Coming Soon: Beyond the Silmarillion Archive
We're excited to announce that the new section of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild site for non-Silmarillion Tolkien fanworks will be called Beyond the Silmarillion!
What Is the Beyond the Silmarillion Archive?
Back in December 2021, we asked SWG members to let us know what new features they'd like to see us add to the site in the coming year. One of the choices was the option for active creators to also archive their non-Silmarillion Tolkien-based fanworks with us, and this was a popular choice.
We sometimes hear from SWG members that they wish there were more archives where they could store all of their fanworks in one place. Since very few creators in the Tolkien community only create Silmarillion-based fanworks, giving space to our creators to also store their non-Silmarillion Tolkien fanworks with us seemed a small but hopefully meaningful way to help our creators preserve all of their Tolkien fanworks.
All fanworks based on all of Tolkien's books and the various adaptations of those books—such as films, games, and shows—will be eligible. Since we will very soon be able to accept all kinds of fanworks, we truly mean all fanworks: fiction, artwork, nonfiction/meta, audio/podfic, playlists, poetry, link collections, videos, and multimedia fanworks that use more than one of the listed types.
The new section will be open to SWG members who have actively posted Silmarillion-based fanworks to our archive, which we are defining as either five Silmarillion-based fanworks or 10,000 words of Silmarillion-based writing. New creators will be able to earn posting privileges in the new section when they reach one of these thresholds.
Finally, this will truly be a separate section of the site. Visitors who are here for the Silmarillion-based fanworks and not interested in other Tolkien fanworks will not see their experiences change. But visitors who want to see what some of their favorite creators are doing with fanworks that range beyond The Silmarillion will soon have the option to do so.
State of the Site Update: What to Watch for in the Weeks to Come
This year has been a busy one for building our site beyond what we have ever been able to offer before. So far this year, we have added several new fanwork types: art, playlists, and link collections. This week, we opened beta-testing on the final two fanwork types: video and multimedia.
Video is self-explanatory, but multimedia fanworks will serve those of you who create works in multiple media that you'd like to see displayed together as a single fanwork. Say you do a painting to go with a story. Or you post a work of meta with a link collection of suggested reading. Or a podfic recording of a story with a playlist of the songs you used in your soundtrack. Multimedia fanworks will let you display all of those elements together as a single fanwork. We hope video and multimedia fanworks are available on the site for everyone to use by the first week of August at the latest.
Next: the new Beyond the Silmarillion section. As this is a much easier build than multimedia fanworks, we hope we will have the new site section up and running by the end of August.
Part of why we built out all of the fanwork types first is because Beyond the Silmarillion will allow you to post fanworks of all of the types available elsewhere on the archive.
After that, the only item on the December survey that we still have to complete will be the ability for members to use the SWG archive to host events. This will take some information-gathering to see what possible event hosts would need or like to see and will likely end up being a pretty big undertaking. We'd like to see it well underway (if not complete but I'm probably being ambitious there!) by the end of the year. We also plan to create a function that allows creators to identify related works on the archive, e.g., if you remix another author's story or make a work of art, playlist, etc for a fic, those works can be associated with each other.
As always, we love to hear what Tolkien creators would like to see on our archive. Comments are open here, or we can be reached by email. The archive is for you and we serve the Tolkien fanworks community, so never hesitate to be in touch with suggestions or ideas.
Posted on 22 July 2022 (updated 12 August 2022) by SWG Moderators
