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 ...
Holiday Party
No matter if you're in the Northern or Southern hemisphere, it's a time of year to think about holidays. Whether you're bundling up in blankets or slipping a swimsuit into your suitcase, we invite you to an SWG holiday party! 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 love that you incorporated the dancing bears. :D
Weirdly, I had the impression that Elros was getting younger as he walked through the forest and talked to Maglor, although there isn't really anything in the text on which I can fix it (except maybe the leaning on Maglor's shoulder, but that happens very late). Although the unavoidable ending made me sad, it feels reassuring that Elros died knowing that it's been a good year (if there are bad years in Númenor at all) and that everything was in good order.
Thank you! I love those bears and how they link up with the bear lore in The Hobbit! But my head has trouble seeing them literally on the same island with Aldarion and Erendis and the others. I can see them as a Beorian folk tale, though, for instance!
I hadn't consciously thought of Elros getting younger, when I wrote, but it fits very well with what I meant to suggest about how he was feeling!
I think of the beginning years in Numenor as being quite tough for the new settlers, but by the time this is set I envision them having no disastrously bad harvests, although not all of them equally good, and enough planning in place to deal with any less good years without much strain (quite unlike the later distribution issues in Azruhar's time!).
I absolutely love the dancing bears of Númenor (out of place though they feel at first) because Númenor was on my mind when I was travelling around Hokkaidô, a long time ago, and the bear is majorly important in the Ainu culture of Hokkaidô. It makes no actual sense, and it certainly doesn't fit with the southern Mediterranean vibes of the rest of Númenor, but it makes me happy. XD
For all we know from canon, there may have been no distribution issues in the days of Tar-Ancalimon and Tar-Telemmaite either. Perhaps those days were just golden and happy and I'm just an evil author! ;) I agree that the beginning years must have been a challenge! In that context, the observation that all of the trees are younger than Elros was very poignant. They not only had to settle a country where nobody had settled before, it was a country that literally hadn't existed before, and that must have been tough. And that isn't even getting into how different peoples had to grow together as one people, and how plenty of them were probably bringing generational trauma and defensive residue from Middle-earth under Morgoth's rule! Elros surely had his work cut out, but he seems to have managed to leave his descendants a well-functioning kingdom at the end of his long life.
Oh, this is so beautiful, tears spontaneously came to my eyes when I reached the ending.
I love that he let go in the comforting presence of both dads (comforting despite all the reasons for the (justifiably) loud words he'd like to say!) And also comforted that the trees they'd planted, along with the other agriculture, had become so well established by now that the island wouldn't need as much tending at the start of his grandson's reign as it did at the beginning of his. (This made me picture Númenor as a kind of inverted Easter Island, relatively barren and harsh initially and gradually forested. And with mystery bears instead of mystery statues, I guess!)
Comparing his age to the great girth of common trees really does give an impression of how old 500 years really is!
I'd love for Maglor to be there on the Island with his fostor son, and then it suddenly made me so sad that Elros is leaving most of his ancestral family here in Arda, inside Mandos and out — although they're mostly people we've come to know and love and of course he didn't.
I do like the implication that Tinfang plays, and in a way calls, to people when it's their time to depart, and that Maglor somehow made a deal with him to play in his stead for Elros. (And bringing in the Warble at the end was a touch that made me smile.)
Very belated thank you for this wonderful comment!
Really loved this!
It felt like a nice ending for Elros and the bears were an interesting feature.
Also fits the time of year really well, since all the acorns and chestnuts and beechnuts are currently falling from the trees and try to hit you when you least expect it.
Belatedly: thank you very much!
Hope you did not get hit by any falling chestnuts in the meantime!
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