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.
That's terrific. Love the entire concept. And thinking about the physical cause and effects of the destruction of Numenor. This is definitely a great contribution the how of the story. You completely convinced me that this is how it happened. Just wow! Thinking also, of course, of the pictures of the recent explosion of an underseas volcano.
Thanks so very much! I'm glad you enjoyed this, and you've got me blushing - the descriptions in Silm of the Downfall read very much like a catastrophic volcanic eruption (like Krakatoa, perhaps) to me, but I hadn't seen anyone actually write it that way before. I bounced the idea off of Pandemonium, who naturally egged me on.
Vivisection's one of those all-too-real facts in the history of medicine - it's how Itialian anatomists figured out that the pulmonary circulation carries blood rather than air, by cutting open still living condemned criminals. I theorize that if it was used on the Faithful, it could explain the very deep distrust certain folks have of anatomic studies in Gondor 3000 years later.
Nemir? I believe he's one of Serinde's ancestors, yes.
The identity of the sole survivor simply tickles me. And I really like how you develop your Original Characters and I'm also looking forward to reading more about Serinde's ancestors.
JRRT wrote -- and struck out -- the following footnote in his earliest version of the fall of Númenor:
Morgoth induces many to believe that this is a natural cataclysm.
I guess I am of the devil's own party* then because the destruction of Númenor sounded more akin to the cataclysms of Krakatoa and Santorini than a flat world suddenly becoming round although the latter is a magnificent "Mannish myth."
But just as horrifyingly magnificent is the massive eruption of a volcano whether in our primary world or in a secondary one. JRRT's interweaving of science/geology into his mythology certainly suggests that Meneltarma was a volcano. And here, you've taken that concept and run with it in a most satisfying manner, taking scientific fact and blending it seamlessly into an imaginary history. As usual, you've also introduced more intriguing historical tidbits and original characters in your vision of the Second Age.
As for the survivor, well someone here is smiling like the cat that ate the canary. That someone might allow that although mythic exaggeration of arising "out of the deep and pass(ing) as a shadow and a black wind over the sea" serves to inspire fear and awe in the gullible, it's none too practical for ferrying a certain item of jewelry across the sea. ;^)
Very well done!
*It's also easier to stomach a "natural disaster" -- utterly impersonal -- instead of a vengeful deity (or its agents) wiping out an entire population which surely included innocents.
I was actually re-reading the 'Description of Numenor' from UT last night, and was struck by the description of the Meneltarma, that the summit had a sort of flattened depressed area with a lip around it - which sounds much more like the top of a long-inactive volcano than it does like the top of any of the numerous mountains around where I live. For it to suddenly become active again, whether a completely natural event or one nudged along by the Valar? Well, the description given by Tolkien fits.
On the survivor? Yep, if you allow for the flat world becoming round being a wonderful myth, then it's entirely possible that there's a less mythic explanation for a certain individual and his jewelry getting back to Middle Earth.
This was immense fun to write, and I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Most interesting! I love the concept of a kind of Santorini-like catastrophe in the Numenor case -- it's very believable (and it got me thinking, because actually most of the cataclysms that people could not explain once, were seen as gods' revenge, this idea works perfectly). Very good job of developing original characters. Above all else, that survivor... Utterly thrilling!
Thank you very much for sharing this. It was a joy to read.
Thanks so much! The descriptions of the Fall of Numenor really do sound like a catastrophic volcanic eruption to me, and it was immense fun to write it that way! And I'm glad you liked my original characters - I write lots of OCs, and most of them are quite near and dear to my heart.
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.