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 ...
Turgon's Rock Opera
On the anniversary of the publication of "The Silmarillion," we’re reflecting on the importance of music in Arda with prompts that come from rock songs. 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.
As a die-hard supporter of Maedhros, I agree with this anonymous follower. Maedhros could not have achieved what he did if he had been the empty shell of a man after he was rescued by Fingon. He must have had a brilliant mind and be in possession of all the skills of leadership in order to negotiate the unification of the divided Noldor and to retain the respect of his followers almost until his end.
All of that you've said much better than I ever could. I'll never tire of reading your Maedhros.
Thank you so much! What a compliment coming from someone who took the pen name Russandol! I adore Maedhros. I fell in love with him even before I fell for Fingon.
I'll post my LJ review on here, and on the B2Me community.
Oh, this is wonderful. It's glorious actually.
And I do think this is a true account from one of his followers. To me this one short piece outshines all the bland and ridiculous stories of the anti-Noldor crowd. This encapsulates what Maedhros was, and what he did, brilliantly.
He was beautiful and brilliant, the most outstanding specimen of an incomparable family. After Thangorodrim, he carried an added element of enthralling darkness, the appeal of tragic heroism. He came back to us wounded, but he had survived. He returned maimed, but not damaged in the thousand subtle and nameless ways of most escaped captives that caused people to shrink back from them. Oh, he did suffer, but his suffering had tempered him. It gave him insight into the tasks to which we had pledged ourselves—to avenge our murdered king and mete out the vengeance due the black Vala from which his brethren had apparently turned away.
*Round of applause*.
Such aggrandisement, I feel, would make Maedhros uncomfortable; this of course is why he deserves it... those that seek power are the ones that should hold it least, etc.
Your commentator puts me in mind of a blindly loyal sports-team member that would follow the coach into any match, whatsoever the stakes or cost; I feel quite sure that he/she would have been present at the Sack of Menegroth.
You said that this was a biased account, and that is true, but then again it is only the greatest leaders that inspire such loyalty; especially when tempered with the knowledge of loss.
A most insightful piece, I enjoyed it.
CiH
Thanks so much for reading and commenting. I got a kick out of writing it. Yeah, I am one of those loyalists who read everything Tolkien wrote and then a lot between the lines and come away worshiping Maedhros. I think Tolkien probably intended the reader to place Maedhros somewhere in between the adoring the view of readers like me and the standard Feanorian basher (more often than not those who focus on LotR and are not that intrigued by the Silmarillion). But I am quite sure he wanted the reader to place him on an heroic scale and feel his pain, not just to casually shrug and pronounce him, his father, or any of his brothers wicked.
Your response raised some interesting points that I had not considered before; for example, I have never heard the term 'Feanorian Bashers' or even considered why there should be. Indeed the many accusations levelled against their 'House' could be lain at the table of Thingol who often lacked cordiality and proved greedy for wealth and objects d'art...
I have to agree with your assessment of JRRT's intentions for Maedhros, although I do not find myself so enamoured as some; but for the sake of a tenuous sporting metaphor I shall finish by saying...
Go, Team Maedhros!
Best Wishes,
CiH
Oh, I somehow missed responding to this. Think I missed a notification. I got the term 'Feanor Bashers' from Dawn Felagund who claims she wrote her epic novel Another Man's Cage as a polemic against the entire school of readers of The Silmarillion and/or Silm fanfic who do not find Feanor or his House interesting because they are just wicked. To the degree that they are wicked, it's a wickedness than Tolkien paints with a certain respect and their demise is written as part of an ongoing tragedy, not a lasting victory for the good guys intended to be uncritically applauded.
I think my attachment of Maedhros et al., is very, very personal. I feel like I have often fought has a question of principle and been considered a trouble maker or someone who wouldn't just sit down and shut up.
They are for me at least endlessly interesting to write about. Love to examine and re-examine, from my own modern perspective, these personalities who are supposed to be, in this invented world, part of our own pre-history. I love Tolkien's Elves for having impossible virtues and all of our very human flaws as well.\
Thanks again for the thoughtful comments!
Site © Dawn Felagund
Logo © Bunn
All copyrights for creative work hosted on this site are retained by their creators.
This site is built using Drupal and the theme W3CSS.
Characters and stories associated with J.R.R. Tolkien's works remain the property of his estate. Creative work using this material has been written solely for the enjoyment and enlightenment of its creator and their associates. No profit is made on the materials shared on this site.
Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.