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 ...
It Comes in Threes
Choose a prompt from a list of 130 different things that "come in threes." 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.
Thanks for this thought-provoking review.
As a fellow country dweller I haven't seen the movie either, but some of the themes you mention do resonate with me so I'll comment anyway ;-)
First of all I'm thrilled that the movie al least acknowledges that JRRT's works came at the expense of Edith's chances in life. As a mom of young kids and fanfic writer I've always considered this a gaping omission in Tolkien's biographies.
It's nearly impossible to overestimate the sheer amount of emotional and physical work required to raise even one child into a functional adult -- enough to sink any intellectual or artistic pursuit. Edith had four, and no hope of anything resembling a fair division of that labor.
While Tolkien had oceans of undisturbed time on his hands to read, write and sit in pubs discussing his work with his friends, Edith spent her time and energy feeding, diapering and disciplining her unruly toddlers. Tolkien never had to interrupt his Elvish genealogy to wonder whether his kids had made their homework, if their school uniforms still fit or how to get them to do piano practice. In the 1930's all that was exclusively women's work.
I'm so glad to finally see a Tolkien biography acknowledge this that I'm not even disappointed in the movie resolving this thread by having Edith resign herself to her situation: in reality it was her only option.
This is probably very bad for my karma but I share your delight in seeing certain pockets of the fandom discover this message and the one about Tolkien accepting his friend's orientation. JRRT was a product of his time and his religion, but claiming that an early 20th century Oxford Catholic would wholeheartedly subscribe to the views of the 21st century religious right is as fundamentally dishonest as making him a liberal.
YES. I 100% agree that Tolkien's literary career--including the very fact that we are having this conversation right now--was due to Edith taking on the labor of mother and homemaker. Grundy presented about the horrors of modernity in his work, especially his own ambivalence: complaining of the noise and stink of cars, for example, even as he owned one for a while. Grundy's words, paraphrased, seem relevant: He disliked when machines reduced the need for manual labor even though, as an Oxford professor, he was performing no manual labor. He complained about caring for his chickens, for pity's sake! Not the most difficult of homesteading chores, especially given all the free protein they supply.
Anyway, in short, he was privileged. A lot of work--Edith's especially--went on around him that he romanticized and held up as an ideal even as he was unwilling to perform it himself.
My chief complaint about the happy-hand-holding-walking-in-the-woods scene--because I agree, yes, it WAS her only choice--is that it seemed to resolve a conflict that, in fact, never resolved. And reverted to the whole, "Why would I want a career when I can get paid in hugs and kisses?" reasoning that the emotional satisfaction of having a family will and should triumph over women's need, same as men's, to challenge themselves intellectually. However, I would rather the ending we got than some invented resolution to the actual conflict. Most viewers, I hope, will see that Edith can be content with her family and still feel like her life lost some of its meaning and direction, partly in sacrifice to his goals.
Re: religion, I just remarked to Oshun that the religious right seems to neglect that most modern Christians are capable of faith as well as being rational, humane people. This fandom has always harbored a handful of them. In reality, I imagine they will just hate the film for suggesting that Tolkien was capable of accepting his friend's homosexuality while remaining a devout Catholic, but their discomfort during the film itself is nice to imagine. >;^)
an early 20th century Oxford Catholic would wholeheartedly subscribe to the views of the 21st century religious right is as fundamentally dishonest as making him a liberal
Gotta agree with this point. Today's "religious right" reaches pretty far in their social and political backwardness!
WORD. They don't understand that religious people are actually able to balance being rational and humane in addition to Christian. I certainly didn't agree with Tolkien on anything, but I never doubt he was both of these things, despite being devoutly Catholic.
It's a really good review. Thanks so much for sharing. As I already mentioned to you I am burning with envy that you got to see it. [If I had known earlier they were showing it in Vermont at the conference, I might have made an even greater effort to deal with my health, financial, and personal issues which made me unable to attend this week.] Happy, however, that you have so thoroughly reviewed here--it's the next best thing. (I can never get enough spoilers! It really helps me to be able to enjoy something more. Especially true in this case.)
I guess it will be available in NYC around May 10. Still have not managed to track down where it will be showing. Got my fingers crossed that I will be able to see it next month. Don't think I can stand to wait until it is available online.
I am bringing my own opinions and baggage with me, since I combed through both the Tolkien biography and Garth's Tolkien and the Great War more than once this past year. Garth has a lot about the collective and the individual members of the T.C.B.S. and also Tolkien and Edith.
Thanks again so much.
(So grateful it does not have scenes that play out like some of the worst of Alex's video games! I can handle a few scenes of battlefield pyrotechnics. I thought about the Dead Marshes myself when thinking of descriptions I have read of no-man's land on Somme battlefields.)
I thought about putting on a spoiler warning and did not--just for you! :D It's a film review. About a person's life whom we are all studying in a nerdy amount of detail. Spoilers should be expected and are they really spoilers anyway?
I hope you can see it. I really want to know what you think of it. You would have loved this past weekend. I really missed you being there. Sian and Grundy are such fun and smart people to hang out with. We've made it our mission to get you here next year! You will love the theme: Tolkien and the Classics. I personally think you should present a paper comparing Mae/Fin and Achilles/Patroclus. XD
I thought the battle scenes were actually very well done. I detest prolonged action sequences. I will deliberately sleep through them because I feel like catching up on sleep is a better use of my brain. I find them both dull and sensorily overwhelming, like having someone shout wordlessly in my face for 15 minutes. These were very dreamlike: a mix of the very gritty (though not terribly graphic) and the mythic. It left me with a definite understanding of how involvement in the Somme would have influenced him (even if he claims it did not, or did not much ... the Dead Marshes are, iIrc, the one part he acknowledges as connected to the Somme).
**I personally think you should present a paper comparing Mae/Fin . XD**
Now you are indulging me! I could do that. (I've thought about it enough.) There has been debate about the exact nature of their relationship--Achilles/Patroclus--since at least as early as the classical period itself and I have been known to compare Mae/Fin to them.
That is *exactly* fitting the theme, and since the organizer Chris Vaccaro does queer studies work with Tolkien, I imagine it would take him all of five seconds to accept it.
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