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 ...
Revolution
Create a fanwork using a quotation, artwork, speech, or song concerned with protest and revolution as your inspiration. 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 like your idea of looking at the women from the perspective of motherhood. You bring up some very valid points.
I would say Melian and Morwen break the mold as they are not absent mothers and do carry some narrative weight. But they are only two among so many.
I know Tolkien despised Disney but he does share the absent mother theme that Disney has going on. But of course so many Disney films and stories are fairy tale based.
very interesting read and good points made.
Thanks!
You are absolutely right! I never realised it, but it is the exact same thing that happens with Disney.
This can't be mere coincidence. Really leaves me to wonder what the common denominator is...
I know the lack of women is brought up periodically, but it really is stunning to see all the dead/absent mothers listed out like this. Unlike the elves and Men, Hobbit mothers seem to largely escape the "carnage", though at the price of being reduced to mere names in the appendices. (Three out of four hobbits in the Fellowship had living mothers. And Rosie Cotton does seem to manage a normal lifespan, despite having 13 children. But again, that's all 'off camera'.)
I wonder what was going on in Tolkien's mind to produce this effect. (I can think of multiple potential reasons, but Tolkien himself having lost his mother at a relatively young age is the only one that doesn't involve some degree of sexism.)
Thank you for reading and commenting.
Hobbit mothers do seem to have te best life expectancy! The Shire was meant to be a safe haven from all the war and geopolitical upheaval going on elsewhere in Middle-earth, so Tolkien couldn't very well kill off mothers at the same rate as in Beleriand, Gondor or Rohan. That said, he just could not resist doing in Frodo's mom anyway.
I didn't even mention Dwarves and Orcs: we have only 1 named female Dwarf and not a single female Orc, even though Tolkien explicitly says they reproduce like everyone else so 50% of Orcs is supposedly female.
Tolkien was orphaned at 12, when his mother died. He lost his father much earlier when he was 3, so if there was any logic to this we should be looking at a list of dead and absent fathers. I'm afraid the explanation is going to involve sexism to some degree.
If only Tolkien was still alive so we could ask himi
I think there's definitely something there!
I do feel you're overstating individual cases.
I would argue that Gilraen is more important in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen than you say, even though I agree the way and the moment she dies raises questions.
Nerdanel isn't quite as insignificant as that even in the published Silmarillion text; Feanor listens to her advice at first and that he stops doing so is one of the ways in which he goes off the rails. And, of course, if you take the late HoME version into account, in fact she is a very noteworthy artist and quarrels with Feanor about his going off with her sons and she is also given a speaking part in this. In any case, she survives, presumably. It's the rest of her family who proceed to die horribly!
Thank you for reading and commenting, I'm so sorry for taking forever to reply!
There definitely is a pattern of women being removed from the narrative before events get underway, and Gilraen fits right into it despite getting a speaking part in the Tale of Aragorn and Arwen. LOTR has no wizened dowager-chieftainess of the Dunedain attending the Council of Elrond to speak on behalf of her people. Neither does Rohan have a strong-willed queen to temper Wormtongue's influence over Theoden, or Denethor of Gondor a wife with enough common sense to tell him to stop watching Palantir and come to bed right now. Sauron might have been defeated a lot faster if they had ;-)
You make an excellent point about Nerdanel's character being far more developed than it seems in the Silmarillion! She does not die (though losing her husband and all of her children does seem like an sure way to die of grief!), but neither does she play any further role in the story, to the point that we never even learn her eventual fate.
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