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] 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…
[Artwork] Map of Valinor by Aprilertuile
My newly drawn map of Aman, as complete as I could make it.
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Random Challenge
Season's Greetings
Create a fanwork in which one (or several) of the holidays of Middle-earth plays a role. 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.
Outsiders of Gondolin Mutual Defence League by Himring
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Prologue
Aredhel and Maeglin leave Nan Elmoth; their ill-fated arrival in Gondolin.
A drabble sequence, perhaps to be expanded.
White in the Sunshine
He stepped out of the eaves of the forest and blinked, squinting over the plain. Behind him, he heard her breathe out deeply, like a sigh. He turned and saw her stand tall in the sunlight.
As a child I thought it was just the way things were. All our secrets were games we played, never a conspiracy against the jailer. That is what she wanted me to see, so much that she had lost sight of the truth herself, perhaps.
Only when I grew up, made my own bid for freedom, did I see how she had been held.
Outside Gondolin
In the middle of a wilderness of rocks, Aredhel stopped. ‘I must change.’ She took off the dun kirtle she had taken from her chest when Maeglin first spoke of flight and stood revealed in white again. Maeglin watched, bewildered.
‘They might not know me, in such a novel manner of dress,’ she explained. He detected reluctant shame in her face. It was unanticipated; his heart lurched, fearing she was ashamed of him, too.
She caught his wrist, strongly. ‘You are my son, my son’, she said. ‘But stay safe, stay behind me, until we are sure of our welcome.’
At last, they stood at the foot of the cliff.
‘Here,’ said Aredhel, indicating the mouth of the tunnel.
‘Here?’ echoed Maeglin, and although it was he who had urged the destination of their flight at the outset, suddenly he was in doubt, wishing that they could have ridden on together, fast and free in the sunlight, just the two of them, without stopping anywhere at all.
‘Is there no other way?’ he asked, hesitantly.
‘This is the way.’ She shivered, in her thin white dress. ‘A new life, for you! And I will be right beside you,’ she said.
A Cold Thought
Mother’s boy.
‘You shall be my guide and I shall be your guard,’ he had promised her but, in the end, it was she who had to guard him from attack, she who had intercepted the sudden javelin and the double death it bore—dead, for his sake, before she had even spoken long to those she had missed.
He tried to think only of her, not of the other, of him, but could not help knowing that before the hot anger and violence, there must have been another, colder moment, when the javelin’s point had been dipped in poison.
‘It is efficient,’ he had said, during one of their journeys, when Maeglin asked cautiously about the use of poison (because Mother had said only orcs…?).
What game needed hunting so efficiently, on the trail of his wife and his son? Not merely resentment flaring momentarily in the face of insult, then!
The poison of that knowledge entered deep into the bone, until Maeglin was cold, colder than his mother’s corpse before him.
‘If I had been able to say to Turgon, the next day: that is my father? But I could not nor fit my mouth around the words.’
Chapter End Notes
Notes on White in the Sunshine
1 x 100 words in MS Word.
Written for the prompt "White Lady" at Tolkien Weekly.
As is evident from elsewhere in my stories, I'm inclined to take a dark view of "not wholly unwilling".
I do understand the motives of those who detect Noldorin prejudice and want to write a revisionist account.
Notes on Outside Gondolin:
Aredhel's white dress canonically allows the pursuing Eol to find their tracks again at this point and has drawn comment. According to my take on the situation here, she wasn't wearing it out of carelessness, vanity or other reasons that have been suggested, but because she was worried that the guards of Gondolin would not recognize her otherwise. Certainly, Voronwe later on is very concerned that both Tuor and he will be killed as they approach Gondolin (his anxiety is emphasized in the version in the Unfinished Tales), so even at this earlier date there might appear to be a risk.
2 x 100 words according to Word.
Written for two prompts of the New Challenge at Tolkien Weekly on LiveJournal: new clothes, new life.
Notes on Cold Thought:
Tolkien 100 prompt: Cold be Hand and Heart and Bone
