Founded in 2005, the Silmarillion Writers' Guild exists for discussions of and creative fanworks based on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion and related texts. We are a positive-focused and open-minded space that welcomes fans from all over the world and with all levels of experience with Tolkien's works. Whether you are picking up Tolkien's books for the first time or have been a fan for decades, we welcome you to join us!
New Challenge: Bollywood This month's challenge offers songs, films, and tropes from Bollywood, the world's largest film industry based out of India, as prompts for fanworks.
Cultus Dispatches: Fandom Chocolate … or Authors Love Comments Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data provides insight into how comments benefit authors and which authors are most impacted by a lack of comments, with a digression on authors' perspectives one-click feedback like kudos.
A Sense of History: Passing Ships As Tolkien's characters in various texts gaze out to the sea, what do they see? What is brought by the ships coming out of the West?
Beta-Reader List Now Available The beta-reader list and profiles have been moved into our new system and are available again.
Nimruzimir, a natural philosopher recently out of his apprenticeship, hardly considers himself very important to anyone, least of all his colleagues. When his strange, prophetic fits bring him to the attention of the High Priest, however, he may find that his existence is less superfluous than…
This is my new poetical attempt to add my own interpretation to Tolkien's Cosmology as to Eru's Creation and the Valar's minds and behind-the-scene providence reasons and mechanisms.. I often review Eä as part of our own world, just in another dimension, this is why I have always seriously…
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data shows that authors view comments as driving their motivation to create fanfiction. However, perception of comments by authors is part of a larger shift in fandom around how and how often fans interact with each other.
The arrival and departure of ships across the Great Sea carries mythic significance for the peoples of Middle-earth. The image of ships crossing out of and back into a mysterious West appears as well in Beowulf and is alluded to in Tolkien's tower analogy in his lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," where the tower allows those who climb it to observe the passage of the ships.
Tolkien Fanfiction Survey data shows that while most authors self-identify as taking their craft seriously, a growing subset of authors may be pushing that norm.
He and Diamond were visiting, though Pippin had been disappearing every afternoon, and taking Frodo and Elanor and most other lads and lasses in the neighborhood with him—though why they couldn’t use Pippin’s own pony, Sam couldn’t imagine.
So gathered they were to Bree, what lieutenants who could be spared, from their scattered watches west and east, for their chieftain had returned from his long sojourn in lands godless and mountains strange.
Aragorn returns from the South to tells his tales. Halbarad listens.
Elrond Week 2024
Elrond Week is a fandom event dedicated to Elrond Peredhel that will run from July 10th to July 16th on Tumblr.
July challenge at tolkienshortfanworks posted
The tolkienshortfanworks challenge for July has been posted to the Dreamwidth community. The thematic challenge is: original character or unnamed canon character; the formal challenge: fixed length of multiple of 50 words. New participants welcome.
Teitho June/July Challenge: Mentor
The June/July prompt for the Teitho challenge is "mentor" and invites fanworks about this relationship in Tolkien's works.
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Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.
It is so sad to read this! I mean, there is just one or two short lines in Silmarillion that Beleriand was sunken, and a reader goes on and probably doesn't give much attention to it, as other things follow in the book. But to read this - to actually see and feel how all those places and living things are being destroyed - it is heart-breaking. :(
Treebeard's song in the Two Towers describes how much he loved those places and how beautiful they were. You can feel his regret for their loss, but even according to Entish reckoning long years have passed since the end of the First Age by the time of the War of the Ring. I was thinking that at the time of their destruction his grief must have been much more immediate.
Different from what I was expecting, but I really liked it. I agree with the review below: the drowning of Beleriand, and what it entailed for the flora and fauna there, is not something I ever paid much attention. I cheered at the end as I was sure the elm was going to die.
Liked how you inserted parts of the poem, and how you added mentions of people who lived in those places… I felt it helped to drive the point that they were all gone across.
I'm glad that you're not disappointed, even if it wasn't what you expected! And it's great to hear that you cheered for the survival of the elm!
I guess by mentioning the people I was cheating slightly, as far as the Entish point of view goes--I'm not sure how much Treebeard would have known or cared about Aegnor and Andreth, for instance. But he does like Elves, after all. And certainly all those past associations would have meant a lot to the Elves who had to flee Beleriand at the same time, either for Tol Eressea or for Lindon...
What a creative idea and illustrated in an equally wll written story. I have not seen many stories about Ents, but I like the perspective of Treebeard here. This is fantastic and I only wish it was a bit longer because I njoyed it so much. I like how you described the destruction, so poetic and tragic all at once.
What a compliment! Thank you! Ents get mentioned so little in the Silmarillion--just twice, I think, and they are not called "Ents"--that it is easy to forget that they were there all along, just as the Elves and the Dwarves.
This is beautiful. Thank you. The juxtaposition of Treebeard's viewpoint with the omniscient narrator's tale of what is happening elsewhere in Beleriand is really well done.
I'm about to compose a MEFA review for this but wanted to add a touch more privately that I cannot believe I'm crying over a tree.... I'm so glad the old tree managed to remember in time and followed him.
This was an effective, wrenching story. Treebeard's song is my favorite of Tolkien's poems and I find it delightful that you've expanded on it in this way. It's one thing to know, in the broad epic sense, that Beleriand was drowned, and another to see it in vivid detail with reference to both the song and to historic events. Nicely done!
Thank you very much! I love that poem, too--you can probably tell. But you know "now all those lands lie under the wave" sounds almost peaceful--except, of course, Treebeard is singing that a couple of thousand years later and even an Ent might have got over the shock by then.
Himring this is utterly heat wrenching. The sinking of Beleriand is one of the incidents in Silmarillion that in completely glossed over - but it is so sad. All those years of work put in by so many people, all the blood, sweat and tears shed for that land, all the pain, joy, hope and fear that it encompassed, lost forever under the sea.
And then to read this, to actually see and feel every one of those moments, to imagine the agony of those beings - it was enough to reduce me to tears. I think that, he must have carried that grief with him through the ages of the world, but the edges, gradually blunted by time.
The way you used the poem in comparison to the sinking of Beleriand was beautiful and that you used this poem, even more so. Ents get very little recognition in the Silmarillion - it is so easy to forget they were there as well, along with the elves, dwarves and men.
Once again, a gorgeous story, very well written. Thank you for sharing.
Yes, the more I write about Beleriand, the more heart-wrenching I find it myself that all those beloved places are broken and drowned. And I'm not an Ent and I haven't even set foot in any of those places! For Treebeard, it would have been a lasting grief, just as you say.
While she usually writes about the Feanorians, or Maedhros and Fingon in particular, Himring definitely shows that she is able to get into the heads of a great many characters, not the least difficult being the esteemed Treebeard himself.
Building on Treebeard's Song about the Trees of Beleriand, Himring draws on the events of the War of Wrath and the gradual, terrible destruction being wrought to Nan-tathren, Dorthonion, Neldoreth and Ossiriand. In a very entishly drawn-out fashion, she weaves in the history of these places, while at the same time narrating Treebeard's attempt to help a single elm escape the cataclysm. The gradual buildup and interchange of destruction with narration makes for a very compelling rhythm, the language is spot on, and all that together makes this fic ripe with impending doom, almost like a countdown. The note of relief toward the end becomes all the more palpable when the elm finally begins to wake and react to Treebeard's narration, and the tree-hugging part of me had to swallow a lump in her throat at the end. As one of the other reviewer said, emotional storytelling involving trees... quite a feat!
A fantastic story, and I'm very, very sorry that I didn't read it any sooner. But thank goodness for B2MeM! And thank Himring for writing this!
Thank you very much, Elleth! I'm honoured you picked this story for your B2MeM review and glad to hear that it appealed to the tree-hugging part of you as well on other counts!
Your reviews are always so lovely and insightful, they make me want to frame them in mithril and ithildin and hang them over my bed.
Keiliss pointed me this way after a discussion about the sinking of Beleriand.
It makes me shiver, reading this. Powerful words, and images you've conjured...and so sad. So much lost. The little details killed me as well -- the Laiquendi leaving behind posessions to carry a sapling. The willows in brackish water and then swept away. You make it very vivid and real. It wasn't just an event. It was a way of life, and lives, that were lost and never will come again (ok, maybe Arda remade, but still!).
You bring home the disaster and the loss in a very personal way that just left me gutted. I've always had a love for the less-seen characters in the Silmarillion, and this...well. This is just beautifully heartbreaking. Well done!
This is one of the saddest things I've ever had the pleasure to read, and yet it is so beautiful! I like ents as much as the next person, but I never felt so much for them- I'm a tad ashamed to admit that this piece made me a little emotional.
YES -- for my TRSB, I wrote about this, but from the POV of one who wanted to save as many animals as possible. I am glad you wrote about the trees! It is amazingly sad that Tolkien created this gorgeous world and then destroyed it in a scant page of writing, maybe even less. Treebeard -- this is a beautiful image of him, slowly saving a tree while everything around him drowns. Thank you!
Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.