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] No Time Have I by Flora-lass
A Silmarillion acrostic.
[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] 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 ...
Pride
Create a fanwork using a prompt from an LGBTQIA+ person, choosing from music, art, poetry, and quotations. 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.
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.
Scribbles & Drabbles 2024
A chill Tolkien event, where artists make art, and authors write little stories in response. Begins in June and ends in November.
I applaud your courage in writing about cannibalism and I was fascinated by your take on it. You made the reasons for doing it make sense. And I really loved your description of Feanor's death - I loved that you wrote he offered words of comfort before he died.
A really good fic - I enjoyed it immensely!
Thank you so much! When I first read the bingo card, the idea for this fic immediately jumped to mind, but I delayed writing it because of the subject, Even after I'd finished this, I waited a few days, debating whether to post it or not. But in the end, it was a prompt on the bingo card and it wouldn't have been put on there if the subject was unwanted.
I am glad it made sense to you - to me the fic is all over the place (I almost never write such timeskips, nor make a 'they' the subject instead of a 'he/she'), but I am quite satisfied with how it turned out.
As for Fëanor, I don't think he was afraid of death and pain never made much impression on him, so he had a clear mind and said what his Sons needed to hear (I almost deleted the canonical part where he cursed Morgoth!)
You make it conceivable that that might be a way they would react to the trauma they were unable to deal with--the death first of Finwe and then of Feanor and finally their brothers. Canon sometimes seems to treat the seven brothers as a single entity and they might look at it that way themselves and take things very literally...
(Of course, that observation that other deaths don't count is pretty damning--however, traumatized they are.)
I think the Sons are both mentally incredibly strong and very weak - if hte right buttosn are pushed, they will resort to practically anything. And I don't know if this is canon or just too much fanfiction that I've read, but it seems that the House of Fëanor, even before the rift within the Noldor, has always been treated separately from the Houses of Fingolfin and Finarfin; therefore, it wouldn't be too far a stretch that they see themselved as separate from the rest of the Noldor and by extension, the same as each other.
The thing about being so in-tune with your brothers results almost automatically in being relatively out-of-tune with the rest of the world, and indeed the happenings during the First Age only strenghtened that feeling...
A taboo story worthy of the categorization! Impressive handling of a disturbing subject. As those who know me well might tell you, I can be a delicate little snowflake when it comes to horror. I don't watch Hannibal, either!
But I have done some small amount of anthropological reading on the subject. So I am not totally unfamiliar with the real world versions (do not know how accurate or reliable they are necessarily) of what are said to have been some social and religious reasons for eating the flesh of deceased loved ones, for example in the highlands of New Guinea. I wondered if you were influenced by those reports of cannibalism being considered an act of love and grief and perferable to the deceased being consumed by insects or worms.
Yep. This story for me definitely addresses a big taboo. I was shuddering as I finished it, and horrified at thinking one could almost understand Maglor's logic and sense of duty/responsibility to stay alive for his father and his brothers.
Haha, concerning horror topics, I have no problem reading it, but I'm as squeamish as anything when seeing it on TV! I've recently watched the zombie show Z Nation though, so I am forcing myself to get over (some of) those things.
While I have only heard about the practices in New Guinea in passing, I cannot claim to have come up with it by myself; in Queen of the Damned, the third book in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the Story of the Twins tells how in their ancient civilisation it was custom to eat the flesh of family after they'd died. Although I must add that there, the flesh was first cooked before it was eaten.
Cannibalism is one of the biggest taboos imaginable; I think that's exactly the reason why I had to write it, or put differently, why my muse could not let go of this particular plotbunny. I am glad (?) it made such an impact and that you were able to understand Maglor's view; I mean, after having lost absolutely everything and everyone, he had to have a reason to keep going, and I think this is a possible explanation (assuming, of course, the cannibalism thing happened in canon! Though I really hope it didn't...)
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