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] 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…
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Middle-earth Olympics
Complete Olympic events Middle-earth style! 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.
Okay, I'm impressed! :D My mind is reeling at the thought of writing without certain vowels. Very well done, insightful ficlets that don't suffer for the challenge you've undertaken here.
Thank you, Dawn! I am pleased you like them! I am surprised at how they turned out, considering it was such a weird experiment, and I had never written short pieces, I never know when to stop! After doing the first one, I began the second one and then it took a while for the idea to do the lot so that I could contribute to the "Five Things" theme!
These are well-done little ficlets, each one packs a bang within the short space. I got a big kick out of all the things that didn't happen to Sauron. Enjoyed your imagery, "writhe like dark snakes," as well as the sly humor. I think my favorite is Call to Aman, but yeah I quite enjoyed Thranduil getting one over on him too. Even without the challenge you set yourself of not using words with certain vowels, these would be good. I wouldn't have even noticed if you hadn't pointed it out. I think the challenge might have caused you to think about the word usage more and so it added rather than taking away from the little stories.
Thank you, elfscribe! I am so very pleased you enjoyed them!
I am not sure which one is my favourite. The ring one was the most difficult, but Thranduils's was the first one I wrote, and slashy too, so I was rather pleased with myself. Then, Call to Aman was done without "e", which is allegedly the hardest, so that one was a little triumph on its own. And Pharazon one, well, it had to be done!
Yes, I certainly had to think every word of the text, which is surely a very sensible thing to do, with or without challenges on missing letters.
Reposting my Mefa review here:
A very clever set of ficlets each of which packs a bang within the short space. Not only do they depict five things that didn’t happen to Sauron (and each one made me smile, I so enjoy Russa’s sly humor) but Russandol added an extra challenge of not using a certain vowel in each ficlet. If she hadn’t said that’s what she was doing, I’d have never have noticed because the language flows quite well. I enjoyed the imagery [“From the high stone city walls, Annatar watched two large birds of prey circling majestically above the plains. The cool breeze played with the loose strands of his black hair, making them writhe like dark snakes.”] I can’t pick a favorite out of the five, although I must say I did enjoy Thranduil’s little bit of manipulation. Knowing Russa's Sauron from her marvelous "Chasing Mirages" fic gave these ficlets an added bit of spice.
I'm so pleased you like them! I'm not sure I have a favourite either. Folly at the Sammath Naur and Call to Aman were the hardest by far compared to the others, so I felt proud of completing them. The kinky Thranduil was a victory (not just for him) because it was the first one I wrote and a bed scene.
Thank you very much for your posting your review here, otherwise I guess the comments get lost at the MEFA site after nthe new year starts.
Wow, that was amazing! Was it hard to write? I admit I couldn’t help checking if you really hadn’t use the vowel you shouldn’t have, because each little drabble flowed so well it was hard to remember you had restrictions while writing them.
I take this as little Aus from “Chasing Mirages”, because this Sauron has the same feeling your Mairon has. The first one, Lies in Eregion, actually seems like it could fit very well in your story… what he says about the eagle giving him a lift, it’s like he’s telling Eönwë’s story to fool Celebrimbor.
While all of them were interesting, I think my favourite was the second one. Making the Ring seems like such a stupid idea when you put it like that… And really, Sauron was such a great manipulator that he could have ruled most of Middle Earth if he had retained his subtlety. Trying to copy Morgoth was doomed to fail.
And of course, the last one. Not because of all the suffering Sauron caused, but because no one can convince my “Chasing Mirages” isn’t what really happened, and I want Mairon and Eönwë to be happy together.
Seriously, great job!
Oooh, thank you, Alasse! Yes, this is my Mairon from Chasing Mirages, I had already written the first ten-twelve chapters at the time, though I had only begun to post them, so he and I were well acquainted by then. They are indeed AUs from that story, though you they also fit as AUs in the original canon, and you don't need to have read Mirages to follow these ones. Believe me, I did not accidentally slip any of the "missing" letters, I checked. It was hard to do but fun, having to think of each single word, however tiny. The Ring story was one of the hardest. No "i" for "ring" or for "it". The one without the "e" was tricky, too.
I had great difficulty reconciling Sauron's clever, subtle seduction of the elves in Eregion and the Númenóreans with some of the really unbelievable (i.e. stupid) things he did, not so much making the Ring, where he grossly miscalculated, but at least he thought he was gaining something in return, but mainly during the Third Age. Tolkien gave us the hints of a great backstory only to turn him into a very pathetic stereotype of a villain in Lord of the Rings. I love the story, don't get me wrong, but it would have been so much better if his Sauron had been as cunning there as in the past.
You want Mairon and Eönwë to be happy together? Ay, so do I. At the moment, that's looking highly unlikely, pero quién sabe...
This was a really cool idea on all levels. I love especially the second ficlet with the destruction of the Ring, when he drank back the power ... what a stunning image!
I must switch on notifications for comments, unless they are the default and I missed the message in all the excitement of the site rebuild. Thank you, Dawn!
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