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] No Time Have I by Flora-lass
A Silmarillion acrostic.
[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] 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 ...
Restoration and Rebuilding
Create a fanwork around a prompt focused on the theme of rebuilding and restoration. 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.
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.
Scribbles & Drabbles 2024
A chill Tolkien event, where artists make art, and authors write little stories in response. Begins in June and ends in November.
Congrats to you! This is an interesting piece. It took me five years after I first picked up The Silmarillion to go back and finish the Ainulindalë--not that it does not have its moments. There is Melkor trying to mess everything up.
John Garth apparently recently produced something on the Ainulindalë. I wanted to see if I could find it and my internet is not working. I'm stopping now! Hope this goes through.
I never enjoyed reading it for fun; I am not one of the Tolkien fans that found it so beautiful or uplifting or poetic. But I do enjoy creation myths as a research topic, so I've found interest in it through that. I've been meaning to write something up fannishly for the last five years (!!), since that Mythmoot presentation, and today's prompt was the kick in the pants to do so.
I'd be interested in the Garth article, if you have access to it. When I researched all this five years ago, the scholarship was pretty disappointing. There were bright points (ha) but there was a lot of religiosity masquerading as serious academic work ... I know you are familiar with *that*.
this was a very informative and thought-provoking essay.
as I commented to oshun regarding her biography of the month I have recently been listening to the Silmarillion audiobook. I am finding it a very rich experience and it actually made the Ainulindalë a far more pleasant experience this time.
I agree on what a creative and unique creation myth this is. Creation from song has it's only other parallel in the creation of Narnia--CS Lewis' world, which is intriguing in itself, considering the close friendship of those two authors.
I have always found some kinship of the Valar to the Greek gods--in some of the characterizations, some of their poor decision-making, in their inability to truly understand the Elves, and their overall lack of insight.
The songs of power have always been fascinating to me and I wish we had more information about them. I imagine Maglor had great power in his songs and I always wonder what would have happened if he had entered into the battle of song against Sauron.
Songs were such an ancient and powerful method of oral tradition--from Homer to the troubadours of the Middle Ages, to indigenous communities that carry their history to this day in stories and songs.
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it! ^_^
I think it's fitting that the Ainulindale works better recited aloud than read as a written text since its power is in vocal song (and that, in Tolkien's imagined in-universe history, it almost certainly started as an oral tale told among or to the Elves).
I had forgotten that Narnia used a similar mode of creation. I am not a Lewis expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm almost certain that the Ainulindale is older; it began as "The Music of the Ainur" in BoLT that Tolkien wrote in his twenties. I do not, however, know if he ever shared it (although, as one of his oldest texts, it is hard to believe he did not) ... but it would not be the first time Lewis borrowed from him! :D Tolkien was rather salty over Lewis's appropriation of "Numinor"!
I agree that Maglor--whose father-name Canafinwe means "commanding"--was a powerful character *because* of his voice. I think this is an area where the popular understanding of music and musicians leads to mischaracterization of Maglor, who gets cast as the simpering, soft-hearted poet when the scops and skalds Tolkien likely had in mind when creating his character were anything but that: they governed public opinion, and a skilled singer could unseat a king. And they controlled the history: who was remembered and how. Powerful indeed!
Thank you again for reading and commenting. <3
I cannot find a copy anywhere! So I wrote him and asked where it might be found! (Given at a Tolkien conf in Germany in Nov 2017 [Das Tolkien Seminar 2017] and the website gives no info about a conf document.)
We'll see if responds. I told him how much I loved his Tolkien and the Great War, which is totally true.
I searched for it too and couldn't find it either! But I figured you knew more about it in the first place and might have better luck. Thanks for emailing him--that's awesome of you! (There you go banging on doors again ... <3<3<3)
You nailed me: brass balls.
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