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.
Ouch! Sorry, don't mean to trivialize--I am just a little delicate. (Not surprising from someone who turned the day after Thangoridrim into a lighthearted story.) I also have a great deal of difficulty in writing a drabble or double-drabble. Therefore, being wordy myself, I appreciate the effort. You certainly did exactly what you intended to do in a mere 200 words.
A belated thank you, oshun! My apologies for taking so long to respond. Yeah, two hundred words. And I, or rather my software, counted every damn one of 'em.
Hmmm, I know we had a mini discussion about well, executioners and it is the tenderness at the heart which gives this ficlet that twisted taint. I wonder if the last line is more of a torture than the iron rod being brought to skin, to be addressed as an evil person like Sauron is. A subtle line, probably even more hurtful to Celebrimbor because that past will haunt him even there. Makes the definition of kinslayer very interesting in this context.
Re: "the tenderness at the heart which gives this ficlet that twisted taint. I wonder if the last line is more of a torture than the iron rod being brought to skin..."
Given these comments, it looks like I achieved what I had hoped to in this short bit (kind of amazed that I did actually). In literature, villains can be portrayed as the embodiment of Evil with a capital E, which is fairly consistent with how Sauron is portrayed in the LotR, which I read as more binary in terms of "good" and "evil" than The Silmarillion. In the latter, as well as in other writings of JRRT, he has more dimension. I'll freely admit that I'm infected with post-modernist tendencies toward villains, but it seems to me that the worst kind of betrayal comes from one who was previously trusted, respected or even loved. Many people have experienced similar betrayal (with varying degrees) in "real life." So yes, that last "benediction" from Sauron probably was horrifically painful for Celebrimbor. From Annatar/Sauron's perspective (at least in my vision), he still held the memory of genuine affection and respect for his former colleague but nonetheless would do whatever it took to achieve his ends and with no regret. Great catch on the meaning of kinslayer, too!
Well, heck, that's a long-winded way of saying "Thanks for the comments, Rhapsy!"
This is wonderful. You put alot of impact into 200 words. I love to read about Celebrimbor - he is the very definition of tragic hero. He was part of the kinslaying yet he turned against his father in the end, then he tries to redeem himself and ends up making a big ole mess of it (sounds like his grandfather lol) and getting tortured to death. Tragically beautiful piece.
Thanks so much, Alassante, for the compliments. Given how verbose I am, managing to write something in 500 words or less is a feat.
Yes, Celebrimbor is a tragic figure, yet by forging the Rings, he contributed to Sauron's eventual downfall. To control the Seven and the Nine, Sauron had to put a significant amount of his power (and to my mind, himself) into the One Ring, using the same "technology" that he developed in collaboration with Celebrimbor and Gwaith-i-Mirdain. So, Tyelpo wound up redeeming the Fëanorians by a circuitous path.
As a scientist, I'm pretty sympathetic to Celebrimbor and his kin. It's easy to become enraptured (ensnared?) by the "Ain't it cool?" aspects of technology and lose sight of its balanced applications. That can lead one down some iffy paths as it did for Celebrimbor and also for Annatar/Sauron. That's explored with a lot more verbiage in my other fics, including "Cat's Paws" which is told from Celebrimbor's PoV.
Thanks again! And as typical, my response is longer than the darned ficlet.
I read this right after "Cat's Paws" and it gave me goosebumps, the two stories are like polar opposites. Thanks to the MEFAs I found myself reading your stories and have been enjoying the way you fleshed out Sauron/Aulendil.
Thanks for the comments here and on MEFA! Yes, I don't see Sauron as a unidimensional cardboard cutout of an Evil Character. One of my reviewers on MEFA commented on Fëanor and Sauron as "two of Tolkien's most powerful intellects." That is exactly how I see them. That level of intelligence invariably comes with a complex personality, thus my version of Annatar has sincere regret over lost friendship with Celebrimbor but at the same time, he will allow nothing and no one to get in his way, hence his overriding ruthless and chilling aspect.
Yikes. That's chilling and quite efficient, not unlike your antagonist. Though I have to admit that I find it also chilling and curious, struggling for the word here, that Sauron, a rebel angel, so to speak, becomes the instrument through which the curse on the House of Feanor is fulfilled. Poor Celebrimbor, thinking he'd found a person with whose assistance he might achieve redemption for his house, only to be delivered to his doom. Allright, excuse my melodrama, but choice and fate are quite interesting here.
Thanks, Lilith! Yes, that was the effect I was attempting to achieve here. Tolkien wrote that the Elves' obsession with 'fading' and their desire to create a replica of Valinor in mortal lands that made them eager for the knowledge which "Sauron genuinely had." JRRT also wrote (see Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, the Letters of JRR Tolkien) "But at Eregion great work began – and the Elves came their nearest to falling to 'magic' and machinery." Ah yes. There's that big bad word in Tolkien's view: machinery. So my take -- and your mileage may vary ;^) -- is that Celebrimbor and Aulendil (Sauron) shared similar interests and engaged one another intellectually. After all, both were brilliant "technologists." So I see it less as fate and choice than predilection and choice. And given Tolkien's jaundiced view of technology ("machinery"), both Celebrimbor and Sauron are bound to fall.
Thanks again for reading and for the insighful comments.
Poor Celebrimbor, trying to redeem his house, just to end up betrayed and tortured to death by the very person one trusted to help one ... it is unbearably cruel.
And afterwards - the final insult - his dead body is carried, naked, as a banner by his enemy's soldiers.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Lissa. Yes, the theme of Annatar/Sauron's betrayal of those who trusted him is a consistent one throughout my fics. However, in my view, indirectly Celebrimbor did redeem his house. Whatever technology he devised (in collaboration with Sauron presumably) was linked into the One Ring somehow which then allowed it and its maker to be destroyed. But yes, I, too, am not keen on how Celebrimbor was treated nor am I much flattered by the original author's predilection for making his best and brightest technologists (Fëanor, Eöl. Maeglin, Saruman, Sauron & Celebrimbor) have such dark fates. I've already railed about that here.
Chilling and intense are the two words I would use to describe this story. I liked the image of Celebrimbor as a star, a broken one to be speciic. There's a lot of great symolisim in that. I liked how Sauron gave Clebrimbor ne last chance. The ending left me with goosebumps. Brilliant writing. I'm going to have to read Cat's Paws now.
Many thanks, Jedi Tarja! I tried to pack as much as I could into this short piece, which really is sort of an epilogue to Cat's Paws. Broken Star is but one snippet of the larger Pandë!verse. I really ought to put a chronological (as in Arda time) list on my bio for the fics. At any rate, thanks for having a read and welcome to the SWG! :^D
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.