian kid growing up in Bangkok, stumbling across The Silmarillion in the British Council Library."

Religion has often been use to exclude and gatekeep in Tolkien fandom, including today, when Tolkien has been co-opted by some Christian nationalists. But Acha argues that Tolkien's work had the opposite effect on her, describing Tolkien as opening doors that she only perceived as shut when she encountered critics who read his work as essentially Christian. Acha's presentation will explore that sense of alienation, as a reader raised in a Buddhist country who found deep spiritual meaning in Tolkien.

"Nature as written by Tolkien does call to the spiritualist in me," Acha explains. "It's the clear manifestation of the growing and creative nature of existence, and I honor how he wrote it."

You can read Shadow's full interview with Acha about her paper here.

If you want to participate in Mereth Aderthad 2025, it is not to late! While we have set our program of twelve intriguing research presentations, we are still looking for fanworks to accompany those presentations. Interested? Check out our call for fanworks here!

After a very busy Jubilee challenge—which resulted in more than sixty fanworks and hundreds of comments—we're introducing a new challenge for the next month that is an anti-challenge.

Dark Matter, just like the substance in the universe that it is named after, involves creating a fanwork around an absence, using an anti-prompt. If that sounds as mysterious as the concept of dark matter itself, it's actually quite straightforward: don't include the prompt or prompts you choose in your fanwork.

The Dark Matter challenge uses a random prompt generator to choose a prompt or prompts across three possible categories: motifs and tropes, literary techniques, and words and letters. You can pick one prompt. You can pick three. You can walk the middle road and pick two. You can reroll the prompt generator as many times as you want, and if you want to try multiple prompts, cherrypick prompts you like as they come up and roll the other categories until you find something you like there too. If you want to take the full Agent of Chaos approach, you can just take what you get and make a fanwork without it.

Because this challenge is a different, unfamiliar approach, we've included a range of difficulty levels in the prompts. After the hubbub of Jubilee, taking low-hanging fruit is fine, but if you are up for creating a fanwork without the letter E, that diabolical anti-prompt is in the mix too (in the Words & Letters category). As always, we never judge what "counts" for a challenge and embrace our challenges' purpose in increasing the number of Silmarillion fanworks out there in the world!

In other news, Mereth Aderthad continues to proceed apace and we have a few updates to share!

First, our program of meta and scholarship presentations has been posted on the Mereth Aderthad 2025 page. We have twelve tantalizing presentations on deck for the event. Watch this space for fanworks to be added too in the weeks to come!

Speaking of fanworks, if you want to create a fanwork for Mereth Aderthdad (the live event, the event's zine, or both!), fanwork sign-ups opened today.

Registration for the even will open on March 15, for both in-person and virtual attendees.

Finally, we will feature interviews with the presenters and creators of Mereth Aderthad in the weeks to come so that we can celebrate their work and let attendees get to know them a little before the event. We're looking for volunteers to help with these interviews. We provide the questions to get you started and you direct the conversation from there. Interviews will be over email or another text-based format unless you and your interviewee prefer differently. We'll handle the rest! If you'd like to help out, reply to this email and we'll be in touch!

In just over a week, we will be opening sign-ups for fanworks for our Mereth Aderthad event, coming July 19, 2025. Mereth Aderthad is a bit of a different approach to a Tolkien event: not quite a conference, not quite a ficswap. Fanworks creators will write stories and poems, make art, and create other fanworks in response to a presentation about Tolkien's world. If you think you might want to sign up and want access to the form when it goes live, make sure we have a contact email for you here. (If this is the first time you're hearing of it, the full call for fanworks is here.)

What we hope this will accomplish is show how easily the scholarly and creative wings of the Tolkien fandom blend into each other, which is what we have been about for twenty years now. Will it work? Who knows! If someone has done an event like this before, we don't know of it. But we have twelve fascinating presentations scheduled (the schedule will be coming soon!) that are looking for creative works to go with them, and we hope fanworks creators out there might consider giving it a go.

In the more immediate future, we are holding an impromptu instadrabbling session today (Saturday, February 8) at 6PM/18:00 UTC on our Discord server. (Find this in your timezone.) Prompts will be traditional four-word prompts either taken from a random page in The Silmarillion or from Elleth's Tolkien Femslash February prompts. If you've never instadrabbled before, it is a low-key, collaborative, supportive, and very fun way to spend a few hours making and enjoying Tolkien fanworks! Check out the instadrabbling FAQ here for more details. Next Saturday, we will again host instadrabbling on our Discord server using prompts for Maedhros & Maglor Week. (The SWG is not affiliated with this event, but we have our share of M&M fans!) Find more about the February 15 instadrabbling event here.

We're at the time of the year where big fandom events like Back to Middle-earth Month and Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang begin to appear on the calendar. And we've welcomed lots of new members in the past several months. Put those together, and there are probably a few people wondering, "I've written something; now where do I find someone to beta-read my story?"

Beta-reading is a fandom practice that involves a reader giving feedback on a story before it is posted publicly. "Giving feedback" is intentionally vague because beta-reading looks different for every author and reader. Some dig deep into the workings of a story, others focus on a specific area like dialogue or characterization, and still others copyedit and catch all those there/their/they're-type mistakes.

If you're looking for a beta, we can help. We have a beta directory on our site where writers can search for betas who specialize in what they most need for a story, whether that's someone to help with pacing and plot or someone who knows a ton about the Second Age. If you belong to our Discord server, we also have a #beta-finder channel there, which is especially useful when you end up pinch-hitting for an exchange and need someone fast.

If you want to help writers get their stories into shape, consider adding yourself to our beta directory! Anyone with an SWG membership can do so. Go to your profile and click the Beta Profile tab at the top. Note the checkbox "Activate This Profile" at the bottom; if you need to go on hiatus and don't want people to contact you, just uncheck this box, and you will be removed from the list without losing your profile data. When you're ready to be put back on, just recheck the box.

Finally, as the News below shows, we have some upcoming dates and events! First, the "abstract gallery" of Mereth Aderthad presentations will be made available in a week for people considering creating a fanwork for the event. If you want to know when the abstract gallery opens and have not added your name to our interest form, make sure you do! Fanworks sign-ups will open February 15.

We also have an instadrabbling session coming up on February 15 at 18:00/6PM UTC (find this in my timezone). The session will focus on Maedhros and Maglor's relationship, timed just before Maedhros & Maglor Week that begins the next day. (We are not affiliated with Maedhros & Maglor Week.) You can learn more about the instadrabbling session here and join our Discord here.

Last week, we held two instadrabbling sessions on our Discord server that, togther, totalled about ten hours of creating and sharing fanworks together. (Check the New Fanworks list below to find many of them!) Live events are always really fun, and last week was no exception.

If you enjoy live events on our Discord server, we want to encourage you to consider hosting one! The quote in this week's newsletter title comes from the Ainulindalë and speaks to the power of many minds and hands building something together. The SWG moderators host live events a couple of times per year, but these are typically oriented toward SWG events. However, we welcome events hosted by members and, if you have an idea for an event, are here to support you in making it happen!

What types of events do we host on our server? Of course, there is instadrabbling. While instadrabbling has a traditional format, we welcome hosts to completely abandon it if they want. If you'd like to organize an impromptu micro-fanworks creation session, whether open-ended or themed, consider hosting an instadrabbling session! Also note that the #instadrabbling channel on our Discord server is always open for impromptu sessions as well.

We've also hosted fanfiction book clubs in the past where we gather and discuss fanworks written about a specific topic, character, pairing, genre, or theme. Book clubs are positive-focused discussion groups that read fanfiction as literary (or literary criticism) and offer the chance to take a deep-dive into what makes a story tick.

Finally, we also host live readings of fanworks in our stage channel. Again, these sessions can be built around a theme, can be open-ended, or take an open-mic approach (or a mix of the aforementioned). In all cases, we hope to both encourage the creation of more Tolkien-based fanworks and showcase the beautiful, thought-provoking, an entertaining work our members create.

In all instances, the SWG moderators support hosts as needed with promotions and logistics. While you will primarily plan and host your event, we're always available behind the scenes to offer assistance when and where needed. We are also happy to help first-time hosts with the questions and worries that always arise when trying something like this for the first time!

Most events are held on our Discord server, but the SWG also has a Zoom account. And if you have an idea for an event that doesn't fit any of the above, let us know what you're thinking, and we'll help if we can to make it happen. If you're interested in hosting an event, reply to this email or reach out using any of our usual contacts!

Mereth Aderthad is coming on July 19, 2025! In celebration of our twentieth birthday, we are gathering in-person in Burlington, Vermont, USA, and online to share presentations of meta and fanworks based on the works of Tolkien.

This week, we opened our interest form for creators who would like to share a fanwork as part of Mereth Aderthad. There will be two options for fanworks, which will accompany the research and meta presentations that are also part of the event. Fanworks of all types are welcome! Mereth Aderthad is a live event, so we will have time set aside for sharing fanworks as part of the event. If you'd rather not present your fanwork live, we will also produce a fanzine as part of the event.

As we build the schedule for Mereth Aderthad, we cannot overemphasize that our priority is that people who want to share their work as part of Mereth Aderthad be able to share their work as part of Mereth Aderthad. We know that speaking at an event is not for everyone. Pre-recorded presentations are welcome. Having someone else read your fanwork is welcome. If you want to participate but need accommodations, you can reach out to the SWG mods at any time, and we will do our best to make that happen.

Right now, we are asking creators who might be interested in sharing a fanwork as part of Mereth Aderthad to complete our interest form. If you fill out the form, we will contact you twice. On February 7, we will send out the presentations for Mereth Aderthad that we need fanworks for. On February 15, we will email you the sign-up form. Filling out the interest form does not obligate you to sign up for Mereth Aderthad.

If you want to know more about what we're looking for, the full call for fanworks is available on our website. If you have questions, hit REPLY on this email or contact the mods through the website or any of our social media.

This weekend, we will be instadrabbling on our Discord server! Instadrabbling is a Tolkien fanworks tradition that has been going on for more than twenty years. Creators gather on a chat together, someone tosses a prompt out out to the group, and everyone creates a small fanwork in response and shares it in the chat. While traditionally, fanworks are drabbles, we put less stock in tradition than we do in welcoming as many creators as we can, so all Tolkien-based fanworks are welcome, regardless of length or format. This round, any prompts are welcome, though the mods promise prompts aimed at earning stamps for the Jubilee challenge. Likewise, if you want to come hang out and enjoy the fanworks being created, you are also welcome! You can join our Discord server here.

One of the most beloved themes of The Lord of the Rings is the ability of the humble and small to succeed where the powerful cannot and do not. It's unlikely that Tolkien had this notion in mind when he wrote so many minor characters and let them carry powerful ideas, but Vidumavi of the Northmen is one such character. Relegated to the appendices, Vidumavi is not only a catalyst in the histories of Rohan and Gondor but advances some of Tolkien's most important themes in the story of her love and marriage to the Gondorian prince Valacar.

In our newest article in Character of the Month, Secondborn discusses the life of Vidumavi and her importance to the legendarium. No one familiar with Character of the Month will be surprised to learn that, with just two mentions in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, Vidumavi carries a lot, thematically, on her shoulders. Secondborn explores ideas ranging from the division of various peoples throughout Tolkien's works based on bloodline—an idea with troubling echoes in our own world—to the conflicting meanings of fellowship to the role of characters like Vidumavi in illustrating a world from which the faerie-element is fading.

Furthermore, Vidumavi offers multiple inroads for creating fanworks. There is the love story. Secondborn writes of Vidumavi that "her marriage strikes me as one of the best and most genuine in Tolkien’s works, a truly moving example of love for love’s sake that endured harsh tests without failure." There is the hardship she experienced as one of the Northmen in a city that did not fully approve of her or her marriage, a trial that she bore with honor and courage, ultimately illustrating the fallacy of declaring one group of people superior to the other. Her story is entangled with the Kinstrife, with Castamir's coup, and with the eventual installment of the Stewards of Gondor. All this from a woman relegated to the appendices.

You can read Secondborn's biography of Vidumavi here.

Vidumavi's biography is a good time, too, to remind those of you who create fanworks that Third Age works are allowed on our site. This is a frequent point of confusion, but any works except those set during The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings are eligible for the SWG. The full FAQ on "Silmworks" is here.

And a final reminder of upcoming dates:

• Proposals for meta presentations for Mereth Aderthad are due on January 15, which is Wednesday. Check out our session on proposal-writing here and remember that this is an event that is specifically seeking contributions from fans! We want to feature your work at our event and are happy to support potential presenters in doing so! Reply to this email or contact us for help or with questions. We're happy to bounce ideas, look over drafts, or whatever you need. Find the call for proposals here.
• Next weekend, January 18 and 19, we are instadrabbling on our Discord server. Find more about how to participate here.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Normally, we release new challenges on the 15th of the month. At the start of the year, we mess up our own system and things get kind of weird.

January is always an amnesty month, when you can complete any challenges you missed from the previous year and receive the stamps for them. This year, because it is our twentieth and Grundy (who maintains the stamp collections) is generous, it is not just an amnesty month but a Jubilee! This means you get another crack at any challenge and can collect just about any stamp for it. (The few exceptions are listed in the challenge itself.) Was a challenge before your time? Or you just didn't get to a challenge you that thought sounded fun? Or you started a challenge fanwork and never finished it? Do it now and get the stamp!

Because it would be kind of a bummer to start the amnesty challenge, especially a Jubilee, two weeks into the new year, we start it on January 1, but it still runs until February 15, so you have a month-and-a-half for this one.

We will also be instadrabbling on January 18 and 19 on our Discord server. Instadrabbling is a long-running Tolkien fandom tradition (older than we are!) where we create and share fanworks together in chat. Prompts for this instadrabble weekend are open-ended, but the mods promise to toss out some challenge prompts for Jubilee so that we can fill those stamp collections! And while we love drabbles, any fanwork you want to create during the session is welcome, as long as it is Tolkien-related. You can find more details on the upcoming instadrabbling sessions here. All are welcome, whether you're an instadrabbling veteran, a first-timer, or just want to read and see the fanworks as they come in!

But today (Saturday), we will be hosting our first session on "So You Want to Present at a Tolkien Conference?" on writing the proposal. The session will be hosted via Zoom and all are welcome to attend and participate however you're most comfortable! (Want to lurk? Ask a ton of questions? We want you all here!) The session will be recorded and available afterward, but if you can make it live, it starts at 1:00 PM Eastern Time (find that in your timezone). You can join the session here.

We hope at least some of you will turn what you learn into a Mereth Aderthad proposal but, really, we think Tolkien fanworks people have brilliant ideas and want to do our small part to help and encourage those ideas to be shared. We hope to see you there!

One of the ways that I mark time through the year is by the newsletter. Each week, I copy the previous week's title and add one to the issue number. This week, we are on Issue 52, the final newsletter for 2024. Next week, I will change not just the issue number but the volume number as well, and we will pass into our twentieth year of newsletters.

The SWG newsletter began as a monthly publication in September 2005. This first newsletter opened with the words: "It is official: The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is now over one month old. Given all that has been accomplished in that month and all the wonderful, new people I've had the chance to meet, it is hard to believe that it is not much longer!"

Now, I would write that as, "It's official! The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is almost twenty years old. It's hard to believe it's been that long!"

Furthermore, I know that making it to this point was not a given. The SWG has had a rich history, but that history has too often and sadly occurred within the context of other archives and communities collapsing around us. Last year, we were only one of five Tolkien fanfiction archives that had new work posted, and we were the only one with significant levels of activity. Our survival amid the challenges of the past twenty years has never been a given, and we owe it to the creators who have continued posting with us, members who keep our communities vibrant and alive, and volunteers who do the too often unseen work behind the scenes to keep the lights on. Thank you all. If you had told me, in September 2005 when I wrote our first newsletter, where we'd be right now, I would not have believed it.

2025 will be a special year for us because we will turn twenty. We are starting off strong with lots happening in January!

First of all, we will be running our annual amnesty challenge as a Jubilee this year, meaning that you can get challenge stamps you missed for any of our challenges from 2017 onward! If there was a challenge before your time that looked cool or you missed a challenge along the way, now is your chance to do it! Details will be available on the website on January 1 and in next week's newsletter (Volume 20, Issue 1!)

Mereth Aderthad is coming up on July 19, and our call for presenters is currently open. Because we want to encourage participation from fans, not just academics and scholars (who are also welcome!), we will be holding a virtual session next Saturday, January 4, at 1:00 PM Eastern Time on how to write a conference proposal. We will stay online afterward for anyone who wants to work on proposals together. All are welcome! You do not need to submit a proposal for Mereth Aderthad, turn on your camera, or say anything (though we welcome questions and discussion, we love lurkers too!) If you even think that someday maybe you might want to present at a Tolkien conference, we hope you will join us. A recording of the session will be available afterward if you can't make the live session. Join the session here or RSVP and we will send you a link.

Finally, for our Jubilee challenge that starts next week, we will hold two Jubilee instadrabbling sessions on January 18 (15:00 UTC) and 19 (18:00 UTC) on our Discord server. Instadrabbling is a long-running Tolkien fandom tradition that is older than we are! Creators gather, create quick fanworks in response to prompts, and share their work live. Instadrabbling is fun and low-key, and this session will include past challenge prompts to help with stamp-collecting efforts. If you're not on our Discord server and want to be, just reply to this email for an invite! If you're already there, show up when you can, create what you can, and enjoy a weekend of fanworks.

Finally, to all of our members, creators, guests, and friends across the years, all the best wishes for a wonderful New Year!

Right now is a very busy time on the SWG. We have three challenges ongoing: Potluck Bingo, the Festival of Lights Fest, and Tolkien Meta Week. We are gearing up for Mereth Aderthad 2025 in just over six months. All of this means lots of new Silmarillion fanworks coming in!

But the SWG has been around a long time—almost twenty years!—and some parts of our site that have been around a while just don't get much attention anymore. You might not even know they exist! So, this week, we dust off three classics.

The Random Silmfic Prompt Generator. Do you ever want to create something but need a little nudge for where to begin? Enter the Random Silmfic Prompt Generator! Built as part of our tenth birthday celebration, the prompt generator includes ten (see what we did there??) categories for which you can generate a random prompt at the click of a button. You can pick one or ten and reroll until the stars align and give you the inspiration you seek. (Also, even though it is called the SilmFIC Prompt Generator because it hails from a time when we hosted only fanfiction, it can be used to inspire any type of fanwork you can imagine.)

Yahoo! Group Message Archive. The SWG started on Yahoo! Groups, which closed down in 2019, taking a lot of fandom history with it. Because our group had a public message archive, we downloaded our messages and have been storing them on our site since. They're a mess, as early email lists can only be, but they preserve some of our most important history (and we are [slowly] working on archiving them in a more friendly and searchable form.)

The Library of Tirion. The Library of Tirion was started by moderator Angelica in order to preserve Silmarillion fanfiction from before the SWG archive opened in 2007. Tracking down authors who had long gone quiet was a feat, but she amassed quite a collection of "classic" Silmarillion stories, many of which formed the foundations for fanon, tropes, pairings, and interpretations that are still alive today.