SWG News

Character of Month: Túrin, Part Two

Posted by SWG Moderators on 17 December 2022. Last updated on 26 January 2023.

Few characters in The Silmarillion are as embattled as Túrin. Like other hapless characters who wear disaster as easily as a pair of cozy pajamas, Túrin is loved and loathed in equal measure by Tolkien fans.

Tolkien certainly considered his story important: It is the longest of the chapters, the longest of the three Great Tales, and the first of the Great Tales to make it into its own book. It is also a particular entangled piece of writing for Christopher Tolkien to unwind, and a complicated plot for readers to unwind. Firstamazon has graciously offered to tackle this snarl of complicated texts in a three-part series of biographies about Túrin.

This month's installment covers the middle years of Túrin's life, after his salad days in Doriath but before everything went completely awry. Living among the outlaws, Túrin actually has a fairly content existence as the productive member of a community, making noble choices, and making and reunited with friends. Of course, nothing ever goes well for Túrin, and next month, we will join him on his inevitable and final slide into ruin.

Read the second part of firstamazon's biography of Túrin. And if you missed it, you can find the first part here.

Reading of the "Father Christmas Letters" on Our Discord

Posted by SWG Moderators on 13 December 2022. Last updated on 7 January 2023.

In the spirit of the season, Himring and bunn will be hosting a reading of Tolkien's Father Christmas Letters on the SWG Discord, beginning 22 December through 1 January 2023. Both synchronous and asynchronous discussion is welcome, and there will be a live reading of favorite passages on 29 December 2022 at 19:00 UTC. (Find this event in your timezone. Note that the time of this event may change.)

The schedule is as follows:

• 22 December: Discussion: Letters 1920-25
• 27 December: Discussion: Letters 1926-1930
• 28 December: Discussion: Letters 1931-1933
• 29 December: Live reading of favourite passages, hopefully, 19 UTC
• 30 December: Discussion: Letters 1934 -1938
• 1 January: Discussion: Letters 1939-1943

All discussion will take place on the #father-christmas-reading channel on our Discord. If you want to join our Discord, logged-in members can find a link in the footer of the site. If you're not a member, contact the moderators for an invitation. All are welcome!

A Sense of History: Galadriel

Posted by SWG Moderators on 9 December 2022. Last updated on 8 February 2023.

Galadriel has always been subject to myriad and diverse interpretations from Tolkien fans and scholars. To some, she is an analogue for the Virgin Mary. At the other extreme, she is a warrior figure on par with male heroes like Fingon and Glorfindel. In the extensive ground between lies many other possible readings of her character. None of this is helped by the texts themselves, which are contradictory and confusing even beyond what one comes to expect from Tolkien.

In this month's A Sense of History column, MirienSilowende looks at the character of Galadriel through a historical lens. Although women typically receive the short shrift in both literary and historical writings, figures nonetheless emerge from ancient and medieval texts that suggest parallels with Galadriel's character. Circe, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Joan of Arc offer three possibilities with whom Tolkien would have been familiar and who might have inspired a woman character at once prophetic, benevolent, and outspoken.

You can read MirienSilowende's article "Galadriel: Parallels among Women in History and Literature" here.

Call for Challenge Stamp Creators!

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 December 2022. Last updated on 31 December 2022.

For six years now, we have offered stamps to creators and commenters who participate in our monthly challenges. Members who earn stamps have them displayed on their member profiles. The challenge moderators (Grundy, Lyra, and Dawn) make almost all of those stamps and take a lot of joy in trying to come up with a unique and distinct set for each new challenge.

However, now that the SWG accepts artwork (as well as many other fanwork types!), we would love to extend the opportunity to help with this endeavor to our artists. If you'd be interested in creating a set of stamps for one (or more) of our 2023 challenges, here is how it will work:

• Comment here (or otherwise contact the mods) and we will grant access to a bare-bones list of the 2023 challenges, the number of stamps needed, and the due date. Please note that if you want to remain absolutely unspoiled as to upcoming challenges, than this is probably not for you! We will send additional details on the challenge and specific stamps needed once you choose the challenge you want to work on.
• Create your set of stamps. You have a lot of creative free rein here. Stamps must
  • include the month number of the challenge. Most of the time, we also include the challenge name (or part of it) too, but this is not required.
  • thematically match the challenge that month.
  • be appropriate for all audiences: no violence, blood/gore, nudity, or sexual content.
  • use our templates or a similar postage stamp template that is not drastically different from ours. (Please check with us first.)
  • use only art and images that you have permission to use, which means that you must own the copyright or have permission from the copyright holder to use the image for this project, or the image is in the public domain.
• Email your completed stamps to the mods before the due date! We will send you a reminder about a month before your stamps are due.

Please note that while we can (and will) credit you as an artist on the challenge page and any announcements about the challenge, we cannot include credit on the stamps themselves or with every appearance of the stamps on our site.

You will also have the option of designing the challenge banner for that month if you wish to do so. (It is not required.) Banners are used on the challenge page, as well as in announcements on our site and social media about the challenge. Requirements for stamps apply to banners as well, with the addition that the banner should include the challenge name, dates, and text "SWG Challenge" or "Silmarillion Writers' Guild Challenge" somewhere on the banner. We prefer that the art used on stamps not be used on the banner as well. Banners should be at least 500px wide.

In participating in this project, you are granting the SWG the right to use your stamps and banner, including any art or photography that the contain, on our website and social media, in accordance with the terms described here. This includes minor modifications, such as resizing graphics to work with the layout of our site.

If you are interested in learning more or gaining access to the sign-up page, please comment here or contact us. The last day to sign up is 31 December 2022.

Cultus Dispatches: Fandom Voices - Women in Fanworks

Posted by SWG Moderators on 26 November 2022. Last updated on 24 December 2022.

Tolkien's legendarium presents a challenging landscape for fanworks about women. The lack of women characters, the missing names and details, and the sexist leanings of some of his writings can all act as barriers to creating women-centric fanworks.

This month's Cultus Dispatches column is one of our Fandom Voices columns, where we present a question or two to the community in an attempt to capture a range of fan experiences with a topic. For this round, we focused on the experience of creating (and reading/viewing) fanworks about women. What is it like to make fanworks about women in the Tolkien fandom, we wondered, and how has this changed (or not) in the decades of the fandom's existence?

We received twenty-two responses by the time we compiled the article, which highlights some of those responses with light analysis (and includes the entire collection so that you can draw your own conclusions). Participants highlighted the challenges of writing about women in the fandom, a major part of which was the fandom itself. While not a universal experience, many observed that the Tolkien fanworks fandom was overtly hostile to writing about women in the first decade of the 2000s, a status quo that fans have worked to change, resulting in a climate that is more openminded today. However, the lingering effects of that hostile history continues to impact some creators, and many respondents see ample work that still needs to be done.

You can read "Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks" here.

Also note that our Fandom Voices surveys never close. If you didn't get a chance to share your experiences and want to, it is not too late! We will continue to add new responses to the collection as they come in. You can respond to the "Women in Fanworks" survey here.

Finally, we are in the midst of a series of Cultus Dispatches articles focusing on the history and culture surrounding women-centric fanworks in the Tolkien fandom. Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions from all members of the fandom, so if there is a character or pairing, event or website, or other approach to fandom history and culture involving women (or any other topic!) that you'd like to explore in an article, contact our moderators and pitch your idea! Our reference editors will support new researchers and writers through the process, so don't let unfamiliarity with research writing dissuade you from sharing your ideas with us.

A Sense of History: Sieges in the First and Second Ages

Posted by SWG Moderators on 18 November 2022. Last updated on 17 December 2022.

In multiple places, the legendarium depicts siege warfare: a martial tactic that seeks to wear down an opponent by hemming in a population and leaving them subject to the slow diminishment of provisions. There are, of course, well-known sieges such as the Siege of Angband and the War of the Last Alliance, as well as several lesser-known sieges. In this month's A Sense of History column, S.R. Westvik looks at the historical analogues for the sieges seen in Tolkien's works. Drawing from ancient history through the present-day War in Ukraine, they consider the strategy behind successful siege warfare, the resistance tactics of a besieged opponent, and the humanitarian issues that arise whenever a civilian population becomes an integral part of a military strategy.

You can read S.R. Westvik's Sieges in the First and Second Ages here.

New Challenge: Manwë's Mailbag

Posted by SWG Moderators on 14 November 2022. Last updated on 21 January 2023.

Every year, as our lives grow busier at the holidays, we run a two-month challenge that we try to make a little special. For this year's November-December challenge, Manwë's Mailbag, your prompt will be a postcard.

All prompts—that is, postcards—will be sent digitally. In addition, if you'd like to receive your postcard in the mail, we will send it to you! You can use any element of your postcard prompt—the image (or part of the image) or the text or???—to create your fanwork. As always, we encourage participants to get creative!

To request a postcard prompt, contact the mods, and we will send a digital copy of your card. If you would like us to mail your card as well, please include an address.

We are also still accepting postcard designs, which will be used as prompts.

You can find the full Manwë's Mailbag challenge guidelines here, including more detail on how to create a postcard.

Important Challenge Dates

November 1: Postcard design submissions open
November 15: Begin requesting challenge prompts (email us to request your prompt!)
December 1: Last day to request a postcard by mail and last day for postcard design submissions*
January 15: Last day to post a challenge response and receive a stamp** and last day to request a digital postcard prompt

* Postcard designs received after December 1 will be included in the digital collection of prompts available on our website for the January amnesty challenge.
** However, at noted above, January is our annual amnesty challenge, so technically if you post by February 15, you can still get a stamp.

Finally, a huge thank you to Grundy, who is generously covering the costs of printing and postage for this challenge.

Create a Postcard for Manwë's Mailbag!

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 November 2022. Last updated on 14 November 2022.

On November 15, we will unveil our next challenge: Manwë's Mailbag. For this challenge, participants will receive a postcard from Middle-earth as a prompt. (Everyone will get a digital copy but, yes, Manwë's Eagles will be circumnavigating the globe to drop off postcards for those of you who want to receive actual mail!)

We are still firmly in X Marks the Spot territory, but in order to make our postcard challenge work, we will need postcards. And that's where you come in! We are looking for postcards to use as prompts for the upcoming challenge and invite you to try your hand at creating one or a few! For complete guidelines, check out our Manwë's Mailbag challenge page.

Character of the Month: Ulfang & Uldor

Posted by SWG Moderators on 2 November 2022. Last updated on 17 December 2022.

Ulfang and his son Uldor are notorious in the legendarium as two of the family of Mortal Men upon whose betrayal at the Battle of Unnumbered Tears the defeat of the Noldor and their allies seems to hinge. For this month's Character of the Month, Himring explores what we know of these two characters. What led to the betrayal? Who knew about it and when?

As is typical for the legendarium—especially the Silmarillion materials—the stories of Ulfang and Uldor raise questions as well. There is the ever-present matter of race in the legendarium, and Tolkien's casting of the treacherous Ulfang and Uldor as Easterlings. But there is (again in typical Tolkien fashion!) the matter of names too: Namely, why these characters have names suggesting negativity and betrayal.

You can read Himring's biography of Ulfang and Uldor here.

Cultus Dispatches: Writing Women in Fanfiction - An Analysis of the Data

Posted by SWG Moderators on 29 October 2022. Last updated on 26 November 2022.

If you have been writing or reading Tolkien fanfiction for any length of time, you probably remember Mary Sue. In the early-mid 2000s, she haunted the margins of our stories: the specter of a woman permitted into Tolkien's world to an extent that she changed the plot or even the characters. (Cue horror-movie scream.) Worry about Mary Sue—and whether our carefully crafted female characters were actually a Mary Sue, much like the slasher-film villain you only think is dead but is actually traipsing toward you with insidious purpose—permeated discussions of female characters and led some writers to abandon the idea of writing women at all. It just didn't seem worth it.

This month, in our Cultus Dispatches column, we begin a series on writing women in fanfiction. The first article in the series looks at data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey and what it shows us about the once fraught endeavor of adding a woman to your fanfiction.

Thankfully, the data shows, it is far less fraught today. Most fanfiction writers endeavor to add women to their stories, according to the data, and many use fanfiction as a vehicle to critique and repair Tolkien's depiction of women in the legendarium. But the fandom's historic distaste for seeing women in fanfiction lurks in the data as well.

You can read the article Writing Women in Tolkien Fanfiction: An Analysis of the Data here to learn more about what analysis of the survey data revealed. And if you create or read/view fanworks with women characters and wish to contribute to our latest Fandom Voices collection, you can contribute your memories of writing, creating, and reading about female characters here. Finally, don't forget that Cultus Dispatches is always open to contributions, so if you would like to contribute to our series about women characters in fanworks, comment here or email us and pitch your idea!