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…
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
Holiday Party
No matter if you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, it's a time of year to think about holidays. Whether you're bundling up in blankets or slipping a swimsuit into your suitcase, we invite you to an SWG holiday party! 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.
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.
Wow! What a really interesting concept. Good luck to Celebrian on her project! What we preserve and we lose is a fascinating topic to me. The recovery of oral traditions has always intrigued me. One of my brother's best friends spent decades working on that sort of thing, beginning as a very young man with becoming an expert on Child ballads collected in Indiana and Kentucky in the late 19th and early 20th century and moved on to studying other folklore and trivia than had never been collected in print. I always thought it was a wonderful career choice.
Thanks! Celebrian will need the luck. :P It's a fascinating topic to me as well - one of my friends hopes to study folklore if she gets to attend grad school. While I'm not studying folklore directly, it's all over anthropology since there's so much we don't know (and in a lot of cases, have little to no hope of ever actually recovering knowledge of). There's just so much that we have bits and pieces of and so much we've entirely lost, and then there's the stuff we have but don't know if we're reading the same way the people who originally said it would have. Your brother's friend's career choice seems wonderful to me as well.
Well, that's going to be a massive challenge! Good luck to Celebrían! If I were Elrond, I'd marry her on the spot ;). I can't help wishing that she finds some way not only of fixing the elements of the performance, beyond the mere words, but also of reconstructing the way in which the poems of long-dead people were recited. What a great story idea!
Thank you! Celebrían definitely has her fair share of work ahead of her! Honestly, while I was writing this I was thinking "And here is the point at which Elrond falls in love, because she is as dedicated to knowledge and lore as he is, if not more so". If she doesn't figure out how before she leaves M-e to reconstruct them, I'm sure she can find somebody in Valinor who knows how to view the past with a palantír or something. :P Or push Námo to let Celebrimbor out, so she can work on some new invention with him that will let her not only view the past, but also record it...
This actually makes a very good point that I had not considered, so thank you for making me think (and I might steal Celebrían's purpose for coming to Imladris in a fic at some point - it's way better than the hodgepodge excuse in my head xD)
Thank you! I'm glad it makes a good point, and feel free to steal her purpose for a fic. I literally only thought of her doing this because she's one of the few female characters that appears to move somewhere with no real reason, and I needed someone to move in and get access to new documents. :P
That's an extremely interesting project. After all, language seems to have changed, so no doubt performance practices did as well, especially with so much war and migration, so that it is not only texts that were lost.
Celebrian joins Daeron, Feanor and Rumil as inventors...
I like your description of that page: "Maglor’s sprawling handwriting twisting around Caranthir’s cramped hand, asking questions that remained unanswered"
Exactly - if it was just the texts, that'd be one thing. But in addition to texts, there's probably entire cultures gone. And that's something that in our real world is painful but we have to deal with, but I don't think it would make as much sense in an immortal culture for all memory/knowledge of entire cultures to just vanish.
She does. :D She would probably get along quite well with all three, if they could move past everything else.
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.