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
Season's Greetings
Create a fanwork in which one (or several) of the holidays of Middle-earth plays a role. 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.
An unexpected journey - getting into the Tolkien fandom by daughterofshadows
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An unexpected journey - getting into the Tolkien fandom
Contains some mention of upsetting fandom experiences mainly due to arophobia
An unexpected journey – how did I get here?
It was my best friend who really got me into Tolkien, the same way he introduced me to so many other things in my life.
It was January, and it was his birthday party, and we watched An Unexpected Journey, and suddenly all the names I had been confused by when I had started and quickly abandoned the Hobbit in book form a year beforehand disappeared.
Now I had faces for all the names that looked too similar for me to keep apart at first.
Unsurprisingly, I read the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in quick succession. The Silmarillion followed as soon as I had found someone who could loan me a copy.
By March I had discovered fanfiction, and after that, my descend happened quickly and painlessly.
The reasons I stayed – what’s not to love?
Tiny me devoured encyclopaedia after encyclopaedia, always hunting for new bits of knowledge, and Tolkien turned out to be a treasure trove of new lore to learn about. To dig into, to submerse myself in.
The perfect place for a bullied thirteen-year-old to disappear into. I dove right into learning as much as I possibly could.
It’s still one of the things I adore most about his books.
There is always something new to discover.
Every time I re-read it, I find something new and fall in love all over again.
Reading his books has brought me excitement and joy, frustration and tears. I laughed, I cried, I screamed into my pillow, and I felt the urge to throw things.
The only thing it doesn’t is leave me untouched.
The wealth of emotions his works evoke are also something that I love.
I have met some fantastic people through my love for these stories (yes, I mean you, SWG discord, hi!), and talking to them, or reading their conversations, has opened so many new perspectives that I appreciate greatly, even if I don’t always agree with them.
In seven years in fandom there have been some terrible moments and some great moments, and overall, the good experiences outweigh the bad.
Tolkien fan and queer – the good, the bad and the in-betweens
In the Tolkien fandom, I found a home, a place to rest, and space to grow.
I could figure out who I am, what being queer meant to me as a person.
I find myself reflected in so many characters of Tolkien’s, and especially the Lord of the Rings is such an aro-positive story to me, in general.
For once, it is not a romantic couple that saves the day.
For once, the romantic entanglements are not the focus of the story, do not force themselves on me and the plot wouldn’t utterly collapse without them either.
It is fantastic, I love it, and it is what makes Tolkien so deliciously attractive to me.
Sadly, finding other aspec-positive readings of Tolkien can be hard to come by, and talking about your own ideas can often be isolating at best, and outright dangerous at worst.
For quite a few fans the suggestion that maybe and especially the popular gay ships in fandom – I’m thinking Sam and Frodo, Russingon, Legolas and Gimli, for example – are aromantic, and thus friends and nothing else, is unpalatable.
You quickly get lumped in with the homophobic fans, who are just as dismissive of aro headcanons, as the queer positive side.
So even though aromantic and asexual readings of characters are still queer readings of Tolkien, as supported by the text as any other queer reading, a large part of the queer positive Tolkien fan community does not accept them as such.
Interestingly, in my experience the push-back on aro Haleth or Aredhel readings, for which I harbour more than a soft spot, can be quite a bit less significant. I have ideas on why that might be the case, but their place is not in this text.
Lessons learnt – the things I take away with me
Tolkien taught me that one queer reading can and will completely oppose other queer readings, even to the point of suffocating fellow queer fans.
He taught me that sometimes you have to dig deep to find the right people for you in the community, because the ones you don’t mesh with have the loudest voices.
I learnt about the value of kindness, and that sometimes knowing when to take a break is just as important as continuing to move.
But most of all he taught me that there is always hope. That you can persevere even in the greatest darkness, and that doing something, even when the odds are stacked against you, is always better than doing nothing, because who knows, maybe it will lead to success in the most unexpected ways.
There is value in the small things in life, the quiet pleasures of a good book and a homecooked meal and taking the time to appreciate them is not time wasted, but time well spent.
It is those lessons I will keep with me for the rest of my life, and for that I am eternally grateful.
