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 ...
Naturalist's Guide to Middle-earth
Sneak a peek into notebooks of the scholars and explorers of Middle-earth, with prompts that are images from historical naturalist publication. 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 enjoyed reading this a lot--so very dark and touching and vivid. Your description of a disturbed Maedhros post-captivity was very well done I think. The ending was just superb. Looking forward to reading more about your Feanorians.
Thanks for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed the story. My post-captivity Maedhros is complex; most of the time he seems normal (heck, most of the time he IS normal), but he occasionally falls into deep depressions and fey, dark moods, and he's certainly far harder and less willing to extend trust than he was prior to his torture (as his execution of the thrall based on mere suspicion that the man may have been corrupted shows very clearly). Thangorodrim did nothing good to him. (If you like this fic, you ought to check out Ivanneth's wonderful story "Of Oaths" for a different look at a post-Thangorodrim Maedhros. You can find it at ff.net and at HASA.)
Oh, Ithilwen, this is so moving. The description of how the Thangorodrim experience affected Maedhros rings so true, how he can function apparently normally in most respects but suddenly the depth of his suffering breaks through . His death wish is so very understandable and, how he must be thinking he is doing the runaway thrall a favor killing him as he could be released from all the terrible memories and suffering he is forced to endure. There is this wonderful sentence about his feeling "trapped by the terrible love of my cousin and my brothers" that so well describes the situation. I've been enjoying all your stories but I found this one particularly moving.
I'm glad you liked it! Thanks for the review.
I see post-Thangorodrim Maedhros as almost having bipolar disorder: most of the time he takes pleasure in life (sometimes almost to the point of mania), but he's subject to unpredictable bouts of really black depression, and meeting up with the escaped thrall has triggered one. I also think he's in part lying to himself about why he did what he did. Killing someone is a lot easier if you can tell yourself you're really doing the dying person a favor by ending their suffering than if you admit to yourself you're really carrying out a cold-blooded (even if necessary) execution.
Love this!
I got where Maedhros was coming from with the 'mercy', or thought I did but you wrote it more beautifully than I imagined. I liked the honest (mis)understanding of Faelathron just saying what he saw - murder - and then feeling appalled as he realised what it really meant. I know I've made snap judgements before and then had them called (not quite on this level mind you) so it had resonance for me.
Anyway, you know I love your stories. More, please!
I'm glad you liked the fic!
What Faelathron saw is indeed the question at the heart of this fic. Maedhros had several reasons for doing what he did, and it's unclear to me at least just how much his action was driven by mercy and how much by harsh necessity. Faelathron was right when he noted, though, that if death was indeed a mercy, it was one which Maedhros was willfully denying to himself.
Oh, I have been stalling commenting upon this terrific story, because I had hoped to give it the remarks that it deserved. I truly loved your original character Faelathron. His observations are fascinating: the combination and evolution of hero-worship, through disillusionment, and finally a form of understanding are well done.
Maedhros, of course, is hard to write. We are told in the texts that his spirit never completely recovers from his experiences, but his deeds tell us of a complex character with a capacity for mercy, despite the requirements of fulfilling an oath that cannot be undone, and an incredibly competent organizer and real leader of his people from his father’s death until he takes his own. If there is anything that leaves me cold it is flat characterizations of Maedhros. This one is anything but flat and forces the reader to think.
It is sometimes hard to read others differing interpretations of characters one has spent a long time thinking about. Yours is close but still not exactly the same as mine, but I found myself to completely able and willing to suspend any disbelief and accept your particular characterization and appreciate it. I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants a serious look at Maedhros. Once again, however, the real star of this story for me is the engaging Faelathron. I adored him.
Oh, I'm glad you liked the story so much, Oshun! Coming from someone who writes Maedhros so well, your praise means a lot.
I had a lot of fun writing Faelathron. Accepting that your personal hero has serious flaws but going on to admire him anyway is something I think most of us can relate to (what adolescent isn't disillusioned in that way eventually?). And it only made sense to me that there would be younger Elves (and probably children as well) living at Himring beside the older, battle-hardened warriors, and that they might romanticize the earlier great Noldor battles in the past, as well as the heros of those battles such as Maedhros, because they don't yet understand the full costs of war.
Ow. It's horribly sad; I'm not sure what else to say.
"Horribly sad" sums up the fate of most of the major characters in the Silmarillion. Fingon meant well, but I wonder whether everyone would have been better off in the long run if he'd killed Maedhros rather than rescuing him.
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