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.
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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.
I do adore educating Elros and Elrond stories! Thanks you for your kindness in leaving me one!
A most eloquently delivered defense of aSTEM curriculum for someone (me) who often needs to be reminded that the world cannot survive on arts and letters alone! I feel like I needed the lecture almost as much as Elrond. And what better environment in which to get your point across than the one we are in right now when the world seems ruled by willful ignorance and anti-scientific obscurantism. The flip side, of course, is that if people like Trump had studied some humanities and thought about it they might be less selfish pigs also. Or, maybe not, Boris Johnson was a classics graduate and he initially believed he could afford to take a chance on herd immunity.
Very nice title choice which neatly foreshadows the conclusion.
I think your comments on Alex's experiences with online learning sparked at least part of it - I certainly wasn't expecting to write little Elrond not liking his schoolwork when I sat down to write. (And maybe some of my own frustration with folks who figure STEM 'isn't useful in daily life' crept out as well...)
(And maybe some of my own frustration with folks who figure STEM 'isn't useful in daily life' crept out as well...)
From my perspective it feels the other way around--since I was in school technology, science and math have been upgrade within the curriculum of most public school and art, theater, music, and things like Classics clubs or language clubs sll but eliminated. But that could be a narrow observation based upon my own prejudices and innate tastes and talents.
When I was in classrooms for math and science, I had kids tell me in various classes with varying degrees of confidence that they'd 'never use this stuff for real'. (The most epic was the one who said it in a basic level high school math class - he felt he wouldn't even need to math to check his paycheck, which had his peers reaching to the floor to pick up their jaws...)
I never thought that way! I lived closer to the real world than kids do now (cooked from scratch in grade school, plotted several mile bike trips at middle-school age, built bird houses and doll houses, etc.). Kids Google-it these days.
But I do notice trying to get a modest humanities grant is a joke in most public school systems as compared to the money that corporations pour into STEM programs. Earnings tell the story--top earners in the liberal arts end up matching only the bottom earners in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Maybe that is all I was ever worth, but I was not raised to believe that. I grew thinking society needed a balance.
Or worse still--did you ever open a textbook for an MBA course? I have tutored people in those over the years--helping them complete semi-literate Masters-level essays. Those courses are a ridiculous combination of blather, jargon, and shady salesmanship. And yet those people are well paid when they finish school.
This is a great look at the practicalities of Elrond's and Elros' education - particularly the glimpse at Elros as a leader... and Maedhros as a teacher. Above all, in spite of all the painful and downright terrifying things in the background - the long absence of Eärendil, why Elrond and Elros are in Maedhros' and Maglor's care in the first place, the certain knowledge that Morgoth will attack, the knowledge of death - this offers a sense of stability and everyday life that I thoroughly enjoyed.
Despite Elrond's reluctance in this one particular area, the twins are largely enjoying their education - and their teachers. Maedhros and Maglor for their part are doing everything they can to give the twins the kind of childhood and education they remember.
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.