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.
SWG News
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.
New & Updated Fanworks
[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] 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…
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Random Challenge
Laws and Customs
Place the a law, custom, or tradition of Middle-earth as the focus of a fanwork. Read more ...
New in References
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.
Beyond the Silmarillion
[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.
Around the World and Web
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.
Fallen through the Cracks by Himring
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Chapter 1
Lalwen cautiously shuffled across the ice, attempting to watch straight ahead and out of the corners of her eyes at the same time for any sign of an insidious incipient crack.
Despite all her efforts to windproof her clothing, the chill of the Helcaraxe slid icy fingers in through even the tiniest gap. Lalwen’s last proper meal had been so long ago that her stomach had forgotten what it felt like. But, even so, those weren’t Lalwen’s main concerns. The ice underneath seemed reassuringly solid, opaque and white, but…
She had tried to drop a hint in her brother’s ear. But Fingolfin hadn’t really listened. Half his mind was always on Feanor, now, and the rest was preoccupied, also: with Father’s death, with the bloody shambles at Alqualonde, with Mandos’s Prophecy and the desertion of Finarfin... And with Morgoth, of course.
Lalwen had been more direct with Aredhel. She owed her niece a warning at least. But Aredhel , too, was preoccupied, tracking, shepherding Turgon and Idril, hunting whenever there was anything to hunt, trapping and fishing if she had a chance—too busy to take a step back and see the larger picture. The look she had given Lalwen, as she hesitantly expounded her theory, was easy to interpret: she thought recent events had driven her aunt round the bend.
And so maybe they had—those events were enough, surely, to drive anyone mad. But as her brother Feanor had so effectively demonstrated, raving paranoia didn’t mean there was nobody at all out to get you…
It had started with Elenwe: a sudden crack, without warning, opening up directly under her feet and swallowing her up. But she had only been the first. Lalwen’s sister Faniel was the next to go, gulped down by the Ice and once again without warning. The wives of Maglor and Caranthir, poor things—abandoned by their father-in-law in Araman together with the rest, in retribution for a few pointed remarks about boat theft and kinslaying—had been swallowed up together. And others had gone: last of all—only yesterday perhaps, but it was so difficult to measure time out here—Edhellos, Angrod’s wife.
All women. The ice of the Helcaraxe, for its own inscrutable reasons, was out to get only the women among the Noldor—and it was prepared to cheat to get at them. Edhellos had been extra careful, after Lalwen had had a little talk with her. There really was no way that ice beneath her feet ought to have cracked, not where she was standing at the time, and certainly not without taking Angrod along with her…
Crack.
Oh no. She had been so cautious, but she had not been cautious enough.
Lalwen saw a deep crack racing toward her where only a moment before, to all appearances, the ice had been solid enough to refuse to yield even to an ice pick. The crack circled neatly around Ecthelion—giving away the game completely if anyone had had eyes to notice—and headed straight for Lalwen. Beneath her feet, the treacherous slippery surface tilted, jogging her off balance so that she began to slide, and then simply tipped her straight into the yawning chasm.
Down. Down, down, down, past gleaming bizarre ice formations, right and left, that offered no hold or way to break her fall. Lalwen braced herself for the final impact, which must surely be imminent, knowing how useless it was…
***
It was the colours that struck her first. Everything had been dark for so long, drained of colour, even before they had entered the Helcaraxe and its infinite whiteness. Then all had been night and ice: charcoal on blank paper. Here there was blue. There was green.
The blue was sky, but not as she had known it. The green was grass. The light was not the Light of the Trees. It came from a source in the sky. A driver in a chariot pulled by horses?
She did not think this could be the Halls of Mandos.
There were anemones waving in the grass at her feet.
***
‘It really is quite a fortuitous coincidence, your arrival at this time’, said Queen Hippolyta.
She was wearing a slightly wilted wreath of anemones and narcissi. Apparently, they had arrived during a local festival celebrating the beginning of spring. But that was not what Hippolyta meant.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I have no idea where this Valinor of yours is. I have never heard of it—or of the other places you mention. I can see no way for you to return there. But you are very welcome to stay. There was peace all winter—nobody cares to try and cross the snowbound steppe in force. But now spring has come, the ways are open again and we could really use a few reinforcements… ’
They were rather more exiled than they had bargained for, thought Lalwen, hugging the distraught Elenwe to her side. Well, they had wanted to see foreign lands and had been prepared for danger and adventure, hadn’t they? They would have to make the best of it they could. And maybe, just maybe, in this place, which was so clearly not in Arda, they weren’t cursed or doomed?
Her gaze fell on her sister Faniel, who was looking rather dreamy and not as upset as she might have been. Here was one who would adjust more quickly than the rest of them, Lalwen thought. She had seen how Faniel eyed the Queen’s sister Antiope and was eyed by her in return. That might be one problem solved, at least. Lalwen had been worrying about Faniel for some time…
***
‘How did it go in Scythia?’ asked Pirithous.
‘Don’t ask!’ snapped Theseus and stalked off in a huff, muttering.
Pirithous caught something that sounded like ‘seven foot tall’ and ‘flaming eyes’, but thought he had probably misheard—although there were some really wild rumours making the rounds about the Amazons and they seemed to have been getting wilder...
‘Well, scratch that, then,’ he thought and felt more relieved than he would have liked to admit.
For some reason, he had never been very happy with Theseus’s idea of carrying off an Amazon bride—seven foot tall or no. There were so many other heroic deeds that he and Theseus could embark on—just the two of them together…
Chapter End Notes
There are a number of different versions of the story of Theseus, Hippolyta and her sister Antiope in antiquity. But apparently in all of them the Amazons get more of a raw deal than is evident from the later allusions in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. It seemed worth sending in a few AU reinforcements to nip all of Theseus's plans in the bud. Whatever training the Noldorin ladies did not already have, the Amazons could provide...
Faniel is (just about) canonical, although HoME has nothing to say about her sexual orientation, I believe. The pairing Theseus / Pirithous, on the other hand, is canonical--sort of.
