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
Revolution
Create a fanwork using a quotation, artwork, speech, or song concerned with protest and revolution as your inspiration. 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.
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.
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.
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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.
Thank you! I had fun doing the meta, and it got me thinking on ideas for writing I didn't necessarily expect! (I'm curious to hear anything you have to say on the details.)
It's tantalising how little information there is about the beginning of the Second Age, isn't it! Elros' establishment of a new society (and his early days as a king who was essentially a stranger to his people) must have been endlessly fascinating. I completely agree with your assessment of the period as a time of uncertainty as well as optimism. And I really like your speculations in the final paragraph. It makes a lot of sense to me that those among the Orcs who were released from the domination of Morgoth and managed to escape the inheritance of Sauron would perhaps try to establish a life of their own, or even more likely try to find healing and peace in Lórien. Now I'd really love to read a story about that. Food for thought indeed! Thanks a lot for sharing it!
Yes - I would have expected more, given that early Numenor is what really sets the stage for much of the subsequent history of Men. (I wonder if this is a product of Tolkien not having thought much on this period, or one of those things he meant to get around to writing and never quite did. Or - and I don't rule this out - I missed something?) The last paragraph didn't quite come out of nowhere - I've thought about orcs before, but more in a post-Return of the King way. Then I realized that anything that would apply in that timeframe would logically apply to the post-War of Wrath time period as well, with Morgoth gone and Sauron possibly initially sincere about repentance and at the very least on good behavior for the time being... Thanks for commenting!
As they were of elven stock originally, there is no reason to suppose they would not be capable of living peacefully without the distorting influence of Morgoth or Sauron acting on them.
Well, that is an fascinating concept. I have never been one to buy the idea that orcs were corrupted elves. But, hey, knock yourself. I am willing to read it in a fictional or non-fiction context. (Dawn's Rumil in her novel Another Man's Cage is a moving and actually quite heroic half-orc.) My position remains that there is no definitive canon explanation of the origin of orcs although CT offers some contradictory theories in Morgoth's Ring and Unfinished Tales at least. But, phew, yucky! I hates them all!
Thanks for offering this--it contains a lot of interesting information and is very readable and useful also!
I've never seen much way around it - if Morgoth couldn't create life, only twist what already existed, then the only options for the origins of orcs are that they are fallen maiar (which doesn't seem likely, given that both elves and men are able to fight and kill them) or that the supposition of the elves given in the Silmarillion ("Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor") is correct, and Morgoth made orcs from captured elves. I generally write the latter.
The first recipe for jam I ever encountered dated to the 1st century AD and used honey. I was looking for one when so much of one's time in writing Tolkien fanfic was engaged in stockpiling plausible explanations for any world-building one might do that ventured outside of explicit canon references. (No nostalgia for those bad-old-days! Today's fandom allows more creativity in general.)
This is a really fun and entertaining piece of expository writing. I will probably refer to it in the future! Thanks for sharing.
1st century jam recipes? Cool! I'm not usually so rigorous in my world-building, but when writing meta I'm fairly conservative and try not to say anything I can't back up. Not being a historian of food, I hesitated to say that most jam recipes use some form of sugar, as I felt that was just inviting someone who knew far more on the subject to pop up with counterexamples!
I shouldn' be reading this now. I am too hungry! Hobbit food sounds really good and satisfying at the moment.
I am sure that you've probably heard me ranting or being taunted by my fandom friends about entered into a huge fandom wank started by someone trashing my reference to cheese in Beleriand in my novel A New Day. My critic claimed she abandoned my story the moment she encountered my description of Elves eating cheese at Lake Mithrim. Periodically, I think about it and either laugh at myself or fume at her depending upon my mood.
Hey, whatever. There is nothing in canon to indicate that the Elves in Rivendell were vegan as Peter Jackson implies in The Hobbit.
One of the things we know about Dwarves is they liked cheese, as you noted above, and "Roaring fires, malt beer, red meat off the bone." Oh, whoops, sorry! That was Peter Jackson again and not Tolkien!
Anyway, I enjoyed this piece very much (too much I am sure!). Thanks again. I am getting a real kick out of this series.
I think I've seen allusions to the cheese incident before, but I didn't realize it had started due to one of your stories. (I don't find the not reading past the cheese as strange as needing to share with the author that cheese was the thing that made them stop reading - people are odd sometimes!)
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.