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.
Oh, I like that! It is perfectly lovely, right on the edge of being a horror fic. I really like how strange and mad Elwing seems. This is the kindest portrayal I would be able to give him. She has always been very hard for me to characterize.
I love the description of the Teleri also. Beautiful language there.
<i>Did not want to be heaped in with the scores of Cirdan's men and women, the silver-haired gentle elves who sang the saddest laments Erestor had ever heard, laments that called dolphins to the shore to comfort them. Even the gulls stopped their cries for the songs.</i>
Cutting his hair in mourning--he would share that practice with so many cultures throughout our real world history right up through the present day.
So much lovely detail in this story.
Hi Oshun,
Yes, I seem to love going to the creepy side of Tolkien which is odd since I can't stand gory movies. I do love suspense.
I was trying to understand Elwing, and why she would do what she did. In some ways I do think she was a pawn of the Valar and not quite sane, but I dont' have any canon truth for that!
I loved the Teler ever since I read that they sat at the edge of the sea and just listened. I understand that completely! A lot of cultures do shear hair in mourning. It makes me wonder what people in the future will make of our shaving our heads to show our empathy for a loved one going through chemo.
Thank you so much for your review! :) I really appreciate it.
Erestor has an unsettling encounter - and so do we all. Lordie! I read this last night when it was too late to manage a sensible comment and I haven't needed to read back today because it's stayed with me.
Your Elwing with her foreknowing is perfect, a flawed, damaged, fey little creature, too frail to carry so much power within, and your Erestor has so much past to him (does that make sense?) that he feels complete, multi layered. I want to know what happened to him before this, but not knowing doesn't spoil the impact of his here-and-now. The stark, grey atmosphere is wonderful, the images so strong that I can see the thin child, Erestor's ragged hair, and smell the sea.
This especially I loved: *Did not want to be heaped in with the scores of Cirdan's men and women, the silver-haired gentle elves who sang the saddest laments Erestor had ever heard, laments that called dolphins to the shore to comfort them. Even the gulls stopped their cries for the songs.*
Hi Kei,
Erestor, this one, has a lot going on behind him. I'd love to get back to him some day and try to do his story justice. Elwing. I have always felt kind of bad for her - the child her at least. To me you have to go back to her past to explain what she did in the future. Otherwise it just doesn't seem like something a sane elf would do (which is what lead me to this idea).
The sea elves will always have a soft spot in my heart. :) How could I not love elves that love the sea?
Thank you so much for you review! Insert happy dance here :D
What an eerie scene and compelling contrast--Elwing and Erestor both seem very fey in their different ways.
Hi Himring,
I think a lot of Tolkien's elves, for me, come off as fey. Especially in The Silmarillion. They feel so deeply and it can drive them to do things you'd think no "sane" elf would do (Fingolfin attacking Morgoth comes to mind). Elwing is one of those elves I just want to get in her head and find out why she did what she did. It's so incomprehensible in ways. Then I thought about what she went through, and this came to me.
Long winded way to say, thank you so much! :)
Levade, this is an extraordinarily beautiful and haunting ficlet, and I mean, haunting (in a very good way). I thoroughly appreciate the way you've shown Elwing with that blood of the Other, noticeable to Erestor, and disturbing to him. You've layered the characters very effectively - Elwing's strangeness, Erestor's guilt. And what does see she?
To me, this is the best kind of horror story, something that is there, but that one does not quite see, that might be real, as Elwing says, or perhaps the imaginings of a burdened mind (Erestor). And all throughout, your prose is poetic.
Very glad to see that you're posting stories here again!
Hi Pande,
Thank you! I think the image of this story was so strong in my mind it almost wrote itself. Elwing has always seemed absolutely otherworldly to me, and I wish her brothers had survived so we could see if it was just her or the whole family. I can't imagine Arvernion was the happiest of places at first, with refugees streaming in from at least two ruined realms and maybe that played on her mind too.
I'm so happy this worked for you! I always love to hear that. I never set out to write horror, and I can't stand the gory stuff, but my brain just tends to lean a bit towards the macabre I suppose? The what ifs and whys.
Thank you again. I never did reply to that wonderful review you left for Forlorn (I was utterly blown away and intimidated by it), but thank you for that as well. You bring a realism and honesty mixed with possibility in your stories that urges me to get back to the computer to explore my own ideas. So thank you for the encouragement as well. I really appreciate it!
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