Earlier this week, we were thrilled to open our Beyond the Silmarillion section. This section is open to creators who already post with us and exists to provide a means to share non-Silmarillion fanworks based on Tolkien's books and their adaptations. If you want to learn more about the new section, our Beyond FAQ has all the details.

The debut of our Beyond section also marks the conclusion of an eight-month stretch of work expanding the site to more readily welcome a greater variety of fanworks on the SWG. In 2022, we have created the tools needed to post artwork, link collections, playlists, videos, and multimedia fanworks, and we've included all of those in our new Beyond the Silmarillion section.

All of this seems timely given that, by the time we send our next newsletter in a week, the Amazon Rings of Power series will have premiered. While our organization has officially chosen not to become involved with the new series, we absolutely welcome the fans who will come our way, curious about The Silmarillion because of the show, and we hope some of them will join our community and post their work with us, just like the Hobbit film fans who came before them.

On that note, this month's Cultus Dispatches column wraps up our four-part series on the impact of the films on the Tolkien fandom. This month's article, Fandom Voices: Filmverse Fans, compiles the responses of more than thirty fans who joined the Tolkien fandom entirely or partly due to the two Jackson film trilogies. As in all Fandom Voices columns, several big takeaways are presented, but we also provide the complete responses so that you can draw your own conclusions. Finally, if you missed the original call for responses, you are not too late: Fandom Voices forms always remain open. If you joined the fandom because of the films and want to respond, you can do so here.

Because we are a relatively specialized archive for this day and age, this week we look outward, to the bigger Tolkien fandom world of which we are part.