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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.
(Sorry that it has taken me so long to reply to your comment, which I read and appreciated very much when you left it!)
I do LOVE lighthouses. I was talking about lighthouses with (to??) Bobby this morning, how they make me feel something very like the Elven sea-longing even just to think of them. I think what comes through, rereading with a more critical eye now that the drabble is a few weeks old, is exactly what I love about lighthouses: their liminal place at the cusp of human habitation, beckoning back those who have gone to that most forbidding of places, the sea.
Elwing as a lighthouse keeper has also been niggling at my imagination for a while now too! :D
Thank you so much for reading and commenting--as always! <3
As I love everything you every write, I love this. Wonderful Nerdanel feeling inadequate but completely suited to Feanor. I have never read another Nerdanel but yours.
Aww, thanks! She knows she should not want to journey north with him. But she does. Oh does she. And for all the "wrong" reasons too. (She is not thinking of what she will learn of gemcraft! :^)))
Thank you for reading and commenting! I'm sorry it took so long to repond! ^_^
Perfect. That moment of unrealised trepidation- what have I done? Like biting into the apple from the tree of knowlege- can't be undone, massive ramifications.
Yes, exactly! I love creation myths--so weird, teeming with symbolism, and eerily parallel with scientific theories of cosmogony--and so was *very* much drawing from mythic archetypes here. The Fall archetype isn't one I deliberately put in there, but you're totally right that it's there (and one that I find very Tolkienish too!)
Thank you! I wanted something evocative of that clammy, damp feeling of stone but also pale and maybe a little luminous ... I'm glad you noted this particular modifier because I liked it myself! :D
Thank you! A bit of humanity reaches through the distance and the animalistic aloofness--or that's what I was going for, so it's good to see it came through for you! :D 100 words is *really* constricting!
Ok-0 this is the ONLY fic ever to make me feel sorry for Elwing or accept that she might have had a valid reason for not handing the damn thing over. I can forgive her if it was this.
I think it was! I am the rare Feanatic who thinks she should have given the damned thing back but also has sympathy for Elwing (perhaps triggered by my recognition that Earendil doesn't bear *nearly* the scorn from fandom as Elwing does and blossoming there into something like empathy for the situation she was in). I tend to see her as pushed into a pretty tough situation for someone so very young (and already traumatized too). She's really a fascinating character to me!
Anyway! I did not mean this to turn into a thesis on how I see Elwing. ^_^ Thank you for taking a chance on a drabble about a character not-your-favorite and leaving a comment!
Thank you! The idea of Elwing as a lighthouse keeper (in Valinor, after Earendil goes on Silmaril duty in Vingilote) has been picking at the edge of my imagination for *months* now, and this was a first overture into looking at how that might have come to pass.
I loved the second one right away and everything about it: the windfalls, the scene, the memory, Fingon's response.
The first has gorgeous descriptions and I felt the heat! I had to look up marula to work out whether it was a real fruit or an invented one. So I learned something.
I just learned about it myself! As the endnotes say, I heard about it on "The Great British Baking Show" and looked it up to learn more.
The windfalls were much more comfortable territory: gathering wild windfall apples to make cider or jelly is an autumn ritual here. I really liked the parallels and contrasts between them, in part because the marula felt distant enough to belong more in Valinor versus the comfortable and imperfect world of windfalls.
(Never mind Maedhros himself as a sort of windfall! XD)
Thank you! I had to go back and reread it because I'm the world's worst author who cannot even remember what happens in her own frickin stories ... I think I probably did imagine Formenos! In the Felakverse, he spends A LOT of time there (cementing the loyalty of the Northern Noldor compared to Fingolfin and accounting for his followers after the Darkening). So yeah. Let's go with Formenos! :D
I researched it too before writing this! It's interesting because I liked the "Marula" ficlet so much more that I almost didn't include "Windfall," but the comments so far seem to prefer "Windfall" ... definitely a reminder about why not to listen to that little negative voice that gets louder when it comes time to post! :D
The first is delicious and playful, while the second feels warming and homely (exactly what Maedhros needs). Also bringing back memories of tasting different ciders in Bristol last year (a new one every evening, not all of them at once!) - feels like a different world now.
When those Amarula commercials first started appearing here, I thought they were making things up! Elephant tree liqueur, yeah right. I have by now come to understand that the marula tree actually exists, but have yet to find out what the fruit tastes like. As such, I relate very much to Maedhros' initial "it's a myth" statement! :D
As far as I know the "marula" liquor does not exist here, but I heard about it on "The Great British Baking Show," and I loved the "urban legend" feel to it and it seemed a perfect fit for what I was trying to do here. :D
Thanks for reading and commenting, Lyra! (And yeah, ordinary things--going to the movies, eating breakfast at a diner counter--seem part of another world already.)
I am so sorry to hear of your loss, Dawn. I lost my older brother earlier this year to cancer (before this virus thank god) and the grief is very present. Your celebration of him seems fond and fitting. We have to remember the good times.
And this is just gorgeous- as always. But the wind did not rise. "Myth or no," Findekáno said, offering the fruit to Nelyo's lips as he might a kiss, "it's supposed to be delicious."
sigh.
And the containment of Fingon in the second- 'so many things' -indeed yes.
Aww, Ziggy, I'm sorry for the loss of your brother too. This has just been an awful year for deaths already (covid aside!) Many fandom people have lost close family due to non-virus-related causes, on top of the stress of living during a pandemic.
Thank you for reading and, always, for you kind comments. <3
Oh wow- this is spectacular- viewed from high above, the sense of the impervious nature of the eagle and yet,and yet, he stoops. My heart stopped with love like his. (sniff)
First and ONLY time I have EVER felt a trace of sympathy for Elwing- and it packs a bit of a punch to be honest, I almost forgive her....her blindness to how wrong this is and how she endangers her people and family. How she betrays those little boys of hers. (Your fault I feel this- AMC- my greatest love.)
Whilst I, like Caranthir, was hoping for something more glorious and homely (I love that line wiating for the moment when HOME became a ruin - rellay captures that dreadful anticipation and longing), it is right that Formenos is like this.
This piece! I love the way Pengolodh is more curious than cautious, observing events more than being swept up in them. He even seems somewhat excited for the opportunity to glimpse the two youngest Fëanoreans. And then his realisation that his characterisations of them had nonetheless been just as inaccurate, only in the opposite way. And, in the midst of fighting, Ambarussa's concern that the tale be told... A lovely view of events at Sirion.
Thank you! I've been writing Pengolodh for a long time (he is also a major subject of my academic work). At first, when I got the prompt ("meeting or speaking with a son of Feanor"), I didn't know that I could do it, not because the prompt was hard but because I'd actually written several meetings with Feanorions and Pengolodh already and didn't want to repeat (or contradict!) myself. Sirion seemed a nice solution to that (all other meetings had been before Turgon's people went to Gondolin).
Same with the twins; I researched them fairly recently for a biography, and Tolkien gives us very little about them and never seems to have settled on a characterization. I like to imagine that's because the historians (i.e., mostly Pengolodh) just didn't know!
Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.