Back to Middle-earth Month 2008: The Circles of the World

Back to Middle-earth Month 2008: The Circles of the World was a curated collection of full fanworks and excerpts (fiction, poetry, and art) that centered on common themes in Tolkien's work. Each piece included a brief personal narrative from the creator. The original call for submissions was posted on 31 January 2008 on the SWG's LiveJournal and described the project as such:

Why did you fall in love with Middle-earth?

Every March, we seek to answer that very question. March is Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM), a chance to remember what inspired us to become involved in this fandom in the first place. Whether a recent addition to our online community, one of the many who were compelled by Jackson's movies, or a fan of multiple decades, B2MeM gives fans a chance to rekindle those first heady months of fandom participation. At SWG, we have observed B2MeM for three years now as a testament for our enduring passion for creativity and scholarship inspired by the stories of J.R.R. Tolkien, particularly The Silmarillion and its related works.

So why did you fall in love with Tolkien's stories? Ask one thousand fans and you will get one thousand different answers. This year for B2MeM, we seek just a few of those answers, presented alongside the creative achievements that define our love for Tolkien's works.1

Participants submitted fanworks that fit the five main themes of the event (beginnings, conflict, relationships, endings, and fate) and subtopics within those five themes. Each week during March featured a different theme with three new compilations about a subtopic released during that week. The project was hosted on its own webpage on the SWG site.

View B2MeM 2008: The Circles of the World here.

Links

Archivist's Notes

Progress: All pages should be restored to the original design with links within the SWG functioning. If you notice any broken images, page layouts, or SWG links, please alert Dawn. Some links point to outside the SWG, to pages that are no longer available; those are being left with their original URLs.

Back to Middle-earth Month (B2MeM) 2008 was the third time the SWG participated in a B2MeM. At this point, the SWG was still running solo projects. (Later B2MeM events would collaborate with other fandom groups.)

The SWG moderators at the time began discussing B2MeM 2008 on 6 January 2008 on a LiveJournal community set up for the SWG moderators. (In fact, the B2MeM 2008 planning post was the first post to that community aside from an intro/test post.) Shortly before, Dawn had proposed the idea of doing a drabble-a-day for a year, covering the entirety of The Silmarillion. This idea was rejected by the other mods but was picked up by Rhapsody as a possible approach to B2MeM 2008. The discussions around the event also showed early evidence of important values of the SWG's culture—namely rejection of a "One True Canon" and foregrounding the goal of inclusivity—shaping moderator decisions. Responding to Rhapsody's suggestion of presenting member-submitted fanworks for B2MeM 2008, ford_of_bruinen wrote:

I think as long as we have several extracts/stories/drabbles regaridng each event its ok. but I am still agaisnt the idae of only presenting one version of events

The idea that there is "no One True Canon" would not emerge formally in SWG policies for another ten years, yet ford_of_bruinen's comment here shows how, even very early, this was on the minds of the moderators as a key component of any SWG-sponsored event. The makeup of the moderator team early in the SWG's history possibly explains this: ford_of_bruinen came from slash fandom, Rhapsody from het fandom, Digdigil writing a bit of both, and Dawn and Tarion more gen-focused. The early leadership of the group, therefore, was sensitive to not excluding fans or fanworks that targeted their particular communities.

Rhapsody replied:

I was pondering how to go about this, to keep it as open for everyone (yes many versions of events/characters makes things a lot of fun!). Do we want to pour this into a section of the site as we did for Seven in '07*, or are we opening a challenge per day and let people respond to that at the archive, or open a round robin by day so that people can react by adding a drabble chapter.. I think the last two would be very transparent and from both forms, we could select drabbles and such to make a special page of it.

Rhapsody is prioritizing inclusivity here. Later, she writes: "I think what we want to aim for are different interpretations."

The moderators considered events, places, characters, and character groups as possible themes to collect fanworks around. On 15 January, Rhapsody suggested broad themes that coalesced around the cyclical nature of Tolkien's storytelling. This would form the core concept of B2MeM 2008, with the final five themes as beginnings, relationships, conflict, endings, and fate. Tarion suggested combining this with a "why I fell in love with Middle-earth" approach as well, which is where the personal narratives for the final event come in. On 21 January, Dawn made a proposal for the year's B2MeM 2008 event, and planning was underway very quickly at that point. The event was released to the public on 29 January, with just over a month to get it ready. In that month, creators sent the submissions that would make up the final project, and moderators made graphics, designed the website layout, and selected the quotes that were featured in each themed collection. Website graphics were designed by Tárion Anaróre, banners and icons by Rhapsody the Bard, and the map and website design by Dawn Felagund.

The project was well-received. In a post to the moderator LiveJournal on 8 March, Dawn wrote:

Well, we're now a week into B2MeM, and I think that we can count it as a success. I wanted to share with all of you some of the positive comments I have received about the project. In reality, these comments belong to all of us, though they most often get sent to me. I could not have done this without you.

First and foremost, it is illustrative of a project's success when people see the finished product and want to be a part. I got an influx of submissions this week, and one person admitted that she'd had no clue where we were going with it at first but, once she saw what we'd done, just had to participate.

References

  1. Back to Middle-earth Month (call for participants and project description), posted to the SWG's LiveJournal on 31 January 2008. (Note that the link here points to the copy migrated to Dreamwidth.)