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
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 ...
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.
Pale Stars Rising (Over The Oaks) by The Wavesinger
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Pale Stars Rising (Over The Oaks)
When the girl wandered into the clearing, a woman stood there, a tall, beautiful woman with golden hair, and she was singing. The song was in a language the girl had never heard, and it was beautiful, so beautiful that tears rose to her eyes, and it seemed as if the trees danced with her, and the grass around her feet swayed to her tune in a breeze that did not blow.
The girl's eyes closed of her own accord, and she took a step forward. A twig snapped.
The woman turned, and it seemed to the girl that she had been frozen in place with a glance from blue eyes the colour of clear, pale waters leaping in a spring. She could not move. She dared not breath. The woman stared.
And then she laughed, and the spell was broken. “No creature of the Dark are you, fair young one, no creature of the Dark are you. You would do well to warn of your arrival, then, to those who fear the Dark.” Whether she spoke in the girl's tongue or some magic enabled the girl to hear her, the girl never knew.
In spite of herself, the girl felt anger flair. “I'm a hunter. Stealth's something I need.”
“But I am not your prey,” the lady rejoined. “I'm not your prey, my beautiful child of the twilight, daughter of Men, mortal girl. I won't harm you.”
“Won't you?” The woman was dangerous; that much was clear to the girl. But dangerous to herself? She did not know.
“I will not, child,” the woman said.
The girl took a step towards her. “Tell me who you are, then.”
“River-Daughter I am in this place. Daughter of the river, mother of the river. Everything at once.”
The enigmatic answer was clue enough; the girl nodded decisively. “You are one of the Great Ones, then.”
“If you speak of the Powers—I am, yet am not.” The woman smiled, again, but it seemed to the girl that there was a deep, ageless sadness in her eyes.
“And why not?”
“Because I have sinned,” said the woman, “in their eyes.”
“How?”
“By loving my sister too well; once she was one of us, and when she fell to the Dark, I couldn't condemn her, my heart-sister, my dearest sibling. And so I was condemned.”
The girl tilted her head curiously (and wondered, distantly, why she did not flee at this revelation, but she knew the answer: her people had dabbled in the Dark, with the Evil One, and now fled the horror. This woman had no touch of evil.). “To what? This is a beautiful place; if your punishment's to stay here, that's not punishment at all.”
The woman shook her head. “Hasty child. I never said this was my punishment.”
“Then what is it?”
The woman smiled. “That I cannot tell you. But this isn't a dreary prison; this where my heart is. I love the woods, and I love this land.”
“Doesn't mean you're not lonely,” the girl pointed out.
A shadow flashed across the woman's face, gone as quick as it came. “So I am, sometimes. So I am.”
“Can I stay with you?” The girl blinked; she did not know herself what she meant to say until the words were spoken. But once they were, the girl suddenly understood that they were the perfect truth. She would stay here, with this woman, for all eternity if she could.
“No.” The woman shook her head. “It is kind of you to offer, but you cannot.”
“Why not?”
“You have a great destiny ahead of you. I cannot keep you from it,” the woman whispered. “But we'll see each other again, twice. That I can promise.”
The girl nodded. Then, again, an unbidden question. “Can I kiss you?”
“Yes.”
And the girl flew to the woman, and they kissed, a kiss tasting of honey and sunlight and flowers. And when it was ended, the woman pressed her lips to the girl's brow. “Goodbye, hunter. Until our next meeting.”
And the girl nodded. “Until our next meeting.” And then she walker away, and when she turned back, the woman was not there.
Chapter End Notes
I knew as soon as I saw this prompt that I had to write this, because I love the idea of Goldberry as a kind of Middle-earth Calypso, and I'm sorry it doesn't have more femslash! Goldberry's sister who fell, in case anyone's curious, is Thuringwethil.
