Many times, when meta fanworks—that is, nonfiction about Tolkien, written by fans—come under discussion, I hear people say things like, "That's not for me. I'm not academic!"

The thing is, you don't have to be academic to create meta. If the idea of producing a lengthy, polished, and meticulously cited essay about Tolkien does nothing for you (or fills you with terror), you are not alone. Meta, though, is much more than essays and articles: It is any form of nonfiction work about Tolkien. That messy document where you keep every mention of a favorite character or theme? Meta. The meme about two characters' relationship? Meta. The lists we make on Tumblr or reflections on how Tolkien and fandom influenced our lives or wild headcanons that form the foundation of our fanworks? Also meta.

This December, the SWG will be hosting a Tolkien Meta Week around this idea that meta is for everyone, a notion that is also at the foundation of our summer hybrid event Mereth Aderthad 2025. Fans bring brilliant insights on Tolkien all of the time—insights that often aren't being considered by the academics writing those long, meticulous essays. We hope that Tolkien Meta Week will inspire some ideas worth sharing at Mereth Aderthad!

Each day during Tolkien Meta Week, we will offer four prompts that we hope inspire ideas and push the boundaries of what many creators consider meta. These prompts are optional, and any meta fanwork is welcome for the event. While our archive is a Silmarillion-only archive, we will reblog any and all meta created for Tolkien Meta Week on our tumblr, @silmarillionwritersguild.

To see the prompts, full guidelines, and prompt definitions, see our Tolkien Meta Week page and watch our social media for updates next week!

Part of what makes Tolkien's world so enduring and appealing (and ripe for fanworks-creating) is that it hints at unlimited stories beyond the perspectives we are given. Fanworks creators have used their work to foreground perspectives neglected in the original texts or to challenge the points of view of the narrators of the legendarium.

This month's challenge, Orctober, begins from this premise. To be clear, you don't have to take alternate perspectives, discuss Orcs or resistance or rebellion, or create a fanwork that is dark and spooky. For our challenges, you can always make any kind of Silmarillion fanwork that you want. However, the premise of the challenge originates from the idea that the Free People of Middle-earth observed the "servants of Melkor" and sometimes switched sides to serve Melkor themselves. Even though the texts don't document it, the opposite happened surely as well, and Orcs (and other "servants") observed Elves, Mortals, Dwarves, and others and decided that they also wanted a different, better life for themselves. Wherever there is oppression, there is resistance. Cuarthol's recent themed collection Orcs Are People includes fanworks and scholarship that engage with some of these ideas.

This month's challenge has two components. As a challenge, prompts come from an old parchment map made by Orcs that shows locations where an Orc seeking freedom can find protection, shelter, or objects useful to resistance. Each location has a spooky-themed prompt, an icon on the map (since Melkor, like most oppressors, likely did not encourage his "servants" to learn and read), a small storyline about the location's importance to Orcish freedom, and of course the location itself. You can use any of these elements to craft a fanwork.

The second part is an optional puzzle to solve. There is one place in Middle-earth where Orcs have established a home where they can be truly safe and free. Will you be able to find this place? For each prompt you complete, there is a clue that leads to its discovery. Once you complete prompts, request your clues here. (Note that collaboration is allowed and encourage!) If you think you've solved the puzzle, email the mods—you can reply to this email to reach us!

Complete guidelines for Orctober are here. And if you're new to our challenges (welcome!) and looking to get started, SWG challenge guidelines are here.

If you study Beowulf in academia (as I once did), you will encounter Tolkien in the form of a 1936 lecture-turned-essay called "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Tolkien fans sometimes know it too, as its importance in Beowulf scholarship means it is more readily available than a lot of Tolkien's academic work, but lacking an immediate connection to the legendarium—such as found in his other lecture-turned-essay "On Fairy-stories"—it isn't engaged with in fandom as regularly as "On Fairy-stories" is. In the world of Beowulf scholarship, "Monsters and the Critics" is still widely considered to be the most important scholarship on Beowulf, as it is credited with producing a sea change in how scholars read and engaged with the poem.

In his final essay in his series on "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," Simon J. Cook challenges the idea that "Monsters and the Critics" is not as deeply entwined with the Ardaverse. In June 2023, Simon first approached the SWG about hosting this series about a new reading of "Monsters and the Critics" as part of our A Sense of History column. Since then, he has produced monthly columns, looking at the tower allegory in the essay from a variety of angles, often tying his revelations back to the legendarium in new and intriguing ways. This final essay pans out to take in the whole picture, concluding with a reading of the analogy that is new and fresh from how it has been interpreted both by Tolkien and Beowulf scholars in the past. By using Tolkien's allegories of the tower and the rock garden, Simon creates a metaphorical map for how the various elements of both Beowulf and the legendarium are both physically and symbolically situated.

You can read Simon's final essay in this series, "Doom and Ascent: The Argument of ‘Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics’," here.

Intially, due to a variety of piling-up small circumstances, I did not think that Simon's essay would be ready for this edition of the newsletter. (In fact, if the newsletter seems a bit later arriving than usual, it is, so that I could get Simon's essay into it in time!) This edition was going to simply mention that we've opened up the call for presenters for meta, research, and scholarship for Mereth Aderthad 2025.

But I find that Simon's essay (a work of scholarship that challenges "established wisdom" and is published on a website with a predominantly fannish purpose) is the perfect illustration of what we are hoping to achieve with the Mereth Aderthad, in honor of twenty years of the SWG's existence.

The core concept of Mereth Aderthad is to hold a day-long hybrid event that engages with both scholarly and creative works about Tolkien's legendarium, ideally in conversation with each other. We the organizers hope that this illustrates what the SWG has evolved to become: predominantly a fanworks website and community but one that also engages significantly with meta, research, and scholarship about the legendarium.

Our hope is that this doesn't result in scholars and academics on one side of the room, presenting their work, and fans on the other, presenting theirs. There is significant overlap, and with the call for presenters released, we hope to convince at least a few people who don't think of themselves as scholars that their meta and research matters enough to share with others at this event. (And maybe we can convince a few from the scholarly side to try their hands at fanworks!)

Ultimately, a core belief that drives the work we do on the SWG is the value of the work that fans do about the legendarium. That is stories and art and every type of fanwork imaginable, but it is also the considerable amount of research and thinking about the legendarium that fans do: in preparing to create fanworks, in conversing with each other, and as meta fanworks.

Because I engage with both the Tolkien fandom and the Tolkien scholarly community, I know that fans bring perspectives that academics often don't. And, as Simon's series illustrates, fans and fandom spaces can push against established wisdom in a way that is more dangerous for someone whose meta is also how they keep a roof over their head.

Many of you have done incredible research and meta work and have important things to say. In the months to come, we will hold events and workshops to support fans who want to present their meta and research work, and I hope you will consider submitting a proposal if you create these kinds of fanworks! The full call for presenters for meta, research, and scholarship can be found here.

Scholars who study fanworks identify the form as especially suited for recentering the stories of people and groups who are often marginalized and ignored in mainstream media. If there was a mainstream media of Middle-earth, possibly the group most marginalized—if not outright maligned—would be the Orcs.

Within the texts of the legendarium themselves, there is little positive to say about Orcs, who most often appear as herd-like evil pawns, showing little capacity for independent thought or empathy. Indeed, taking the legendarium at face value, Orcs scarcely seem human. In the newest addition to the Themed Collections series, Cuarthol presents ten works of fiction, art, and scholarship that challenge this perception and proceed from a simple but radical stance: Orcs are people.

Of course, the idea that Orcs are people is in fact far from radical. Our real-world history is littered with examples of historiography that seek to dehumanize a group for purposes of propaganda, and the legendarium—written as it is from the points of view of Elves and Men—would be no different. But as the works Cuarthol selected show, considering the lives and perspectives of Orcish characters opens corners of the legendarium that many have not thought about, much less explored, expanding the edges of the legendarium into new lands and points of view.

You can find Cuarthol's collection "Orcs Are People" here. Our themed collections are viewed as a starting point for exploring fanworks centered around a topic, so we encourage adding your own favorite fanworks that seek to (re)humanize Orcs as a comment on the collection. And remember we are always looking for new themed collections; find out more about how to share a collection of fanworks on your favorite character, pairing, genre, or topic here!

While Tolkien was widely read, his primary interests—both professionally and in terms of his own aesthetic preferences—lay in the traditions of northern Europe, especially the Germanic traditions. Many of these cultures used alliteration (as well as a complex metrical system) as the dominant feature of their poetry. This included the Anglo-Saxons of England. After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, poetic traditions began to shift to favor rhymed poems with the bouncing meters that we often think of as English-language poetry today. Yet there were some holdouts, and some scholars see these late English alliterative poems as a potential political statement, holding fast to the original English Germanic culture over the invading French traditions. Tolkien, as we know, once sought likewise to capture that same misty past as his "mythology for England": what we today know as Middle-earth.

It is no surprise, then, that Tolkien also enjoyed alliterative poetry. Some of his favorite poems—Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—were alliterative. He translated alliterative poems and wrote original alliterative verse. Fanworks creators following in Tolkien's tradition have followed suit, crafting alliterative poems about the legendarium.

This month, as part of our Themed Collection series, Paul D. Deane has assembled a collection of alliterative poems about Tolkien's world. Paul is the editor of Forgotten Ground Regained, the definitive source of Modern English alliterative poetry online, which publishes a quarterly journal of alliterative verse. (Poets, take note—they take submissions!) The site includes a substantial section on poems based on science fiction and fantasy, including Tolkien. Paul was kind enough to select ten legendarium-inspired poems to introduce readers to alliterative verse based on Tolkien. As always, we want to hear your favorites as a comment on the collection.

You can check out Paul's collection, "Alliterative Verse for Arda," here.

Paul's is the second of our new Themed Collections column. (If you missed Himring's collection on the ruling queens of Númenor, find it here!) We are looking for other collections of fanworks and other content related to Tolkien. These curated collections can be as ridiculously broad or as ridiculously specific as you would like. (Something less ridiculous and in the middle is welcome too, of course.) Characters, character groups, pairings, genres, formats, tropes, themes, ages, events, and a thousand approaches we haven't even thought of—if you'd like to put together a themed collection, find the call for contributors here.

Finally, we had big news last week that we will be hosting a hybrid event on July 19, 2025 to celebrate our twentieth birthday. We will gather for a day (with optional social events on either side for those who can attend in person) to share research and scholarship about Tolkien and fanworks that address similar topics. Mark your calendar! If you'd like to volunteer to help make this event happen, reply to this email.

We are excited to announce that we will be hosting an event on July 19, 2025 in celebration of our twentieth birthday! The event will be hybrid, with both virtual and in-person options, with the in-person event taking place at the South Burlington Library in Burlington, Vermont. For those able to attend in-person, we will also host community meals and other outings the weekend of the event.

In the spirit of the SWG's (almost) twenty-year history, the event will involve both research/scholarship and fanworks components, as we seek to showcase and celebrate the variety of ways that Tolkien fans engage with and illuminate his work through fiction, artwork, poetry, research, scholarship and meta, music, and other forms. If you'd like to present research, create a fanwork for the event, or attend either in-person or online, we encourage you to follow us on at least one of our social platforms so that you receive updates as they come in:

• Subscribe to the SWG's weekly newsletter (you are reading it now!)
• Join our Discord server and watch the #announcements channel for updates
• Follow us on Tumblr
• Follow us on Dreamwidth

In the next few weeks, we will open the call for presenters for research, meta, and scholarship.

Right now, we are looking for volunteers to help with the various tasks we will be faced with over the next ten months. You do not need to be able to attend in-person to volunteer, and there is no minimum time commitment. Anything helps! If you'd like to volunteer, comment on this post, email the mods, contact us on any of our social media platforms, or post to the #town-hall on our Discord. Let us know if you'd like to be on the logistics committee (scheduling, tech setup and testing, weekend outings, etc.) or the promotions committee (graphics design, social media, presenter interviews, etc.) or both!

Click here to see the full information that's available for the Mereth Aderthad 2025 event.

Are you looking for a way to spend time this month spinning a yarn or painting a picture worth a thousand words? This month's challenge cuts the crap and goes straight to the horse's mouth with prompts that are idioms from around the world. If you'd like a prompt from our idiom collection, just shoot us an email (hit REPLY right now!) and we'll give you the pick of the litter!

As always, we encourage creative interpretations of our prompts. We want you to march to the beat of your own drum and color outside the lines and follow the road less traveled if that is where your creativity takes you. If a prompt isn't tickling your fancy, you can always double dip and ask for a replacement. Remember, too, that the Kings & Queens challenge remains active through the 15th, so if you're reading this on Saturday, you have the rest of today and Sunday to post entries, if you want to receive the stamp.

On a more somber note, we were saddened last week to share the news of the death of our longtime friend and contributor, Oshun. We sought to raise money to help her family with funeral expenses and were able to raise $1600. I (Dawn) have since passed that money on to her daughter, Laura, who expressed astonishment and gratitude for the way that Oshun's community came together to see her laid to rest in peace. Laura will likely reach out in the coming weeks but is understandably coping with a lot right now, and I encouraged her to take her time. In the meantime, I wanted everyone who was able to contribute to know that your donations did help ease the burden for Oshun's family at this terrible time, and they are grateful for the help our community was able to give. You can read her obituary here, which speaks to an active life centered on social justice and where writing was one of her most beloved pastimes.

It is with great sadness that we share that our longtime member, Oshun, passed away earlier this week after a long illness. Many of you reading this knew her, and I expect that nearly everyone reading this knew her work. (Oshun's stories can be found here. Her character biographies and other essays can be found here.) Her impact on this group was undeniable as well. Although she staunchly refused to become a moderator (she hated discussing policy!), it was her work that grew our Reference section and newsletter, pushing our small ambitions for this section of the site. She is responsible for most of our Character of the Month collection.

But even more importantly than that is the positive force she was in the fandom, here in the SWG and beyond. She wrote slashfic, including Maedhros/Fingon well before the term "Russingon" was coined, even when intolerance in the fandom made it uncomfortable and even dangerous to do so. She felt that writing about love was never wrong. Her stories were light and funny; in a fandom where the source material can lead creators to explore the darker corners of human nature, Oshun intentionally focused on moments of love, joy, and celebration in the lives of Tolkien's characters. And if you knew her, this made sense. She welcomed everyone, and many people, starstruck by her work, who braved reaching out to her found a friend. She was always eager to share with fellow fans, whether knowledge about Tolkien or a good laugh.

Oshun has been absent from our group for over a year now due to her illness. It is heartbreaking to know that she will not be coming back, but her influence lives on in her writing and her kindness to so many of us in the Silmarillion fandom.

We've set up a GoFundMe to help Oshun's family with funeral and other expenses at this sorrowful time. She leaves behind a daughter, son, and grandchildren. If you wish to donate, you can do so here.

When we first started our Akallabêth in August challenge in 2008, the fandom was very different. Second Age fanworks were relatively rare—hence the challenge—as were fanworks focusing on women and characters of color. As for femslash??

As we close out our seventeenth Akallabêth in August—which we've mostly run unofficially since its inception but which shapes the challenges we plan during August—fanworks look different in a lot of ways. Many creators aim to increase the visibility of women, characters of color, and LGBTQ+ characters in their fanworks, and of course, the Second Age is no longer an obscure pocket of Arda's history. For our very first Themed Collection, Himring has gathered fanworks that prove that point in many ways, focusing on the three ruling queens of Númenor: Tar-Ancalimë, Tar-Telperiën, and Tar-Vanimeldë.

"Named female characters with any accompanying biographical information are not all that common in the Legendarium," Himring writes in her introduction to the collection. "Even fewer of these are shown exercising political power." The three ruling queens are a notable exception to that rule—yet they still remain somewhat obscure, with most information about them coming from Unfinished Tales, and as Himring also notes, with "tantalizing gaps in the available canon material that invite filling in and expansion by fan interpretations." As Himring's collection shows, creators have done admirable work to fill those gaps, often expanding the diversity of the people of Arda as they do so.

Himring has selected eleven works of fanfiction and fanart that show various perspectives on the ruling queens. But our Themed Collections are not in any way intended to be definitive, and if you find that your favorite story, art, or other fanwork about these three intriguing women is missing, we encourage expanding the collection by leaving a comment so that others can fall in love with it too!

You can check out the fanworks Himring chose for "The Ruling Queens of Númenor" here.

Finally, we invite anyone who is passionate about fanworks focused on a specific topic to consider creating a Themed Collection for an upcoming newsletter. You can find our call for contributors here.

Back in 2007, the SWG archive was still brand-new and the group itself was only just two years old when I had a modest idea: Let's feature a character in the newsletter each month with a brief biography about the person. Just something quick, no more than a paragraph or two, to acquaint a reader new to The Silmarillion with the basics about the character. Just the basics. Oshun volunteered to write these mini-bios, and the Character of the Month was born.

Of course, any of you familiar with the Character of the Month biographies probably don't know them as the small, unambitious summaries that can be dashed off in a matter of minutes. For that, Oshun—who eventually became the lead writer on the project—can be credited. If you go back far enough, you can see that they started that way, but they didn't remain that way for long. As the cliché goes, the tale grew in the telling. That seems appropriate for this group, which was never intended to be what it is today and yet is.

Oshun also began meticulously citing her sources for these biographies, which set the standard for the SWG, as it began to develop its own Reference section, and raised the bar for the fandom beyond us. At the time, online references about Tolkien, such as the burgeoning Tolkien wikis, rarely identified where they got their information, and when you're working with over a dozen texts (with varying statuses as "canon" in people's minds) that few fans have comprehensive access to, that led to confusion and easily spread misinformation.

Today, the Character of the Month is winding down (but not finished yet! the characters we still need biographies for are listed here), and we have over 150 biographies archived on the site, written by a variety of authors but mostly by Oshun. The Character of the Month collection can be found here, and you can search our Reference section for a specific character here.