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.

Off the top of your head, name a king or queen from the legendarium. Likely, within a matter of seconds, you were able to name not just one but several. Drawing from medieval societies as he did, Tolkien leaned heavily on monarchial structures for governments, giving us an extensive and diverse array of kings and queens to draw from.

Our newest challenge, Kings & Queens, is simple: Create a fanwork about a king or queen in Arda. While you can find a list of canonical kings and queens at the previous link, you should not feel limited to those on the list. First of all, the list was compiled by Dawn reading through the indices of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings on a beautiful summer afternoon, and it is very possible that some were missed amid the sunshine and summer breeze. There are also textual ghosts—characters who must have existed but remain unnamed—and characters whose royal status is questionable. Finally, there is potential for kings and queens who are original characters. All of these are welcome.

The simplicity of this month's challenge is part of the point. There are several large fandom events ongoing right now. (Check out Around the World & Web below for more!) We wanted a challenge that offered easy entry points for those who want/need them or an actual challenge for those who want/need that. (All those Third Age kings!)

This is also a good time to offer the reminder that our challenges can always be combined with other challenges and events. If you can't post your challenge fanwork due to posting requirements of the other event, just let the mods know (reply to this email!) and then let us know when the fanwork is posted on our archive, and we will give you the stamp for the challenge.

Check out the full Kings & Queens challenge guidelines, the (optional) list of kings and queens, and any fanworks for the challenge here. If you're new to our challenges, we'd love for you to join us, and you can find the challenge guidelines here.

(This is the last call for feedback on if and how you would potentially attend our live event! We will be collecting responses after this weekend and need as many as we can get, so if you haven't filled it out yet ... well, you get the point. Thank you to those who have filled out the form. Watch this space for an official announcement of the event very soon!)

For the past year as part of our column A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook has been looking at how Tolkien's writings on Beowulf, namely the lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," informs and is informed by his work on the legendarium that he was undertaking at the same time. Last month, he considered the crossing of ships from and back to the West. A familiar journey to fans of Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, a ship journey from and to the West also appears in Beowulf.

A ship-burial suggests that beyond the Shoreless Sea is hell, the realm of mortal shades in ancient English mythology. Tolkien reads the first ship of the exordium to Beowulf as ancient myth, the ship-burial as Anglo-Saxon art. The art breathes meaning into the myth, yet raises the uncomfortable thought that the good king came to his people out of death. Early in 1936, Tolkien penned an "Elvish myth" that told of a king who sailed the Straight Road, out of a mythical flat world and into the round world of history, and then died side by side with his Elvish friend, fighting Sauron in Mordor. This legendary appendage to The Fall of Númenor spells out Tolkien’s reading of the exordium, a connection that Simon explores in this month's A Sense of History article.

You can read Simon's article "Straight Road" here.

First of all, if you have not responded to our question about next year's live event for our 20th birthday, can you? We will be choosing a venue within the next few weeks and value as much information as possible about what we might expect for attendance. We also appreciate signal boosts if you are able to do so. (A Tumblr post of the announcement is here!)

Thank you to those who have responded already!

This week, we continue as part of our Cultus Dispatches column our exploration of the topic of commenting and feedback. This is often a fraught topic surrounded by a lot of emotion. Creators want feedback, especially comments, but many receive few (or none!) and the silence can be huge and easily filled with their worst fears about their work. Readers and viewers, on the other hand, generally want to keep happy the creators who are making the art, stories, and other fanworks they love, but writing comments is hard. It is not often that guilt, shame, and a sense of failure arise regularly in a Cultus column, but here they do. (Friendship, community, and fanworks barely saved from the dustbin by a timely comment are also common themes, but thankfully, at least the first two are more regular topics for the column!)

This month's column explores the topic through our recent Fandom Voices survey about comments and feedback. Thirtyish participants answered two simple questions: "What has been your experience around receiving feedback on your Tolkien-based fanworks?" and "What has been your experience of leaving feedback (or not) on Tolkien-based fanworks?" Their responses reveal the delights and challenges that leaving feedback creates for all parties involved.

You can read the article "Fandom Voices: Comments and Feedback" here. And if you missed the survey, or did it but want to say more, or answering the question about the live event made you hungry for more Google Forms, the survey is still open for new responses, which we will add to the collection as they come in.