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] 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…
[Artwork] Map of Valinor by Aprilertuile
My newly drawn map of Aman, as complete as I could make it.
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
I loved this glimpse of an important moment in M-e history.I especially enjoyed the character of Elendil's wife.
Thanks for reviewing, Linda. I'm glad you liked Isilaire; especially since I don't do OFCs, even unnamed canonical ones, too often.
Glad to see you posting here. Also happy to see another story about a woman. My imagination was captured also by Pandemonium's version of Elendil's wife, but yours pursues different aspects, focusing as it does in the beginning on what was left behind/lost. Those Numenorean women, largely nameless in the texts, would have been formidable in my imagining of their story.
The Alkallabëth is not an area which I have studied carefully, so I hope you don't mind a question. I had it stuck in my mind that not all of the Faithful who left Numenor at the time of its destruction survived the great wave that eliminated it. I don't know if that is fanon or canon, but you say that "all our folk" arrived safely.
Liked the idea of splitting up children and those with special skills throughout the ships of the émigrés.
Thanx for reviewing this story, Oshun. I think Elendil's wife would have been a strong character in anyone's fanfiction; I can't see Elendil marrying a nervous-nellie or a prima donna.
I have no objection to your question; but I personally don't remember hearing anything about anyone on the Nine Ships being lost - I don't think Tolkien went into that much detail. Also, I don't think I had Isilaire mention whether all the people who set out from Numenor in Elendil's half of the fleet survived; there might not yet have been a head count. As for the five ships of Isildur and Anarion; Elendil said My sons, the Lords Isildur and Anárion, and I believe most of those aboard their five ships, have come through the storm alive. He couldn't have known 100% whether every single person had survived; but by the conditions of the ships he saw in the palantir, and the amount of people he saw coming from the ships, he thought that most of them had lived. I personally think a few of the sailors might have been lost in the waves - the nine ships went through big waves and constant storms at sea after they survived the wave that drowned Numenor....
What a wonderful way to debut here, Raksha! Simply put, I love this story of thanksgiving! I devoured the rich details which I have come to expect from you: the contrast of what Isilairë left behind and what she brought with her, the descriptions of their landing site, and most of all, her leadership and strength. Those really shine here.
Love the fact that she brought the pure strains of athelas, and the contrast of leaving her gowns and finery behind so that she could make sure items of need could be taken -- and also that the treasured grandson and his mother were on the ship.
Her reactions -- and Elendil's -- when they learn that Isildur and Anárion and their people have survived are great, and I very much like the way you've portrayed Elendil and Isilairë's relationship: one can see their love and support for one another in just a few sentences. Adroit use of the palantír, too!
I hope you will continue to write in the Second Age -- a very rich and largely unplumbed source -- and furthermore, that you'll also include OFCs. I know many writers shy away from the species, but needlessly, I think. It's obvious with the character of Isilairë (of whom my Isilmë heartlly approves) that in your hands, you can craft an excellent character.
Thanx much for reading and reviewing, Pandemonium, especially since your Isilme was an inspiration! This was new territory for me, both the era and the gender of my protagonist. Normally I would shy away from OFCs, but I wanted to explore what Elendil's lady, who had to be worried about their missing sons and yet have the responsibility of caring for at least some of the folk on the ship, would be doing after landfall. And then I found Isilaire easier to write than I had feared.
The Second Age is definitely a rich and unmined source of fanfic; but the Fall of Numenor is rather depressing, isn't it; I mean they had everything and messed it all up, getting greedy and arrogant even before Ar-Pharazon The Stupid started listening to Sauron. Someday I'd like to do an Elendil-and-Gil-galad friendship piece; but we'll see what the Muses send me. And Elros Tar-Minyataur; there's someone who must have been a powerful and fascinating character.
I'm glad you saw the love in the relationship between Elendil and Isilaire; I meant it to be there, known and wordless between the two of them.
Lovely and very appropriate for the season! I liked that it began somewhat despondent and swelled to such a happy ending. So much of Silmfic is depressing (I am to blame as well as any other in this), so it is nice to get a story with a happy ending every now and again.)
Isilairë's grief over animals and objects lost really resounded to me. I am that way as well. I nearly cried when one of my Golden Retrievers chewed up my favorite hair sticks last week. And if I lost said Golden Retrievers ... we won't even go there. :) But such honest emotion makes this story shine.
I really preferred to write this than even contemplating writing Miriel's frantic, futile climb up the Meneltarma. Sheesh; all those people drowned. Yes, much Silmfic is depressing.
I would think that after the danger of storms and imminent death subsided, the survivors' minds would start thinking of all they had left behind. Only Isilaire would try not to, because there's so much she has to take care of. It must have been horrible to have to decide which dogs, cats, birds and horses could come; there probably wasn't much room the animals; maybe a few breeding pairs; and Tolkien said the Numenoreans cherished their horses.
Thankfully, I don't live in an area where flooding would be much of a problem. But to survive a disaster, and to see one's home destroyed so utterly, and then be tossed around in a storm for days; well, those Numenoreans had to be hardy people. I couldn't imagine choosing between my dogs, if I had more than two (and they're spaniels); or leaving them.
Anyway, thanx much, Dawn, for reviewing my first story posted here.
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