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…
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 ...
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.
Loaded with fabulous details that define setting, characterization, and backstory. I am no expert on architecture or design, but you've convinced me of the authenticity. Love the discussion of the strangeness of adjusting to the new light. Beautifully paced and lovely language.
Loaded with fabulous details that define setting, characterization, and backstory. I am no expert on architecture or design, but you've convinced me of the authenticity. Love the discussion of the strangeness of adjusting to the new light. Beautifully paced and lovely language.
Thank you so much! I'm still at the point in my fiction writing where I'm doing it by instinct, and I get very nervous when I have to put some of it out there for other folks to see. It's so much easier to do that knowing there is appreciation for what I am trying to do. The story I want to tell (which is at heart about thingmakery/subcreation) is perforce set at a time of enormous social and even cosmic change. It's important to me that I both stick as closely as I can to whatever canon is available and also make some attempt to have my characters grapple with what is going on around them, from delight to PTSD and everything in between.
Glad you like it! I'm trying to imagine how it must have been for a princess to be as displaced in as many ways as Galadriel was at the beginning of the First Age.
Thanks! One of the things I want to explore about Galadriel is her identity as a sort of Yavanna-Jesuit, that is, one of the most deeply educated in the branches of knowledge for which Yavanna is renowned. (As I look at her history in Middle-Earth I see the influence of that early education playing out across especially Eldarin but also Edain culture, and I will be writing more about it as this series develops.) I imagine that her meeting a sentient being who is also clearly tied to Yavanna would have set up a form of religious resonance for her, especially in the first full spring season of Beleriand under Anor. Perhaps Galadriel's hunting cousins would have preferred to meet Ents rather than Entwives, given their shared ties to Oromë!
Wow, it's a really interesting and original idea that the elves could communicate to the trees like this, and that they could mutually shape trees' future. Well done!
Thanks! I feel like I've always known how Galadriel (and others) would and could talk to trees, but this is the first time I've had to consider at length how she might have gone about "encouraging" them.
As for Teleporno, well, he's an old-fashioned kinda guy. He'll probably not let that phrase slip again for years!
By rights it should be, yes. :-) But honestly, I don't think I am ready for the emotional turmoil of telling Galadriel about her family's woes. It's hard enough writing her side of things, which she is repressing very determinedly.
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.