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] 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…
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 ...
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.
Short Tales of Arda by grey_gazania
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Blood and Shadows
Thuringwethil takes some time out of her busy schedule to torment a captive Maedhros. A quadruple-drabble.
In the deepest dungeon of Angband, Maedhros woke, dry-mouthed and disoriented, to a darkness more total than he ever believed possible. Cold lips at his chest and sharp teeth tearing into his skin brought him to full awareness, and he cried out, struggling to pull away. But Morgoth's barbed chains held him fast.
"Such spirit, still," hissed a voice, and the darkness receded to reveal burning, bright eyes in a fog-pale face — a woman's face, blood — his blood — smeared across her mouth and staining her teeth. "I am impressed."
"Demon," he croaked, shuddering. A fresh stream of blood ran from the wound, and she bent her head to lap at it. He tried once more to pull away, but she only laughed.
"Unwise, little king," she taunted, with the iron tang of his blood on her breath. "I could kill you."
"You could," he rasped. "But you won't."
One hooked claw skittered lightly over his neck. "You sound so sure…"
In answer, he gathered what little saliva he could and spat at her, and then gasped with pain as her claws raked across his face, more blood spilling down to sting in his eyes. She fisted a hand in his hair and drew his face near, and when she exhaled shadows spilled from her lips to press like damp cloth over his nose and mouth. Panic fluttered in his chest as he struggled to draw breath, but he quashed it and forced himself to still. Surely she would not kill him? If Morgoth wanted him dead, he would have killed him at the false parley.
But as she bent again to feed on his blood and the suffocating shadow wrapped tighter around him, that flutter forced its way out from his control. He couldn't breathe, and he threw himself against the chains in futile desperation, trying to reach her, to reach his face, anything to bring back air. He barely heard her whistling laugh over the thundering of his own panicked heart, and dark oblivion soon claimed him.
Thuringwethil swept her shadows back under her wings before pulling the barbs free from the unresisting elf and licking at his raw wounds. He hung senseless in the chains, wheezing and blood-smeared, but she didn't spare him a glance as she glided from the cell. He would live, and she would be sure to return. Mairon had not lied about this one.
