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.

This week, we are excited to offer two previews of upcoming Mereth Aderthad 2025 presentations that take very different approaches to very different topics.

Zhie's presentation "How to Make a Star from a Tree: The Science of Telperion and Laurelin" grew out of a similar presentation for Oxonmoot 2024 on the science of the Silmarils. Zhie is a librarian, not a scientist, and describes a process to Shadow that involved amassing hundreds of sources to bridge the gap between fandom and science in investigating first the scientific roots of the Silmarils and now the Two Trees.

"Nobody should be shoed into this thought of you are only an artist or you are only a fanfic writer or you are only a scholar or whatever. We should all be able to go into different parts of the sandbox and do different things," Zhie said to Shadow, which really underscores the core idea behind Mereth Aderthad: to recognize the extraordinary lengths fans go to in mastering their understanding of the legendarium (including collecting sixty-five different books to tackle a topic!), whether to write a fanfic or craft the perfect artwork or dive into discussions on Tumblr and Discord with fellow fans. Zhie went on to say, "I hope that, you know, it will kind of help to encourage those who maybe thought that they, you know, that they weren't able to because you can. You can do it."

We agree! You can find the recording of Shadow's interview with Zhie here and the transcript of their conversation here.

Also this week is Anérea's interview of Savannah Horrell about her paper "By Guile Committed: Comparing Tolkien’s Thieves to Beowulf." Beowulf—an epic-length narrative poem in alliterative verse that tells of the adventures of the Norse hero Beowulf—was a favorite of Tolkien. He translated the poem and, as Savannah points out, The Hobbit can seen as a retelling of the disastrous theft of dragon gold that brings about Beowulf's demise—but told from the perspective of the thief.

"There are very few guile heroes or underdog heroes in what we have left of the Germanic heroic legend," Savannah told Anérea. "This is obviously a big contrast with the Hobbits, singers, and burglars who dominate many of Tolkien’s narratives—it felt worthwhile to unpack that!"

Savannah notes that Beowulf influences Tolkien's work—and the wider realm of fantasy—in many ways, but the shift in how thieves are regarded, whether Bilbo or Lúthien, speaks to the ways in which Tolkien's work differs from its Germanic predecessors and highlights one appeal of Tolkien's work: that it elevates the stories of the small and humble amid the epic histories of heroes and civilizations.

You can read Anérea's interview with Savannah here.

When most people think of poetry, they think of rhymes.How many poems, which includes songs and nursery rhymes, can you recite from memory? How many of them rhyme?

But the earliest poetry in English was not structured around rhyme but alliteration: multiple syllables in a metrical line that share the same initial sound. This early verse, which includes examples like Beowulf, has an earthier, driven feel when compared to the later bouncing meters of rhymed poetry that came with the French during the Norman Invasion. Alliterative verse also tends to handle heftier topics and is darker in tone: the Northern feel that Tolkien sought to capture in The Silmarillion. Tolkien himself was an avid practitioner of alliterative poetry, translating key examples of the craft (Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl) and writing his own original verses, some set in the legendarium.

At Mereth Aderthad 2025, Paul D. Deane will be presenting a paper on alliterative verse and Tolkien, titled "Love, Grief, and Alliterative Verse in Tolkien’s Legendarium." Paul is also an avid practitioner of alliterative verse and edits the quarterly journal of alliterative poetry, Forgotten Ground Regained. Himring spoke with Paul about his upcoming Mereth Aderthad presentation, which considers how both Tolkien and fans use alliterative verse to explore the key themes of love and grief in the legendarium.

Paul's work on alliterative poetry entwines with involvement in the Tolkien fandom, roleplaying an Avarin poet named Rhunedhel who, like Tollkien's own historian-poets, witnessed and recorded many events of the legendarium. Paul describes alliterative verse as having a "raw power" strong enough to be magical in the legendarium—the perfect form for the early legendarium, where magic and downfall are deeply entwined. His work exemplifies significant research and skill that many fanworks creators use to build the legendarium beyond what Tolkien gave us.

You can read Himring's interview with Paul here.

Some additional news: Keep scrolling for a first look at the full program for Mereth Aderthad! Also, next weekend, Anna (IdleLeaves) hosts our monthly instadrabbling session on the Discord server. If you're not a member of our Discord server, you can join us here.

There's no business like show business, and our newest challenge, Musicals, plays on the energy and emotion of musical theater by putting some favorite quotes from musicals in the limelight as challenge prompts. This month's challenge allows creators to select their own prompt from the list (linked above!), though as always, we remind participants that creative interpretation of the prompts is very welcome. (Want to use the title or the name of the musical or a snippet from the song that wasn't included in the prompt but you find at the link to the full lyrics? We're not going to stop you!)

If you're new to our challenges, you can find the complete challenge guidlines on the website.

We are also in one of those rare instances where we have two challenges running at once ("running" as in "eligible for stamps" since you can create for any of our challenges whenever you want). Birthday Bash, being a daily prompt challenge, will run until April 25 so that creators have time to work with the later prompts in the challenge. (If you missed Birthday Bash, it recapped twenty years of our history with matching challenge prompts.)

We are taking a break this week from Mereth Aderthad interviews, and next week, we will be taking the site down briefly on Saturday, April 19, for a major software upgrade. We are swiftly approaching four years since we reopened the site after rebuilding it from the ground up in Drupal (and eighteen years since I built our original archive), so it seems a good weekend for a digression about some of the technical history of how the SWG came to be and continues to exist and why next week's upgrade is happening.

The SWG was not intended to be an archive. I did not have the skills for such an endeavor when the group was founded in 2005, but popular sentiment that we should be an archive (and not a writers' workshop, as I intended) pushed me to gain those skills very quickly. Our archive opened in June 2007. It was built in eFiction, an open-source fiction archive software developed by Rebecca Smallwood, who created it for her own Tolkien and other fan sites and then made it available to all.

The best way to describe eFiction compared to Drupal (our current software) is that both have the ability to make archives—fandom houses in this analogy—but eFiction is a dollhouse that you buy assembled, take out of the box, and can play with right away. You can decorate it and make small adjustments as you want, but you can't fundamentally change what it is without cracking it open and rebuilding it.

Several developers after Rebecca, eFiction stopped being actively maintained, and in 2016, our archive began to show the first signs that its aging software wasn't going to work for us forever. We began researching options and eventually settled on Drupal. If eFiction is a dollhouse, Drupal is a box of LEGO bricks. The essential shapes are there, but you put them together into the structures you want, and you are in no way required to build a house. You could also build a barn, windmill, or shopping mall ... or a house attached to a barn on top of a shopping mall with a windmill attached to the side. When we rebuilt the site in Drupal, this is what we did, first reconstructing the fiction archive more or less how it was in eFiction, then adding on lots more: the ability to archive other types of fanworks, a system for sharing news, a beta-reader directory, and lots of behind-the-scenes tools that help the mods and volunteers keep the site running with minimal fuss.

We are doing a major software upgrade on Drupal next weekend, so if you notice the site offline on Saturday morning Eastern time (afternoon in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and hopefully those west of me are still getting their morning coffee when it's back up), this is why. I'm looking forward to more effective HTML permissions (so that those of you working on pages with me don't get frozen out of edits by my admin powers!) and the ability to more seamlessly handle coauthored fanworks.

The developers of eFiction are almost never mentioned, but we owe so much to Rebecca, Tammy, Artphilia, and Sheep Control, whose work gave us our original home, where we learned and built our community so that we could one day move into the site we have today. Beyond us, so many communities and fanworks would never have existed without their generosity in sharing their skills and time.

If you want to meander more through SWG history, check out our Birthday Bash challenge, which centers on a new event from our history each day (and is almost over, so it's pretty complete as of this writing).