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 ...
Pride
Create a fanwork using a prompt from an LGBTQIA+ person, choosing from music, art, poetry, and quotations. 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.
Poor Erkenhild, daughter of two worlds and not really at home in either! You brought her inner conflict across in so few words, and I really like that you didn't limit her sense of alienation to Rohan only. That made it very believable to me. And I liked the reconciliatory ending! (If that's what it is. After all, …owyn's and Faramir's offspring might face the same difficulties one day...)
Thank you very much, Lyra! I really appreciate your insightful reviews!
Yes, although moving from Gondor to Rohan might be the change that would trigger a lot of this, I think it likely that the sense of alienation would be something she would feel in both worlds, not only in Rohan. I'm glad it was believable.
And it is meant to be a reconciliatory ending, even if it won't stop others, like Eowyn and Faramir's offspring, from encountering the same problems, maybe. I was trying to hint at that, with the reference to Erkenhild's sisters (not too schematically, I hope). Not everyone would be affected in the same way--and for some, minor feelings of alienation might not be such a great price to pay for the broadening of their horizon.
I've always been fascinated by the ties between Gondor and Rohan and the possible cultural differences and overlaps.
I spent a lot of time digging into the question for purposes of my Third-Age novel The Princess and the Horse Lord, wherein I wanted to take a hard position on what language[s] Eowyn and Eomer might have spoken and how well-educated they would have been by Gondorian standards [very well, I decided!]. At the time, mainly on HASA and ff net, there was a subset of works about Rohan within which fanfic authors posited they were illiterate because the language of the Rohirrim of Rohan was not a written language. I objected.
Here was one of my assertions from my author's notes to that story related to that line of researcg (I was always a geek):
He [David Salo in his book on Sindarin] goes on to note that native Sindarin speakers were largely limited to Minas Tirith and the surrounding area, the Dúnedain of the North and Dol Amroth. He claims that it was most persistently used among Men as a first language in Dol Amroth. He goes on to say "In the last years of the Third Age as a result of the marriage (2943) of Thengel of Rohan to Morwen of Lossanarch (whose family was from Belfalas), Sindarin came to be spoken also by the Kings of Rohan." (He references Peoples of Middle Earth, Return of the King, and Unfinished Tales. I also found references to that effect in Tolkien's letters as well.)
I am insufferable! My point is that I really enjoyed your exploration of these connections and cultural overlap and contrasts/differences in this story!
Thank you very much, Oshun! Glad that this caught your interest! It is an interesting subject, isn't it?
There are hints that there was a bit of cultural backlash to the the pro-Gondorian attitudes and encouragement of Sindarin at Thengel's court. So I suppose it's possible that some nobles of Rohan refused to learn to read or to learn to write, out of principle, and there were clearly some who were reluctant to speak Sindarin. But it doesn't seem very likely that Eomer and Eowyn would have been part of this movement.
I may be wrong about this, but I get the impression that Morwen being ultimately from Belfalas is a post-LOTR revision. Is that right, do you think? The implications of that irritate me just a bit, because I suspect that one of the motivations was that Tolkien decided that Forlong was not poetic enough for major characters to be related to. And I like Forlong, so I'm a bit indignant on his behalf. But I suppose there are ways that Morwen could be related by blood or marriage to Forlong and still be from Belfalas and also related to the Princes of Dol Amroth. And besides, maybe I'm doing Tolkien an injustice and he just wanted to tidy up his ideas about the distribution of Sindarin.
Anyway I left all that very much in the background here!
It's always difficult to belong to two different worlds, two different cultures.
The Rohirrim would see her as an aloof woman, perhaps too refined, too distant. And the Gondoriand would see her as a "wild maiden of the North".
And Morwen is right: perhaps it's harder for a woman. Perhaps it'll be harder for Éowyn, too, in a sense. But she has Faramir. And he makes her feel they are kin.
Yes, I think that is how a daughter of Thengel might be perceived.
It may be harder for a woman--although it could be hard for a man, too. Theoden, the only son, had a role waiting for him in Rohan, of course: the heir and future king.
I was also trying to hint that Morwen, who seems to have impressed the Rohirrim, may herself have found it hard at times. She was a fully grown woman, though, when she left Gondor, so her experience was a bit different from her daughters'.
Thank you for reading and commenting!
oh, I like this a lot!!! :) As an avid reader and writer of both Silmfic and that set in later Ages, I found this to be exciting :) Erkenhild, so betwixt and between...poor Princess! But she links Faramir and Eowyn together in more ways than one. :)
I do hope to see that other ficlet someday!
Thank you very much, Kaylee! Glad you like it and the subject appeals to you!
Yes, Erkenhild links Faramir and Eowyn. I was also interested in speculating what other sources Faramir might have for his views on the history of Gondor and its relation to the rest of Middle-earth, besides conversations with Gandalf and his own reading.
The other ficlet I mentioned was written for the Art's Desire challenge at the LOTR community on LJ, so it will be revealed in a couple of days. It's written from Gleowine's point of view, who doesn't like Erkenhild very much. I found it difficult to get Erkenhild's point of view into the same story--and that is why there are now two, rather different ficlets!
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