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.
SWG News
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.
New & Updated Fanworks
[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.
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 ...
New in References
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.
Beyond the Silmarillion
[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.
Around the World and Web
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.
The Dweller in the Dark by Ithilwen
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Chapter 1
The Dweller in the Dark
All greyness, is this place. Greyness, going on forever. I, who once loved the light, hate it here. But I will never leave this place now, and that is by my choice.
For he has already left. Why he should have been offered release before me, I cannot say. Perhaps it is because I long refused to recognize my own faults, preferring to mislabel my willfulness as mere love of freedom, while his flaws, being far greater, could not be so easily disguised, and so he overcame them more quickly than I. Perhaps my latest decision shows I am flawed still, that I should choose to dwell in the Halls forever rather than regaining my hröa and returning to a physical existence, returning to him. He is my husband, after all. That Námo has released him shows that he has been purged of his evil; his fëa is now as unstained and pure as his newly-made form is free of scars. I suppose it is wrong to hold his past against him now.
But I do not care. To choose re-embodiment now is to choose him, for that is the nature of my kind. The marital bond, once formed, cannot be broken. And I will not dwell again with one who imprisoned me during my former life. I will not lie again with one who once pierced me not merely with his member, but with his javelin. I will not resume my life with the man who gave me my death.
I would be free of him. And if the only way I can be free of him is to choose the Halls over Aman, then the Halls I will choose.
Such is my choice. But it is not a free choice. And perhaps it is just another sign of a flaw that still remains within my fëa, but I cannot help but believe that I deserve a better one.
* * * * * * *
How then can a marriage be ended and the union be dissolved? By the law of the nature of the Elves, the neri and the nissi being equal, there can be union only of one with one. Plainly an end can be made only by the ending of the will; and this must proceed from the Dead, or be by doom. By the ending of the will, when the Dead are not willing ever to return to life in the body; by Doom, when they are not permitted to return. For a union that is for the life of Arda is ended, if it cannot be resumed within the life of Arda. ("Laws and Customs among the Eldar", Morgoth's Ring (The History of Middle Earth, volume 10), p. 226)
It is the purpose of the grace of re-birth that the unnatural breach in the continuity of life should be re-dressed; and none of the Dead will be permitted to be re-born until and unless they desire to take up their former life and continue it. ("Laws and Customs among the Eldar", Morgoth's Ring (The History of Middle Earth, volume 10), p. 227)
Chapter End Notes
The narrator of this sad vignette is of course Aredhel, who was murdered by her husband Eöl; as Jacynthe DeMorae quips in her essay "Questions You Never Actually Asked" (http://jdemorae.slashcity.net/recsrants/qynaa.html), "...if there was ever an Elven couple who deserved a statute and debate among the Valar, it's them. He killed her for cryin' out loud. Surely, she should be allowed to legally tell him to shove it." But if such a debate was ever held, Tolkien does not tell us of it.
