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.

Last week, we closed out our first time running a Tolkien Meta Week. With our Mereth Aderthad 2025 event coming up in July and our call for presenters currently open, we are spotlighting all of the brilliant work that fans do in advancing what we know and understand about Tolkien's world.

Fans can often push the boundaries of how we understand Tolkien's world in ways that academics can't. After all, we are not navigating the politics of a workplace (and one in academia at that!). That's not to diminish how hard it is to have one's cherished ideas panned or attacked in fan communities and social networks. Our fandom history is full of examples of fans advocating for new readings of Tolkien and then experiencing harassment and aggressive opposition to their ideas, and this continues to this day with the alt-right misappropriation of Tolkien. But without our work attached to our jobs and our ability to use pseudonymity as a buffer between our fanworks and threats to our livelihood, fans have pushed Tolkien studies in new directions in ways that often go unrecognized.

We were writing, discussing, and debating the role of women in the legendarium, queer readings of Tolkien, disability in the legendarium, and reading the legendarium as history, among others, long before these became hot topics on the scholarly side of Tolkien fandom. Mereth Aderthad seeks to recognize fan contributions to Tolkien studies, and Tolkien Meta Week was part of that. We ended up with thirty-one works of meta posted to our tumblr and the SWG archive. These works spanned all topics, ages, texts, and characters and used a variety of formats and approaches to share ideas about Tolkien.

We hope that at least some of our Tolkien Meta Week contributors will consider sending us a proposal to share their work at Mereth Aderthad. However, we recognize that making this leap is a big one. In the weeks to come, watch this space, our site, and our socials for more information on how we will be supporting fans who want to present their work, either at Mereth Aderthad or at another Tolkien conference.

A huge thank you and congratulations to our Tolkien Meta Week participants! All thirty-one of their works are below. If you find something you love or that got you thinking, we encourage letting the creator know or (if on Tumblr) reblogging their work!

The adaptation of Elves in Peter Jackson's movies and how it influences my (and I would guess our?) perception by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

The Aging of Elves by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

Aredhel, the White Lady of the Noldor by @erendur (Tumblr)

Arwen Character Analysis by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

A Change in Circumstances by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Denethor and Theoden as Fathers: A Comparison by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Elves are per default bi-sexual. Period. Sex always marks marriage is bullshit. Period. There are polyamorous relationships in Valinor. My hot-takes on the Laws and Customs by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

Eowyn and Gothic Horror by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Eowyn and Masking by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Eowyn and the Hobbits by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Eowyn and Theoden by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Fibers in Fiction - A Silmarillion Writer’s Guide to Þerindë's Craft by @amorbidcorvid (Tumblr)

Finding Celebrían by @balrogballs (Tumblr)

From the Book of Lost Tales to the Silmarillion and further - the rounding off of a character by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

Galadriel's Successor by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Gender Roles and Faramir's Ultimate Triumph by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Heroes of old and despair by @nerdanelparmandil (Tumblr)

Libraries at the Edge of Middle-earth: Fanworks, Archives, and Communities as Heritage by Dawn "Felagund" Walls-Thumma (SWG archive)

My Open-Source Tolkien Studies Data Sets by @dawnfelagund (Tumblr)

On Dwarves and Glass-making by Artano (SWG archive)

On Feanor Asking for Galadriel's Hair: A Meta on a Long-Debated Topic by @mircallaruthven (Tumblr)

Open Letter to Silmarillion- and Wider Tolkien-Fandom by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

The Self-Destruction of Elu Thingol by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

Tolkien's "Collected Poems": A Link Collection by Himring (SWG archive)

Tolkien through an Aromantic Lens by daughterofshadows (SWG archive)

Untitled by @in-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras (Tumblr)

Untitled by @kanalaure (Tumblr)

Untitled by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Untitled by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

Untitled by @torchwood99 (Tumblr)

What is canon in Tolkien's universe? How to deal with the History of Middle-Earth and Tolkien's Letters by @ladysternchen (Tumblr)

Just as the title says, tomorrow is the opening day of our inaugural year of Tolkien Meta Week! TMW is part of our ongoing effort at showcasing the brilliant thinking, writing, and creation that Tolkien fans do on the legendarium and to emphasize that Meta Is for Everyone!

If you're hearing about this for the first time, here's the elevator pitch: Tolkien Meta Week will run between December 8th and 14th on the SWG archive and our tumblr. ALL meta is welcome: all subjects, all formats, and all levels of completion and polish. We will offer four daily meta prompts, but these are entirely optional. Do them on different days! Mix and match! Skip them entirely! Any nonfiction content about Tolkien is welcome for this event.

Tomorrow's (purely optional!) prompts are theory, infographic, The Silmarillion, and the Tolkien fandom. So share your theories about how the various details of the text work together! Or make a visual to share information about a favorite character or topic in the legendarium. Or share something nonfiction about The Silmarillion: a headcanon, a list of favorite resources, or a favorite bit of canon and what it means to you. Or talk about Tolkien fandom: what you notice about what we do, what brought you and keeps you here, or a favorite piece of your fandom history. Or something else entirely! (Prompts really are optional ...)

Here are the prompts for the week:

One of our favorite parts of our challenges is awarding the little postage stamps that we give out to challenge participants. There is just something delightful about an online hoard of brightly colored prizes that are worth absolutely nothing but their commemoration of creativity or interaction with another creator.

For the past two years, we've been asking artists to help us in making these stamps. Doing so lets each month have a unique style or approach and, we hope, draws some attention to the stunning work the artists on our site are doing!

If you would like to help with creating stamps for the 2025 challenges, it is that time of the year! You can reply to this email or contact the mods through any of our usual channels. Next week, we will share a sign-up document with bare-bones descriptions of the 2025 challenges. (Note that if you want to be completely unspoiled about the challenges, you should probably not volunteer for this one!) Our call for stamp creators has more information, and note that all creators are welcome to volunteer. There is no level of expertise in art required.

In addition to our ongoing Potluck Bingo challenge, the SWG is really happy to be able to provide a home for the Festival of Lights Fest this year. This Hanukkah-inspired event runs annually and encourages works about or inspired by Hanukkah. Fanworks might directly depict Hanukkah (e.g., a modern AU with Jewish characters), might relate to Hanukkah (such as an in-universe celebration similar to Hanukkah), or might just be inspired by our Hanukkah prompts. Because the Festival of Lights Fest runs alongside Potluck Bingo this year, FLF mods Indy and Janeways have added two Hanukkah-themed bingo cards to the collection—and yes, you get stamps for Potluck and Festival of Lights Fest if you complete a prompt on one of the Hanukkah cards!

Finally, Tolkien Meta Week begins in just over a week! Yes, this might be timed because we also have an open call for meta/scholarship for our 2025 Mereth Aderthad event ... but more broadly, Tolkien fans are brilliant people who tend to underestimate their brilliance, and both Tolkien Meta Week and Mereth Aderthad are intended to encourage all of you out there to shine! Tolkien Meta Week includes optional daily prompts, but really? We just hope people will become more comfortable sharing their ideas about Tolkien! Note that while Meta Week on the SWG archive follows the usual rules for what is eligible as a "Silmwork" for the SWG, we are also running this event on Tumblr and would love to reblog any Tolkien meta, whether it is eligible for our site or not! Make sure to tag #tolkien meta week and we'll do the rest.

And a brief erratum from last week: In a rush to get out the door to a work conference, I forgot to include Anérea and Varda delle Stelle's Mapping Arda, Part III: The Second Age as a featured article in the newsletter. If you haven't checked out their exploration of Second Age maps and geography, it is well worth the read and is linked below!

The cartography of Middle-earth is one of its many fascinating details for many fans. How many of us turn regularly to the maps inside The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, and The Hobbit as we read? Have you ever looked at those maps and wondered at the places on them that are barely or never mentioned? Or wondered what lay beyond the map's edge? Maps suggest stories beyond the roads we've been allowed to follow alongside familiar characters, making them a perfect inspiration for fanworks.

This week, Anérea returns with our periodic Tolkien art column, Tolkien Fanartics, and her series within that column about mapping Arda. In the third installment in that series, she looks at maps of the Second Age.

As Silmarillion readers can tell you, the Second Age is a frayed patchwork between the more complete stories of the First and Third Ages. Cartographically, the Second Age is no different. Maps of Númenor and mainland Middle-earth during the Second Age are fragmentary, leaving the artists who work with them to draw on their full array of cartographic skills, close reading, and a dash of speculation. The maps Anérea has selected for this week's article show various ways of viewing the lands of the Second Age and depict these lands in a variety of forms, from the more traditional drawing and digital art, to embroidery, to three-dimensional models.

You can read Anérea's article, "Mapping Arda, Part III: The Second Age" here.

A couple weeks ago, we announced that we were looking for bingo cards of prompts for our upcoming Potluck Bingo challenge. That challenge is now live, and you can sample the five-star offerings of prompts, beautifully crafted and served on an array of bingo cards!

We generally run one bingo card challenge each year (after the uproarious success of Back to Middle-earth Month 2012, which the SWG mods who lived through it still regard with a mixture of awe and trauma—trawema, if you will), so if you want to create a fanwork or write a comment for this challenge (and we hope you do), then a quick rundown of how bingo card challenges work is in order. We are not calling numbers for this challenge; you can create for any prompt you want on any card you want. If you made a card, you are under no obligation to play it, or you can go wild on your own prompts. You can combine multiple prompts into a single fanwork (from the same card or different cards). The various ways that prompts combine is part of the fun of bingo challenges!

Of course, if you've played actual bingo in a drafty church hall with blue-haired old ladies and their array of lucky charms and fierce combativeness, you know how rabid bingo aficionados can be about winning bingo. Our challenges don't expect you to fill lines, but we of course welcome you to try! There are special stamps available for participants who do. Let a mod know if you've achieved bingo, which we define as filling prompts in horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines or (for the truly ambitious!) all prompts on a card. There is also a special stamp for players who play multiple boards.

As always, all types of fanwork are welcome on our archive. (If you're new to our challenges, find our challenge guidelines here.) We also have bingo boards for leaving comments, and we are accepting new cards for the duration of the challenge. The Potluck Bingo page has guidelines and templates for making cards.

This challenge runs through January 15, 2025, but because the first challenge of the new year is always an amnesty challenge where you can create for any of our 2024 challenges you missed and receive the stamps, you will have until February 15, 2025, to post responses to this challenge and receive stamps.

In other challenge-related news, we had several members collaborate to solve the Orctober riddle for last month's challenge. I've set up the form for requesting riddle clues to email me when there are new requests, so if you haven't solved it yet (or even started!) but want to try, feel free to keep sending clue requests.

And a few other reminders: Tolkien Meta Week begins December 8, and we are still accepting proposals for presentations at our July 19 Mereth Aderthad hybrid event!

As we approach our twentieth birthday, we have become a group that does a lot. We hold online events, including our monthly challenges, publish articles and a weekly newsletter, maintain an SWG presence on three social media sites, and of course keep an archive that welcomes all types of fanworks about The Silmarillion. Enter the semi-regular reminder that none of this stuff does itself and that our team of volunteers is what keeps it happening!

If you enjoy the SWG and want to show your appreciation, one of the best ways is by getting involved as a volunteer. We don't collect donations but do rely on people-power to keep the group running.

Our volunteers page contains an up-to-date listing of roles we're currently looking for. In addition, with our Mereth Aderthad hybrid event coming up next July, we're looking for volunteers willing to help plan the event and at the event itself. If you're interested, hit REPLY here and we'll get you started!

Volunteer roles vary as to whether they are long-term (such as the Around the World and Web editor role that's been open for almost three years now!) or one-off (such as writing an article for the newsletter). Time commitments vary also, but important to know that we understand that our volunteers have lives, families, jobs, school, and community commitments that need to take priority. Our volunteers are backed by a moderator team (also volunteers!) who are able to step in to cover or assist when volunteers need time off.

Finally, a thank you to our current volunteers: our moderators Russandol, Grundy, Lyra, Suzelle, Janeways, and Angelica. Shadow manages our social media accounts (which is my least favorite things to do, so I send out waves of gratitude each week at least when posts appear as though by magic). Our art editors are Anérea and Varda delle Stelle, and they ensure that each article for the newsletter has a gorgeous work of art to go with it. Newsletter writers within the past year(ish ... because I like to acknowledge people!) have been Simon J. Cook, Anérea, Melesta, LadySternchen, Cuarthol, Rhunedhel, Himring, and firstamazon. This year's challenge banner artists are Grundy, Cuarthol, Independence1776, and Zdenka. Istari for our Discord server are firstamazon and Nienna. Inclusivity committee members, who help us navigate some of the toughest and most important questions we face so that all people feel welcome and wanted here, are Independence1776, Shadow, Elwin Fortuna, and UnnamedElement. And our Mereth Aderthad planners are Quente, Aprilertuile, Shadow, Gryph, Independence1776, and Zhie.

If anyone is left off, it is purely an oversight on my part! Please let me know so that I can write a correction for a later edition of the newsletter.

And again, if you'd like to join this group of much-appreciated volunteers, check out our volunteers page or click REPLY and let us know!