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.
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.
[Writing] An exercise in music... And patience by Aprilertuile
Makalaurë was sitting at the harp in his music room. He was holding a dark blindfold in his hands and was looking at it with much scepticism.
[Writing] No Time Have I by Flora-lass
A Silmarillion acrostic.
[Writing] I called it Fate that I should fail by AdmirableMonster
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…
[Writing] All of you by chrissystriped
Elrond and Celebrían celebrate their anniversary with their family.
[Writing] Lament for the Singer by daughterofshadows
A short thing about Maglor, death and grieving.
[Writing] Cosmological Poems of Arda by AaronAzrael
I would like to share my revelations of Tolkien's Universe in the form of narrative and emotional poems.
[Writing] Eä's Redemption by AaronAzrael
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…
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Fandom Chocolate … or Authors Love Comments by Dawn Walls-Thumma
[]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.
Passing Ships by Simon J. Cook
[]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.
Fanfiction and the Serious Business of Writer's Craft by Dawn Walls-Thumma
[]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.
[Writing] Staging a Battle by StarSpray
[]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.
[Writing] From whose bourn no traveller returns by losselen
[]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.
[Writing] Sand Sorcery by StarSpray
[]It is well known that Psamathos does not leave his cove. He does not like to get his feet wet, and prefers to spend his days dozing under the sun.
Fellowship of the Fics: Summer Stories 2024
Fellowship of the Fics offers four weeks of summer-themed prompts during the month of July.
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.
July 2024 Call for Papers and Proposals
Conferences and publications that have open calls for papers and proposals in July 2024.
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.
Very interesting interpretation. I liked the way it's written: the first part is frustrating (I imagine that's how Tour must have felt, with that voice urging him on who knows where and for what) then it's surreal and at the end I couldn't help thinking Tuor's fate was unfair (weird considering I think he was one of the few with a relatively happy ending).
Hope you decide to fill in more story gaps ;)
Dear Alasse,
Thank you for your kind words! And I'm sorry I didn't respond earlier - I didn't realize I had to turn on a notification switch, and real life has been demanding attention.
I'm glad the style worked well for the story, and that it threw into question whether his fate was fair or happy. His story is so enigmatic to me, it seems it could go either way, and I have always been partial to the notion that NOBODY in his or her right mind actually wants to be a prophet. It's always hard, and usually comes with costs to go with the honor and glory and all that.
Silm nuzguls usually are less forthcoming for me, but we'll see if any new ones attach themselves to my ankles!
Thanks for your encouragement,
Dwim
This story shows impressively the irruption of the sacred and numinous into a human life. It also greatly helps to make sense of Tuor's behaviour and actions towards the end of the story, after the fall of Gondolin, in Nan-tathren and in Sirion.
I wonder how Tuor's relationship with Idril would be affected by his transformation into Ulmo's prophet. Of course, he hasn't even met her yet, although she has been briefly shown to him, but I had always imagined that it would be his human nature that would have been the main barrier between them that they had to overcome - now I see that it might not have been.
Dear Himring,
I'm glad the sudden overturning of daily life on the run worked - getting personally hauled across the continent by the power of Ulmo to do his bidding to a doomed city just seems like it ought to be unsettling and thoroughly life-changing in many ways.
Your question about the Idril-Tuor relationship is terrific. In all honesty, I don't have the faintest clue how that would work - I tend to get Silm nuzgul rarely, and they tend to be fairly focused creatures: one scene, one idea, and Idril is rather a closed book to me. But being married to a prophet... that seems like it could be a very difficult and unique three-way relationship. While I don't know that I've got anything to contribute to that discussion/fanfic possibility, I do hope someone else will take it up. That'd be fun to read.
Finally, many thanks for tipping me off to that review-alert setting. I'd not realized there was one, and real life has been productive lately, so I've not been back to explore the account settings since I first registered. Oops!
Take care,
Dwim
This is gorgeous, Dwim, one of the best pieces I have read of yours. Utterly SILMish, but more, bigger and wider and making the reader feel a personal connection to Tuor and really feel his connection to the sea and to Ulmo. This is sea-longing like few of Tolkien's characters will ever know. Ulmo is one of the Valar most friendly to the Children, but he does mark Tuor, whether out of necessity or unconcern, it is hard to know, for all of the Man's life.
Hi Raksha - Thanks! I'm glad the story worked for you, and seemed to fit well with the Silm. Tuor's a strange guy, and Tolkien's story, allegedly about him, manages somehow to keep him very quiet, imo. It was a challenge to try to find a way to access his POV, but I had a lot of fun once he opened up a bit and the connection to Ulmo became the central point of the story.
Dwim
Here via Himring’s rec/review repost. I am having some difficulty articulating my affection for this story. Firstly, it’s somewhat in the same vein as "Strange Fire," which was the first work of yours I read and which I loved. Though the particulars are different, it’s got that same sense of vastly powerful entities using for their own ends the really quite painful reverence they inspire/instill in mortals. Secondly, it’s terribly evocative. I could easily imagine what the experiences under the water / on the beach / in the cave must have been like for Tuor and place myself in his (waterlogged) shoes. Third, yes, it’s a reasonable interpretation of the text and an engaging gapfiller.
Hi Huinare!
Why thank you, I'm so glad you liked this fic! I do like playing around with theology and religious life in M-e, and there are definitely some common themes, so I'm not surprised you're finding similarities between this and "Strange Fire." God is never safe in my book - God may be many, many things, but safe is not one of them, so getting caught up in divine plotting is not some kind of light-hearted venture for most of the characters I'll write. There should always be a challenge to the individual, even if that person really likes the relationship and is generally happy with it. As a gapfiller, it needed to make Tuor actually a character with a perspective in his own story, which was sort of weird, but then again, so was Tolkien's story! :-D
I'm also really glad the description worked: I found this story to be very visual and tactile, and to really begin with the sensory elements so I threw everything I had into trying to position the reader to experience the ocean with Tuor.
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