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 ...
Random Challenge
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 ...
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.
Subscribe to the SWG Newsletter
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.
this was a great glimpse at life on the Helcaraxe. Love the use of the song, and everyone's characterisations. Finrod and Fingon are some of my favourite elves. Turgon was suitably maudlin...
I've enjoyed this more than anything I've read in quite a while. I loved your Finrod - sometimes oblivious but eternally hopeful and well meaning - loved all of them. (Anyhow, there is no way I couldn't enjoy a story containing the line *my little sister invented unfreezable shampoo*). I wish there was more, feel that I've just got to know these people and they're wonderful.
Some of your touches are really inspired, things like Aredhel as a healer, the way they divided the time into waking and sleeping periods by the stars. Enjoyed the mix of humour and the more serious, and found the differences between the Noldor and Telerin way of looking at music. and that you could no more own a song than you could a child, wonderfully authentic. I live in Africa, so the concept of music belonging to everyone, where how it feels matters more than getting it 'right', resonates.
The bear fight was very well written. Poor Teleporno - he tries but he's not good at the 'hero' thing, I guess. I liked that you brought him along, it was another of those touches that appealed to me. The end of the bear fight - Galadriel the Brave and Fingon the Valiant, indeed - was absolutely, perfectly right and showed the real power of the Eldar in action --- working with light, not darkness. And the end hurt my heart. Thank you for posting here. Finding this made my day.
Thank you so much! I'm really glad my characterizations worked for you, and I'm so happy to hear that the music stuff came across as authentic--I'm a musician myself, and was definitely thinking about the divide in attitudes between Western classical traditions and the folk traditions of so many other cultures.
I'm also relieved you liked Teleporno--I actually like him a lot, and don't think it's fault that he's not very good in a fight. (I certainly wouldn't be!)
This was a great story. You made all the characters feel relatable, yet still very Elvish - which isn't easy!
I particularly liked Finrod's moral uncertainty about eating seals. As an on-again, off-again vegetarian myself, it rang very true! Perhaps Finrod later had a discussion about this with Beren, and that's why Beren became vegetarian?
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I have no doubt that, when they meet, Finrod will be DELIGHTED to talk, at length, about Beren's vegetarianism, and all the pros and cons associated with it!
To continue--some of the things I like about this:
That you found space for so many of them! Many Helcaraxe fics I've read basically feature an exchange between two characters (or even the monologue of one) and the rest are mostly background--which is actually fair enough, but it's still lovely to see more group dynamics: Aredhel and Galadriel come across as vividly as Finrod and Fingon. It also well reflects the breadth of Finrod's sympathies.
The music theme! The description of Telerin music partly reminds me of what I've heard of Indian ragas, but other things also.
Polar bear maiar and seal poets!
And your hunting scene really works as action.
(There would be more--but I'm running out of steam and also time...)
Thank you so much! I've noticed the same thing about many Helcaraxe fics--people tend to write vignettes and introspective pieces, which perhaps fits better with Tolkien's descriptions of the trip as unmitigatedly terrible experience... But I had a lot of fun writing scenes with characters who, later in the book, won't have much to do with each other.
I'm glad that you enjoyed the music theme (that's really a compliment coming from you, you write music stuff so well!), and that it suggested something a bit beyond traditional Western music. Thanks again for commenting twice!
This is a glorious story! A more effusive review will be forthcoming when I have a real keyboard in front of me. For now, I will simply say I enjoyed this immensely.
This was really well done! It's been ages since I have read a really good, plotty standalone. I really liked the sense of community you managed to bring. Great job!
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.