Our Newsletter Returns!

The SWG's newsletter will be returning this week! SWG members can subscribe here or by clicking the Newsletter tab on your member profile. Non-members cannot subscribe quite yet, but we are working on it! Anyone, member or not, can subscribe here.

Why subscribe? The SWG newsletter will deliver a weekly round-up to your email inbox each Saturday. The newsletter will include SWG news and Around the World and Web announcements, so you can keep up with happenings and events in and beyond our group. Need some Sunday reading? The newsletter will include a list of new fanworks added that week and fanworks updated that week. Busy week and didn't get to check the site? You no longer have to worry about falling behind or missing updates!

In addition, we will be offering more original articles and columns, including featured artwork for each. The Character of the Month has been running for years and will resume, and we'll be adding more to the lineup, which will be included in the newsletter.

Contributors Wanted

We are currently seeking feature article writers, as well as columnists for A Sense of History and Cultus Dispatches, as well as backup writers for the Character of the Month. Feature articles explore a Tolkien-related or Tolkien-adjacent topic (i.e., a topic relevant to Tolkien studies, such as history, linguistics, fan studies, et cetera), while columns offer a briefer take on a specific topic related to a broader subject. See our call for contributors for more information.

If you have an idea for a new column or project that would fit in our newsletter, feel free to contact our moderators to propose your idea.

The SWG remains committed to the belief that we all benefit when we welcome more voices to the conversation. If you're a new writer or research, speak English as a second (or third, or ...) language, or have a disability that impacts language use, we are willing to offer the support you need to contribute and have your voice heard. Our editors can help during the writing and research process (including with obtaining references) and with editing. Our call for contributors has more on how we can support our writers.

Please also signal-boost our call for contributors! You do not need to be an SWG member or even a fanworks creator to contribute to the newsletter.

History of the Newsletter

Our newsletter debuted in September 2005 and ran every month until we suspended the newsletter with the opening of our rebuilt site in March 2021, making the newsletter older than our website by almost two years. For all of those years, the newsletter was written, compiled, and coded by hand every month by a team of volunteers. Because our old site made it difficult to compile and share content, our newsletter was how we ensured that our members were able to keep up with happenings in and around the SWG. Former and current site moderators have many emails in their archive that open with, "It's that time again ..."

Over the years, the newsletter expanded from group announcements and the monthly challenge. We added the Character of the Month and, occasionally, other columns and even comics. We started listing all the fanworks posted and updated that month on our site. For a while, we featured a new podfic each month. We started collecting and sharing links and announcements from outside the SWG in a section titled Around the World and Web.

If you look at the site now, you'll see all of that information-gathering has been automated by our new software. Visitors can easily find the latest site news, Around the World and Web announcements, and latest fanworks collected and linked in various places around the site--no hand-coding required! That made our old newsletter format redundant and obsolete. We hope that the energy we once spent every month into putting the newsletter together can now be turned toward showcasing new content exploring the legendarium from diverse and fascinating angles.

Our first edition of the new newsletter will debut this coming Saturday, March 5. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it!

Posted on 27 February 2022 (updated 26 March 2022) by Dawn Felagund