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] 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…
[Artwork] Map of Valinor by Aprilertuile
My newly drawn map of Aman, as complete as I could make it.
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
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 ...
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.
This is very useful and fascinating. I particularly like the comparison with the three-brothers fairytale trope.
There are so few citations!! I already have included all of the ones you cite above in my up coming bio and I am not quite half done yet!
Thank you so very much for sharing this here. I do intend to quote from you and encourage others to read it.
Very good! Some of these points Dawn made in a similar way in her essay on this site, but you've got a different angle on them. Others are new to me.
Many, many years ago, I wrote an essay on Finarfin (it is in the References section here) that arrived at a similar conclusion, although it came from a more defensive place: At the time, Finarfin-the-wimp was a very common trope in Tolkienfic, and I was sick of it, believing the arguments that you advance here that Finarfin was actually a character of deliberate, considered, and courageous choices. In particular, his willingness to oversee a shattered people plunged into darkness--a natural disaster beyond anything we can imagine--doesn't suggest someone who was weak or traitorous or indecisive, but someone who was willing to take on a very difficult task without the side order of renown and glory that his brothers earned for themselves.
I loved the fairytale parallel, which I'd never thought of before. I agree with you that I doubt Tolkien chose and wrote this parallel intentionally, but it's wholly possible that it could have been on his mind (or in the back of his mind, where he wasn't fully aware of it but knew that the story clicked in a way that was very pleasing). I think you hit the nail on the head in noting the difference in endings: In "On Fairy-stories," Tolkien notes that it is not the similarities between stories that he finds interesting but the ways in which they differ and what that difference means. I agree with you that I think it has a lot of meaning here.
I've never interpreted the "high prince" remark as a slight to Finarfin; I assumed that the title went to the eldest son and heir. Since Finwe has two eldest sons by two different queens, it would belong to Feanor and Fingolfin but not Finarfin. The very fact that Melkor could so easily capitalize on Feanor's anxiety over the succession has always suggested to me that the Noldorin succession (if there even was such a thing, but I've always gone with the assumption that Finwe would one day wish to abdicate and pass his crown on to one of his children; this is one of the perils of trying to impose a medieval-style succession on an immortal people! :) wasn't unequivocally in Feanor's favor, that doubts had been raised over who should take over Finwe in the case of abdication (or perhaps that they should share the throne). In any case, that's always been the explanation I've assumed for why Finarfin seems apart from his brothers in the text.
Ultimately, I think that Finarfin represents values that were important to Tolkien and that are found throughout his work: The humble and the seeming small triumph. Even as I don't think he was without admiration for the Exiles and their "Northern courage" (quite the opposite, in fact), I also don't think that his value system would allow them to be anything but doomed or the allow the triumph of the forceful and the powerful while relegating Finarfin to the merely weak.
As you can hopefully tell by the length of this comment, this was a well done essay that made me think! :)
I love this essay! I'm a big Arafinwe fan and am sad that he doent get enogh love.
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