Around the World and Web

C&C Week 2025

Teitho March/April Challenge: Mothers

Exploring the idea of mothers in Tolkien lets us go behind the scenes. We have quite a few mothers directly in the narrative, primarily in the Silmarillion—where we see Miriel, Nerdanel, Morwen, Idril, Aredhel, Luthien, Elwing, and even have mentions of Anaire and Earwen.

In The Lord of the Rings we read of Galadriel being Celebrian’s mother and Arwen’s grandmother. Aragorn’s mother Gilraen, Faramir and Boromir’s mother Finduilas, and Rosie Cotton—Sam’s wife—are all mentioned in the narrative. The Hobbit gives us a memory of Belladonna Took, Bilbo’s mother, and mentions of Thorin’s sister Dis—the mother of Fili and Kili. The stories of any of these characters would make for fascinating fic! Or art!

There are many who remain unmentioned and unnamed—Legolas’s mother, Gimli’s, the mothers of generations of Dunedain, of Gondorians, of the Rohirrim, of the Shire. And consider Ungoliant, mother of Shelob! And mothers among the ranks of orcs.

We are excited to see where this prompt takes you and which character gives you inspiration! Please submit your fic or art by April 30 to teitho.contest@gmail.com

Find more information about Teitho here.

March Challenge at tolkienshortfanworks

The challenge for March has been posted to the tolkienshortfanworks community on Dreamwidth. 

The thematic challenge for this month is: return.
Bonus prompts:
Include one of the following three canonical phrases from the Legendarium:
a) Well, I'm back.
b) the return of the king
c) the return of the Noldor
(Use those phrases any way you like.)

The formal challenge this time is simply: any multiple of 100 words (100 words, 200 words, etc.).

The two parts of the challenge can be filled separately and freely combined with other challenges and prompts that allow this. 

More details about these challenges at the linked post and at the  linked DW community.

New participants welcome.

March of the Quendi 2025

March of the Quendi is a month-long Tumblr event to celebrate the long walk the Elves took from their home on the shores of Cuiviénen, across great and unknown lands, to the blessed realm of Aman with weekly Great Journey-themed prompts. The event runs March 1-31.

March 2025 Calls for Papers and Proposals

Call for Proposals: Anthology on Women and Gender

We invite submissions for an anthology focused on women and gender in Tolkien’s writings, ‘Great Heart and Strength:’ New Essays on Women and Gender in the Works of J.R.R. Tolkien. In 2015, Janet Brennan Croft and Leslie A. Donovan published Perilous and Fair: Women in the Works and Life of J.R.R. Tolkien, the first volume dedicated to the subject of women in Tolkien’s works and life, which collected the major milestones of feminist scholarship in Tolkien studies alongside new essays. Since then, feminist scholarship and gender theory has flourished in and outside of Tolkien studies. This volume will honor Croft and Donovan’s work and build on the past decade of feminist scholarship in Tolkien studies by presenting a new collection of essays on women and gender in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Please send your proposal (no more than 300 words) and a short bio (100 words) to cami.agan@oc.edu by March 15, 2025.Working bibliographies encouraged.

Proposals should focus on women and gender in the legendarium or in non-legendarium texts by J.R.R. Tolkien, reflecting contemporary feminist and intersectional theory. Proposals may also focus on non-binary, trans, and gender fluid interpretations, as well as non-anthropomorphic topics such as landscapes and environments. All proposals should convey a thorough knowledge of previous feminist scholarship in Tolkien studies as well as current theory outside of Tolkien studies. We highly encourage intersectional work, which analyzes how gender intersects with other aspects of identity (such as race, sexuality, class, etc.).

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Female characters in the legendarium
• Female characters in Tolkien’s non-legendarium works (such as The Fall of Arthur, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, etc.)
• Non-binary, trans, and gender fluid interpretations of characters
• Landscapes, environments, and material culture
• Historical conceptions of gender
• Intersections with race, sexuality, socio-economic class, etc.
• Postcolonial analyses
• Women and gender in adaptations of Tolkien’s work
• Women scholars of the legendarium and/or women-centered treatments of Tolkien’s legendarium

Mythcon, the conference of the Mythopoeic Society, is scheduled for August 2025, and its theme is Women and Gender in Sci-Fi Fantasy, and we hope to organize several panels from the accepted submissions.

Tolkien Society Seminar: Arda's Entangled Bodies and Environments

The relationship between the body and the environment is at the heart of Tolkien’s writing. He even called his secondary world “Arda Marred” after Melkor’s discord led to all matter, vegetal and organic, having a “Melkor ingredient”. Yet even as early as ‘The Book of Lost Tales’ and in his writings not related to the legendarium, Tolkien shows a keen interest in the connection and ongoing relationship between the body and the earth, often linking the land’s health to the beings that inhabit it. Frequently the environs within his writing indicate they might be sentient, suggesting possible greater agency in Arda and his other worlds beyond his humanoid characters. Likewise, over the course of his writing career, Tolkien developed his ideas concerning the body, which play out in complex and even contradictory ways in his metaphysics and within his narratives.

This seminar invites analyses that explore the complexities of bodily experiences and environments. Building on a strong tradition of scholarship on embodiment and ecology in Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations, this seminar invites new and innovative readings of the entangled body and earth across Tolkien’s oeuvre and its adaptions.

Papers may address but are in no way limited to the following topics as they pertain to Tolkien’s writings and their adaptations:

• Bodies (physical, mental, emotional) and the environment;
• The built environment;
• (Non) Anthropocene and the biosphere;
• Medical studies (e.g. disability, ageing, motherhood/reproduction, trauma) and Environmental Bioethics (e.g. environmental law, ethics of the body and earth, climate change, pollution, agricultural practices, biodiversity);
• Temporality and spatiality;
• Intersectional studies (e.g. gender, race, sexuality, religion, disability, age, ethnicity, nationality) of the body and the earth;
• Liminality, borders, and boundaries;
• Travel and ecological symbiosis;
• The body, food, agriculture;
• Technology and industry;
• Enlightenment (e.g. rationality, categorisation, progress, science) and Romanticism (e.g. sensibility, sensation, subjectivity, earth as mental symbol, sublime, beautiful, picturesque, vast and minute);
• Historical perspectives;
• Linguistics and philology;
• Ecology, Dark Ecology, ecoGothic.

The CfP deadline is Friday 28th March.

We invite proposals of no more than 300 words for 20-minute papers with 5 minutes of questions and 500 words for 45-minute panel discussions with 15 minutes of questions. Bionotes for all authors should be no more than 100 words each.

Please submit your paper proposal here.

Please submit your panel proposal here.

Mythopoeic Society Online Midsummer Seminar: Women and Gender in Mythopoeic Fantasy

The Mythopoeic Society invites paper submissions for an online conference that focuses on intersectional feminist approaches to women and gender in fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction or other mythopoeic work. While the focus of this seminar is women and gender in mythopoeic works, we encourage proposals that acknowledge and analyze the intersectionality of gender with other aspects of identity, experience, and embodiment, including the non-human. Proposals should engage with developments in women and gender studies that both acknowledge and seek to move beyond the work of Perilous and Fair, drawing on theories and methodologies from recent years.

Papers, panels, and roundtables from a variety of critical perspectives and disciplines are welcome. We are interested in ANY form of media — text, graphic novels, comics, television, movies, music and music videos, games — as long as it can be described as fantasy or otherwise mythopoeic. We also welcome papers on the work of either of our Guests of Honor.

Each presentation will receive a 50-minute slot to allow time for questions, but individual presentations should be timed for oral presentation in 40 minutes maximum. Two or three presenters who wish to present short, related papers may also share one 50-minute slot.

Individual proposals (~200 words) with bios (150 words, maximum) should be sent to: oms-chair @ mythcon.org by March 31, 2025.

Group (two or three presenters) proposals should group the individual proposals together to send to: oms-chair @ mythcon.org by March 31, 2025.

Working bibliographies are welcome, but not required.

The seminar will be held August 2-5, 2025 on Zoom and Discord.

The full call for papers and more on the midsummer online seminar can be found here.

Coming Soon: Call for Proposals for McFarland's Critical Explorations in Tolkien Studies Series

We are sharing this information on behalf of Robin Anne Reid:

I recently signed a Letter of Agreement with McFarland Publishers to become the series editor for a new series, Critical Explorations in Tolkien Studies. The series will open for proposals in 2025 after I assemble an advisory board.

Scholars can submit proposals in either of two tracks. The first track is for single-author or collaborative monographs and edited collections written for academic experts that should be between 70-100K words long. The second track is for shorter Critical Companions, between 40-50K words long, written for a general audience including but not limited to students and fans. Submissions for both tracks will go through a double-blind peer review process.

Proposals on topics relating to Tolkien's published works as well as to the edited posthumous publications; the adaptations for film, television, and games; the translations; and fan transformative works (textual and visual) or other reception studies may be submitted to either track.

While peer-reviewed scholarship is a professional necessity for tenure-track and tenured academics, there is also value in shorter works, informed by critical theories, that focus on an aspect of single work or a thematic group of works, especially ones that have received less critical attention than The Lord of the Rings. The Critical Companions are designed to introduce a more general audience to analytical approaches and the scholarship in Tolkien studies by situating works in their socio-historical contexts; explaining how the text or texts fit into the field of Tolkien studies; and modelling how to apply critical theories to analyze primary texts.

The primary goals of the series are to add significant original contributions to Tolkien scholarship by developing and to create and support greater diversity in the field by embracing a wide definition of what Tolkien studies includes in relation to authors, texts, topics, theories, and methods.

Both single author and collaborative works, especially those foregrounding intersectionality, are explicitly welcome from authors without regard to ability status, age, caste, class, ethnicity, gender, nationality, religion, or sexuality. Approaches can include but are not limited to theories and methods from class studies, cultural studies, critical race studies; digital and new media studies; fan and reception studies; feminist, gender, and queer studies; film studies, languages and linguistics, literary studies (any period); medieval and medievalist studies; pedagogical studies, modernist and postmodernist studies, media and marketing studies; religious and theological studies; source studies; stylistics, and tourism studies.

Contingent faculty, early-career faculty, graduate students, independent scholars, tenure-track and tenured faculty in the Americas and worldwide who are trained in any discipline and period specialization are invited to submit proposals in either track and to consider applying to become m become a member of the advisory board.

The call for applications to the advisory board will be circulated shortly. Please email robinareid@fastmail with any questions you may have.

Signum University Regional Moots

These small, regional conferences are held at various dates and locations. See the Regional Moots page for more details.

Journal of Fandom Studies: Open Call for Papers

Journal of Fandom Studies seeks to offer scholars a dedicated, peer-reviewed publication that promotes current scholarship into the fields of fan and audience studies across a variety of media. We focus on the critical exploration, within a wide range of disciplines and fan cultures, of issues surrounding production and consumption of popular media (including film, music, television, sports and gaming).

The editors welcome general papers (between 6000 and 9000 words), interviews and book reviews (between 800 and 1200 words) as well as suggestions for thematic issues.

All articles submitted should be original work and must not be under consideration by other publications.

See the Journal of Fandom Studies open call for papers for more information.

B2MeM 2025: Basketball Championship

Two basketball conferences have been battling for supremacy for centuries. This March, the madness comes to a head with the B2MEM Basketball Championship.  

Choose your team. Attend the draft and put together a roster that you and your fellow creators can use to go head-to-head with other teams in this year’s championship.

When you sign up, you’ll have a chance to choose a team to ‘coach’. You’ll be asked for your first, second, and third choice.  Each team can have up to five (5) coaches.  

If your first choice is available, you will be assigned to that team.  If that team is already full, you’ll be assigned to your second choice, and so on.

Each team already has a team captain.  Only members of that team may create entries that utilize that character.

Additional characters are available during the draft.  If your team drafts a character, then only your team may use that character – unless you trade with another team. (Your team captain cannot be traded.)

To draft players, each team will need to fill out a form listing your top 20 choices of characters from the roster in order of preference.

The draft will have 14 rounds, giving each team a total of 15 players (captains have already been determined). Should all characters on a team’s list be claimed already, a random character will be assigned.

Drafted characters can only be used by the team that drafts them.

With over 750 named characters in the legendarium, it will still leave over 550 characters which are fair game to any team as substitutions.

There will be a live event where we go through the lists and announce the players drafted by each team. Attendance is optional, and the final lists of drafted players will be sent to each team afterwards.

Each week will consist of two matches – one within your own conference, and one against a team in the other conference, where points are doubled. These matches happen on different days.

Each match will have a theme.  The theme will be announced at the beginning of the week; creations should fit the theme of the challenge and must be posted by the end of the week.

Schedule

Games 1 through 6 run March 1st-9th

Games 7 through 9  run March 11th-17th

Games 10 through 13 run March 19th-24th

At the end of the four weeks, teams will face off after being seeded in their brackets. All teams will play in the championship and have a chance to win!

The winners of these matches will go head to head to determine which conference is the winner of the B2MEM Basketball Championship!

Find full B2MeM Basketball Championship information here.

Sign up for a B2MeM team here.

Daily Prompts

If you don't have time to commit to an event the size and intensity of the Basketball championship, but still want to celebrate Back to Middle-Earth month, don't worry, we've got you covered. And in case you're busy this March, here they are already, so you can get a head start! Just like every year, we've prepared some general prompts to use in March (or whenever else you have time)! This year, it's a list of daily prompts, one for each day of March.
They range from simple prompt words, to more involved activities on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. If you want to share your creations with us, an Ao3 collection will be available, and you can also tag us on tumblr (@spring-into-arda) and we'll share what you come up with!

Week 1

Optional weekly theme - Community, Fun, First Times
March 1 ‒ Coming home | Reunions | Missing somebody
March 2 – Community Sunday! Comment on a fanwork that was created over 1 year ago | Listen to a podfic | Rec your top 3 comfort fics
March 3 ‒  Chaos | Troublemakers | Out of Bounds
March 4 – Experimental Tuesday! Write a songfic! | Experiment with textiles | Try out an Alternate Universe
March 5 ‒  First Meetings | Games | Connections
March 6 – Meta Thursday! Share your meta/headcanons about a Tolkien character.
March 7 ‒ Audience | Ball | Court 
March 8 – International Womens’ Day! Create, comment, or recommend fanworks featuring women as main characters.
March 9 – Community Sunday! Read and comment on a story about a character you’ve never read about before! | Comment on/reblog art that features the colour purple | Listen to a fan song

Week 2

Optional weekly theme - Test, Struggle, Progress
March 10 ‒ Conflict | Exploration | Windmill
March 11 – Experimental Tuesday! Write a poem | Experiment with a monochrome palette | Compose a short piece of music
March 12 ‒ Difficult Decisions | Darkness | Defense
March 13 – Meta Thursday! Share your meta/headcanons about a place in Tolkien’s world.
March 14 ‒ Build up | Challenge | Block
March 15 ‒ New Horizons | Negotiations | Now or Never
March 16 – Community Sunday! Comment on a fanwork featuring poetry | Comment on/reblog art that doesn’t include people | Share your favourite trinkets that remind you of Tolkien’s works
March 17 ‒ Survival | Back-up | Endurance

Week 3

Optional weekly theme - Setbacks, Loss, Resilience
March 18 – Experimental Tuesday! Write a fic without dialogue | Experiment with woodcarving/sculpting/pottery | Try out a new pairing
March 19 ‒ Grief | Comfort | Rebound
March 20 – Meta Thursday! Share your meta/headcanons about an event in Tolkien’s world.
March 21 ‒ Failed Experiments | New Ideas | Recovery
March 22 ‒ Hope | Escape | Trap
March 23 – Community Sunday! Get together with friends for a live-reading session to celebrate Tolkien Reading day!
March 24 ‒ Collapse | Reinvent | Bench

Week 4

Optional weekly theme - Rivalry, Competition, Victory
March 25 – Experimental Tuesday! Record a podfic | Create art that uses 2+ different media | Try out a new genre
March 26 ‒ Shot | Song | Creation
March 27 – Meta Thursday! Share your meta/headcanons about a culture in Tolkien’s world.
March 28 ‒  Dunk | Hide & Seek | Water
March 29 – Theft | Emotions | Journeys
March 30 – Community Sunday! Tell us about your favourite part of Tolkien | Tell your favourite fan creators what you enjoy about their work | Say thank you to somebody who has made your fandom experience better in the last year
March 31 – Triumph | Hunt | Travel

Teitho February/March Challenge: Resolution

Blind Fic Exchange

Fandom Trumps Hate 2025

FTH is an online auction of fanworks that generates donations to progressive nonprofits that are working to protect marginalized people. We began FTH in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 Presidential Election, and over the course of the last 8 years have raised over $300,000 for a range of amazing organizations.

Here is this year’s list of supported organizations. We’ll be posting more detailed profiles of each of them over the coming weeks. We also encourage you to look at the Auction FAQ (which has lots of useful information for people thinking about signing up as creators, as well as dedicated sections on bidding and on nonprofit orgs.) If you’re raring to go, you can look at our bidding policies.

Lastly, in a couple of weeks we’ll be kicking off our newly-revived offscreen activism tumblr blog, FTHAction. If you're on tumblr, give us a follow!

FTH2025 Auction Calendar

Monday, January 20th: creator signups open for both the auction and the crafts bazaar

Sunday, February 2nd: creator signups close

Friday, February 21st: browsing period begins, crafts bazaar announcement goes live

Tuesday, February 25th, 8am ET: bidding opens

Saturday, March 1st, 8pm ET: auction bidding closes

Monday, March 10th: craft stalls close

Wednesday, March 12: proof of donations due