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 ...
Dear Irmo
Historians trace the first advice column to 1690, and in the three centuries hence, the heartsore, woebegone, and perpetually puzzled have turned to these "agony aunts" (and uncles) to solve their most debilitating dilemmas about family, work, and of course, love. Choose one of our real advice columns, tweaked just slightly, for your prompt. 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.
*hugs you, and hugs this fic* I already rambled to you at length about how much I love this - the image of Idril in the ivy garden will stay with me for a long time, I think, in fact the whole scene will - so I'll spare you further ramblings and say thank you - again. ♥
Astris, I thoroughly enjoyed this short story! Your Aredhel has such a wonderfully strong, confident voice (as one might expect) and yet, you show her vulnerability and uncertainty, too. I really like how you've built the concept of the gilded cage of Gondolin (that's certainly how I see it, too): beautiful, elegant, but also claustrophobic with the spectres of stasis and stagnation looming in the background. Aredhel's desire for freedom, but her loyalty to her brother and her affection for her niece clearly cause conflict.
I loved the interactions between brother and sister and aunt and niece. The latter two seem more attuned to one another.
At any rate, very nice work!
Thank you very much! I'm glad you like my Aredhel (I like her too - and she's rather fun to write!).
I greatly enjoyed this story. Aredhel is wonderful. Beautifully characterized, complex and not perfect either, but a decent person, with a good heart who does not shut her brain off, even when she makes choices based upon the needs of others, while making a conscious decision to subvert her own interests. But there is a sense of her, lacking positive alternatives, she recognizes that there are people she cares to support.
I never really examined the idea that Idril might have felt as trapped in Gondolin as Aredhel did. Maybe for slightly different reasons. I was wondering as I was reading it if it actually passed the Bechtel test. (I am not as in love with that idea as most of my friends might think I should be--but that's a discussion for another place.) Actually, I think it does not. We do have a long interaction between two women, extended would perhaps be a better word (because one enjoys it so much that it does not feel long at all), wherein no man is mentioned except briefly in passing. But really it IS all about Turgon--brother and father, idealistic, and perhaps very wrong. And the choices I see Idril and Aredhel making are women's choices.
I know I'm not supposed to think holing up in Gondolin is wrong. Ulmo, a pretty good guy as Vala go, one of ones I like, told him to do it and he does have their interest at heart. Tolkien spent years plotting this out and he would have us believe that Gondolin actually served its purpose. It did protect Idril and bring Idril and Tuor together and save Earendil to give the light of the Silmaril to the world and bring hope to Middle-earth, etc., etc., etc., and all the way down to Arwen and Aragorn. Whatever. Well, I don't buy all of that 100 percent. But I do very much like this story. Because it examines motivations, personal loyalities and relationships, and does raise a lot of questions, unanswered and unanswerable.
Perhaps my favorite part, a small but very telling detail, is when Aredhel figures out how long Turgon has been plotting this city without including her and then asking for her support at the very last possible moment and she still gives it. She has a big heart. I have to love her for that.
Sorry I did not mean to go on so long or make this so contentious. Thanks so much for sharing. Two thumbs up.
Thank you for the wonderfully long review! And I certainly don't mind it - you raise some good points there :)
I think that much of what goes unspoken in Aredhel and Idril's conversation is, in fact, about Turgon. Clearly, Aredhel and Idril's lives at this point in time are greatly influenced by him (they are, after all, living in a hidden city of his devising). And there are many things about Gondolin that make it an interesting place to think about, regardless of whether or not you think it was right!
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