When we first opened our archive in 2007, we called it our MFAQ—Most Frequently Asked Question: "Does my story count as Silmfic?" It seems like an easy question, but it's not. The Silmarillion—as in the published book—is of course but a part of the more sprawling legendarium. People, cultures, lands, and historical events spill from the pages of The Silmarillion into other works and vice versa. Tolkien himself did this, pulling bits from the "Silmarillion" into The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So at what point does something become a "Silmwork"?

Of course, we have our MFAQ among our FAQs: How does the SWG define "Silmfic" or "Silmarillion-based fanworks"? We've created a checklist there; all you need to do is check one item and you're good to go. But here's a few insider tips from the mods that may also help creators decide if their work belongs with us.

• Characters and groups that span multiple books are welcome as long as there is a strong connection to The Silmarillion. Same with multi-age works: We love multi-age works, but a significant portion should take place in one of the time periods on the list.
• Speaking of: we accept Third Age fanworks! This often gets overlooked because we tend to hear "Third Age" and think "Hobbit and Lord of the Rings," but in fact, most of the Third Age is eligible for our site. If your fanwork takes place in the vast swath of the legendarium not covered in depth in those two books, it is welcome with us—yes, even if it is about people who feature heavily in these books.
• We are all Tolkien fans here. The SWG started at a time when the Tolkien fandom was coming down from the Lord of the Rings films, and most fanworks were centered on that book and those films. Silmarillion-based fanworks were often quickly overwhelmed on other Tolkien archives (of which there were many at the time), so we carved out the SWG as a space for Silmarillion-based fanworks. However, we are Tolkien fans—works do not need to be scrubbed of all mentions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
• Fanworks that draw on adaptations of Tolkien are welcome as well, as long as there is a significant basis in the The Silmarillion or a related work. (Looking especially at Rings of Power fanworks here!) Choose Crossover as one of your genres if you're creating based on an adaptation as well. (Maybe consider posting it for our Crossroads of the Fallen King crossover challenge!)
• If you think a fanwork is on the line, post it. The mods are rarely as strict as people think we are, and we favor including more Tolkien fanworks.
• And if you've posted five fanworks or 10,000 words with us, you can post anything Tolkien-based you want in the Beyond the Silmarillion section!

When it comes to fandom topics that provoke big emotions, there are few as fraught as commenting and feedback. From creators' perspectives, feedback can feel like a just reward for the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making a fanwork. In a community where there is little opportunity for rewards or prestige for our work—we cannot be paid or traditionally published, and many of us can't even have our work tied to our names—even a few words from our readers and viewers saying that they like what we did can mean a lot. Why most people who click on our fanworks don't bother with "even a few words" can provoke discouragement and even anger from creators.

On the other hand, readers and viewers of fanworks often express that commenting isn't as easy as it may seem. Various barriers—whether language, skill with comment writing, or mental health—can stand in the way of letting a creator know how much their work means to a reader or viewer. Furthermore, social norms around commenting can feel opaque and even perilous to the fan of a fanwork who desperately wants to avoid pissing off a favorite author or artist.

I've been writing the Cultus Dispatches column about Tolkien fandom studies for more than two years now and have yet to wade into the fraught waters of the history and culture around commenting and feedback on fanworks. But over the next few months, I plan to do just that! To start, I am collecting responses for a Fandom Voices article on commenting and feedback. Fandom Voices is an ongoing project that collects and publishes responses from fans on a variety of fandom-related questions and topics. Whether you create fanworks or read/view them, if you'd like to share your views and experiences with commenting and feedback, Fandom Voices is seeking responses about commenting and feedback from anyone who engages with Tolkien-based fanworks in any way and wants to share their perspective. You can contribute a response to our current Fandom Voices collection on commenting and feedback here.

The SWG is an archive built for a community, and we have always encouraged our members to comment on each other's work. To find more about commenting on our archive:

• Logged-in members can find all of the comments on their work here (as well as the five most recent on the homepage).
• But no one wants to physically go to and check a website, right? It's 2024!! If you'd like to get email notifications of new comments (on your work or someone else's), learn how here.
• Site hack: You can always find the comments on a fanwork (including the comment form, if you're logged in) by navigating to the work and typing "/comment" after the web address, e.g. silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/##/comment.
• Likewise, if you're logged in, you can find the number of comments (and views and favorites) on any of your fanworks on My Fanworks, with a direct link to all of your comments on that work.

Chances are, if you write fanfiction, you have given thought at some point to your craft as a writer. I say this with confidence, based on 2020 data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey: 90% of you agreed that you "take [your] writing seriously when writing Tolkien-based fanfiction." In fact, writer's craft is so deeply embedded into the institutions of fandom that it can be easy to miss. How many of you use a beta reader? Have joined a writer's workshop or some other craft-focused discussion of your work? Asked for concrit? Read and reread your work umpteen times, tweaking and changing it to coax laughter or tears from your readers, to keep them turning the pages, to help them see Middle-earth and its people through your eyes?

Craft is a complicated aspect of the history of the Tolkien fanfiction fandom. Part of this, when Tolkien fanfiction moved (and exploded) online in the early 2000s, was the bad reputation of fanfiction overall and the desperation of many writers to prove they weren't the stereotypical badfic writer, i.e., they cared about craft, they were different, they deserved the right to exist as fanfiction writers. (This was also a time when it seemed rights holders might bring an end to fanfic at any moment.) Additionally, in a fandom saturated with new writers due to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and growing access to the internet, many fandom institutions tried to stem the rising tide of writers—and turned to "writing quality" as the way to do it. Given this, it is no surprise that most writers internalized the value that their writing was serious business and that craft matters.

But, for about 5% of you, this perhaps isn't familiar. You didn't agree with the survey statement about taking your writing seriously, and you are a growing group. In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, I looked at survey data about writer's craft. It was unsurprising and even a bit boring—until I considered the emerging group of writer's who don't care much about craft. If they don't want to become better writers, then what does motivate this group to create fanfiction, and how do they differ (in both demographics and motives) from Tolkien fanfiction writers overall?

You can read "Fanfiction and the Serious Business of Writer's Craft" here.

Writing or creating a crossover is like adding another ball or three when learning to juggle. It's one thing to keep everything required of writing or creating a fanwork effortlessly aloft when you're dealing with one fandom. But crossovers demand that you add another (or more?) fandom and all that entails in terms of character, setting, plot, style, and the myriad other elements that creators juggle in their work.

This month's challenge is Crossroads of the Fallen King and it is, quite simply, a crossover challenge: Mix The Silmarillion with something else. What that "something else" is is entirely up to you. It could be a media text or another book. It could be another Tolkien book! It could be mythology, folklore, or real-world history.

If you're looking for inspiration, check out one of the 78 crossover fanworks already on our site.

Some housekeeping: We tag fanworks on our site by crossover text. Here is a list of the crossover texts already on our site. If the one you need isn't there, use the Moderator Request field when posting your fanwork, or let us know ahead of time and we'll make sure it is added. (Just reply to this email!)

We're having one of those wild months where we have two challenges running at the same time. The Tengwar challenge is still ongoing (since there are more tengwar than days in the month), and you can post Tengwar fanworks and receive a stamp up to June 15. (This is also the deadline for creator stamps for the Crossroads of the Fallen King challenge.)

If you've never done one of our challenges before, you should join us! Full challenge guidelines can be found here.

"From where does Frodo first see the sea?"

Simon J. Cook opens his A Sense of History column this month, Thálatta! Thálatta!, with this question. Do you know the answer? (I didn't!) It seems like a question suited for a Tolkien-themed pub trivia night but in fact forms the crux of his latest installment on towers in Tolkien's work, both the 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo first glimpses the sea in Galadriel's mirror, having descended into a hollow to see (versus ascending a tower, as Simon's work so far might predict). Yet Tolkien uses an interesting turn of phrase to describe Frodo's experience, as like stepping "through a high window that looked on a vanished world." One generally steps out of a high window—and falls. Frodo's safe entry into a vision of "a vanished world" aligns it with the views from towers elsewhere in the legendarium, and Simon explores that view this month.

Although Frodo's glance in Galadriel's mirror may seem anticlimactic by design—after all, Galadriel refuses the Ring and consents to fade from the story—Simon makes the case that the view Frodo sees and the actions it inspires are in fact a key turning point within the legendarium.

You can read Simon's article "Thálatta! Thálatta!" here.

When the SWG was founded in March 2005, it was intended to be a writer's workshop group and a small one. The vision was that ten or so Silmarillion writers would gather and share and provide feedback on their writing to each other, mostly using Yahoo! Groups (though we had a LiveJournal too). My (Dawn's) first post to that Yahoo! Group mentioned an archive as a down-the-road possibility, and it was this—not the writers' workshop—that captured our new members' interests. We never started the writer's workshop, but I did start learning HTML and CSS. Nineteen years later, here we are.

Likewise, when the concept of a character of the month arose, it was in conjunction with our monthly challenges. The idea was that we'd feature a character each month as a writing challenge to create fic about that character. We started including a brief bio about the character to, ostensibly, get people interested. In August 2009, Oshun took over writing these "brief bios"—and she did stick to the original vision at first. Her first biography was of Irmo and was about 560 words long. However, this idea also evolved and changed beyond anything we imagined at first, until Oshun was producing scholarship-level biographies every month—some of them so in-depth that they spanned multiple months—and ended up gifting us one of the most notable parts of our site.

Throughout the history of the SWG, we've often moved like leaves before the wind, following where enthusiasm and interest have taken us. Right now, the Character of the Month is in its sunset phase; most of the major Silmarillion characters have been written. But we are in the process of developing new columns to continue to provide a venue for fan scholarship, a space where fans who want to write nonfiction can learn the craft, and resources for fanworks creators and Tolkien fans alike.

Our next endeavor follows Oshun's Character of the Month (in fact, the idea was hers, when we realized we were running out of biographies to write) and will focus on locations in Arda. You can vote for the name of this new column here. If you want to contribute to this column (or any other!), reply to this email. As a fan group first and foremost, we are committed to welcoming beginners and experts alike and provide support to new authors, so don't let a lack of experience with nonfiction writing dissuade you!

We do have a handful of characters still in need of biographers: Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. Likewise, reply here if you are interested in taking one!

We are excited to see where the wind blows and our new column goes and will have more details on it in the weeks to come!

When we built our current site in Drupal (now more than three years ago!), we kept it as similar to the original eFiction site as we could. Part of this was convenience—not having to figure out the "what goes where" amid so many other big tasks and decisions—and part of it was to make it easier for our members to transition to the new site.

This week, to fix an ongoing issue where profile pages were throwing an error, we moved users' Favorites lists off of their profile—where they were in eFiction and where we kept them as well—and onto their own page. You can still access the Favorites list of any user in the same place: at the top of the profile.

This made me think that a quick primer on Favorites—and her sisters, Bookmark and Follow—might be useful this week.

Favorites serve as a sort of personal rec list of fanworks and creators on our site. Your Favorites list is available publicly; hence, you have the opportunity on Favorites to share the reason you have added a fanwork or creator as one of your faves. This is also publicly available.

Bookmarks are similar, but they are private, visible only to you. Logged in, you can find your bookmarks on the My Bookmarks page. Bookmarks are handy for the days when someone drops a 60K novella, and the rest of your week is packed, but you don't want to forget to read it. Or when you've started a fanwork you'd like to check out again later, want to mark all the works about a particular character or relationship, or any other number of reasons why we may want to put a pin in something but aren't quite ready to share your choice with the world.

Finally, following a fanwork (My Follows for logged-in members) will notify you via email when that fanwork is updated, the creator adds or updates a fanwork, or a new work is added to a tag you follow. These are also private.

In all instances, you can add or remove a favorite, bookmark, or follow by clicking on the fanwork and using the links at the top of the page.

... by which I mean the Tengwar!

We have a new challenge on the SWG this month-and-some that is constructed around the Tengwar. What the challenge mods have done is take the thirty-six tengwar in the chart and done a prompt per day. We are not presenting the tengwar in any particular order (to make it less predictable for those of you who know the chart!), and each day will include the tengwa, its English translation, and a small graphic. As always, absolutely any part of the prompt is acceptable to use as inspiration for a fanwork!

Daily prompts can be anxiety-provoking for some, so it is important to note that the expectation is not to use every prompt or make something every day. A response that uses a single prompt (or part of one) is just as valid for the challenge as the person who can make something for every one!

Because there are thirty-six prompts and our challenges usually run for a month, note that we have extended the deadline to receive a stamp for this challenge to June 15. This will overlap with the next challenge, which will come out on May 15 as always.

You can see the Tengwar challenge, prompts posted so far, and fanworks created for the challenge here. If you want the SWG challenge guidelines, find them here.

This newsletter is coming to you live from the Tolkien at UVM Conference in Burlington, Vermont, where several SWG members and friends are here together! While we started as a fanworks group focusing on fanfiction, we include nonfiction and meta and scholarship under the broad umbrella of our group. In the months to come, we will be introducing new columns to the newsletter, so if you'd like to be involved, write for a column, or write a feature article (which we've yet to run yet, but we have to start somewhere and it could be you!), hit REPLY and let us know.

But today, we are featuring the next installment from Simon J. Cook for the A Sense of History column. Simon has been pursuing the question of towers in Tolkien, beginning with the mysterious (and controversial, I've since learned!) tower of "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," noting a correspondence in dates between this lecture and Tolkien's work on his Ardaverse, inspiring the question of how they are connected.

This month's column follows the "red thread" of Valarin aid to the Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings. Returning from the West-gazing palantír of Elostirion, which is said to show a glimpse of Varda in Valinor, Gildor Inglorion bestows a blessing of Varda's protection upon Frodo. Simon traces the miraculous influence of Varda throughout the ensuing narrative that becomes an essential element of The Lord of the Rings.

You can read Simon's article "Crossroads" here.

Things and people are always getting lost in Tolkien. In trying to come up with a clever title (I lost), I just searched my digital Silmarillion for the word "lost," and Tolkien uses it forty-nine times. It's not surprising, given that his stories are generally about people taking long walks over vast swathes of land, sometimes in large and unwieldy groups, and featuring objects that are always getting tossed into remote places or being squabbled over. People and things are easily lost under such conditions.

While I can't help you if you get lost with a group of Elves dragging their feet over a mountain range or if you lost something dropped into a volcano, I can help you not get lost on the SWG archive. As of this writing, there are 5,509 fanworks archived with us. That puts the SWG on par, stats-wise, with the big Tolkien archives founded in the early 2000s. It can also mean that, when you're looking for something specific, it can be hard to find.

The SWG was originally an eFiction site, so when we rebuilt in Drupal, we kept the basic structure used by eFiction for organizing fanworks in place: the ability to see lists of all fanworks in the order they were added/updated, all fanworks for a particular tag, or a filtered list of fanworks meeting the searcher's exacting specifications.

If you just want to see what's new on the site, start with the Fanworks dropdown on the menu at the top of the page. Here, you can see everything that's been added or updated, or you can see all of a particular type of fanwork (e.g., Artwork or Link Collections). If you click on All Fanworks, click one link further to include Beyond the Silmarillion fanworks to truly get EVERYTHING.

But if you're feeling lost in finding what you want, you probably don't want everything. There's 5,509 things in that everything, after all.

If you want all fanworks with a particular tag, at the bottom of the Fanworks dropdown menu, there is an option to "Browse Fanworks By." Use this if you want to see fanworks by a specific creator or tagged with a specific character, genre, or relationship. (If you really love that genre, character, or relationship and want to know when something is added or updated with that tag, you can also follow tags from here. You can also click any tag on the site and end up with a list of all fanworks for that tag, and follow the tag from there.)

But what if you want something really, really specific? Like you want an adventure story including Glorfindel but not Ecthelion. Or an Adult-rated Anairë/Fingolfin fanwork, but no violence please? Under the Tools menu, use Find a Fanwork to really narrow down those 5,509 fanworks to exactly what you're looking for across nearly all available tags.

Finally, the SWG site is built by us, for us, the Silmarillion fanworks fandom. If there is a feature or tool that we don't have that you'd like to see, hit REPLY and suggest it!