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 ...
Random Challenge
Within the Pages of Lore
Get your Silmarillion off of the shelf. Close your eyes, let your book fall open at random, and put your finger down on the page. Your challenge is to create a fanwork using that quote. 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.
Oh, these are all lovely! I especially liked The Sound of Our Voices. The prose flows so well and is evocative. A real passion within the words. Nicely done!
Oh, thank you! I'm happy to hear you like The Sound of Our Voices. A lot of my short pieces are fairly spontaneous, but this one was more so than most. So it almost feels as if I didn't work hard enough on it, but when I look at it, there's nothing I'm ready to change right now.
Ah- you are right. I suppose I mean, more self contained - certainly not lacking passion and fire, but more thoughtful and refelctive. Your Maedhros is clearly affected deeply by Angband, as he would be. Its making me think quite a lot more about all this and you probably are the World MAedhros expert!! :)
Boethius was an important influence on a couple of medieval English authors that I was studying (quite a long time ago now). So I did a bit of research on him, too, and some of it stuck.
I think I commented on this already somewhere (unless I dreamed that), but you managed to get me solidly into Maedhros' head here - not easy in such a short space, and I think I did let out a sigh of relief at the final sentence. Tiny eucatastrophes like this may be a favourite trope of mine.
(I don't think you had commented on this before--unless a notification went missing somehow--but I'm gratefully accepting it as a double review anyway!)
I was thinking, horribly, that somehow Maedhros was mad, in the Void, and (in some way) dreaming. I am so glad for the end sentence which proved he was not.
Yes, that is more or less what Maedhros is afraid of at that moment, although he is not in a state in which he would be able to put that clearly to himself or think it through. But, as you say, he is not!
Thank you very much for your comment and I'm very glad this piece worked for 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.