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…
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
I like the way this investigates one of the really missing areas of the text! The potential for stories about the early relations among Dwarves and Elves is so broad, because so little is there in the canon. It makes sense that Celeborn might be the one to do the ethical thing, and confess what happened.
Thank you! I'm glad you like it. The possible stories are endless, depending on how the author handles it - I mean, you can have the elves reveal it, you can have the dwarves discover it then, you can have the dwarves not discover it, you can have it told after the First Age ends, etc. But I felt like it added to the later betrayal the elves of Doriath must have felt when they realized the Finarfinions hadn't told them about the Kinslaying, because hey, they told the Dwarves, and the Dwarves aren't even their kin. I'm glad it made sense that Celeborn might be the ethical one.
This also throws an interesting light both on what we later see of the attitudes of the elves of Doriath to the elves of Aman and the attitudes of the Dwarves of Nogrod to Thingol and Doriath.
The Elves of Doriath have a reason for believing that the Finarfinions should have told them about the kinslaying. Same for how the Dwarves of Nogrod feel about Thingol and Doriath. :P (The other option is it has no effect ever, and I'd really like to believe that killing almost an entire group would have some effects).
"If something was to happen to them, I would prefer to know the truth instead of pretty lies about their fate. Not speaking of it would only compound the guilt of having killed them, in my view."
Uh-oh...
Very well written account of something that may have gone on behind the scenes, but is never adressed in the book. The parallels between the killing of the petty-dwarves and the Kinslaying make it especially painful.
Wow. Even with the calculation that they're unlikely to be killed, it's still fairly brave of the elves to walk in unarmed to confess their (sins? mistakes? I don't quite know what word to go with here.) I like that the elves acknowledge that there cannot be a sufficient recompense for what they did, since the dead cannot be brought back. The actions of the elves of Doriath also throws a new light on Thingol's anger at the omission of the Kinslaying from the Finarfinions' tale of how they left Valinor.
Thank you! It is brave of the elves - after all, if it goes badly, the fact that there are numerous elves in the forest isn't going to make them any less dead.
Thingol's feelings about the Finarfinions (who he greeted as his own family) not telling him about the Kinslaying are definitely affected by the fact that he allowed Celeborn to go in and tell the truth to the Dwarves, who are not his family and who could have easily killed them for telling the truth. He's not very pleased with lies.
It is a corageous-- and necessary-- thing the Elves did, and yet, as Gunnvör said, it can neither fully repair their relationship nor heal the wound. Very well done and you've given me something to think about.
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.