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…
My newly drawn map of Aman, as complete as I could make it.
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Random Challenge
Holiday Party
No matter if you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, it's a time of year to think about holidays. Whether you're bundling up in blankets or slipping a swimsuit into your suitcase, we invite you to an SWG holiday party! 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.
Thanks, Ellynn! Glad to hear the family drama remains moving. I had to do such a chop job on this one to get it down to size, I was a little worried the emotion between father and son(s) might not survive.
You made me grin. I've said before that some people approach Tolkien canon like Talmudic scholars. I was joking! Never say never!
Personally, I think it is interesting that Finrod is often painted in fanon as too saintly to have continued to M-e. I have seen some explanations that he could only have gone out of a sense of self-sacrifice, etc. There are contradictions to that position. Tolkien described his motivation eloquently in this passage in the UT:
Finrod was like his father in his fair face and golden hair, and also in noble and generous heart, though he had the high courage of the Noldor and in his youth their eagerness and unrest; and he had also from his Telerin mother a love of the sea and dreams of far lands that he had never seen. [Emphasis mine.]
Not the motivation of a plaster saint or a martyr, but one stemming from reckless youth and incorrigible curiosity.
Not as much as your review made me grin, I assure you! :-D
</i>I've said before that some people approach Tolkien canon like Talmudic scholars. I was joking! Never say never!<i>
I'm sure there must be some authors out there who are really adept at reading Talmud and then taking that method to Tolkien's plethora of manuscripts. I'm only just dipping hesitant and linguistically-hampered toes into the Talmud, however.
And not being as much into Silm fandom, I'm not very up on characterization debates, so alas, I can't claim to have deliberately tried to play against trope. The characters I'd thought I would fit this scenario well were Maedhros and Fingon, but I couldn't find a moment between them that would justify the argument until I went all the way back to Araman. At that point, I realized my voice-from-heaven, which I'd thought I might have to write my way around, *had actually been written by Tolkien* as an ambiguous prophetic herald whose identity was only guessed at, never confirmed. PERFECT! Nearly squeed in delight, and I shanghaied Finrod and his father without further delay. So I can't make claims to having given deep thought to his different presentations in Tolkien's corpus; Finrod just happened in his Silm portrayal to fit the bill in an almost eerily ideal fashion.
So this isn't so much an example of reading Tolkien Talmudically well as my simply getting very, very lucky twice in a week! But I'm really glad you enjoyed the drabble, and the happy confluence of passages. Thanks so much for your comments!
This throws a very interesting light on Melkor's original motivations in interfering in Arda. Of course, some would claim that War and Eros are always mixed?
Some surely do! Others just as surely don't. For my money, Melkor's not a very good lover and mistakes distance for simply violence, failing to realize that it's the condition of real love. So he doesn't, I think, have any clear conception of the difference between love and war, whether the difference is qualified or absolute. It just doesn't exist for him.
Hee! Only in one sense, I think (I hope). Maedhros is totally bound by his fear that his life is an unredeemable series of disasters that lie strictly within his responsibility if he doesn't have the Oath to hang himself on. If Finrod is right, then that's release for them all, but release comes as such a devastating blow to Maedhros's world, he'd rather the agony of familiar, semi-exculpating bondage than the agony of the unfamiliar, totally responsible freedom.
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.