Right now is a very busy time on the SWG. We have three challenges ongoing: Potluck Bingo, the Festival of Lights Fest, and Tolkien Meta Week. We are gearing up for Mereth Aderthad 2025 in just over six months. All of this means lots of new Silmarillion fanworks coming in!
But the SWG has been around a long time—almost twenty years!—and some parts of our site that have been around a while just don't get much attention anymore. You might not even know they exist! So, this week, we dust off three classics.
The Random Silmfic Prompt Generator. Do you ever want to create something but need a little nudge for where to begin? Enter the Random Silmfic Prompt Generator! Built as part of our tenth birthday celebration, the prompt generator includes ten (see what we did there??) categories for which you can generate a random prompt at the click of a button. You can pick one or ten and reroll until the stars align and give you the inspiration you seek. (Also, even though it is called the SilmFIC Prompt Generator because it hails from a time when we hosted only fanfiction, it can be used to inspire any type of fanwork you can imagine.)
Yahoo! Group Message Archive. The SWG started on Yahoo! Groups, which closed down in 2019, taking a lot of fandom history with it. Because our group had a public message archive, we downloaded our messages and have been storing them on our site since. They're a mess, as early email lists can only be, but they preserve some of our most important history (and we are [slowly] working on archiving them in a more friendly and searchable form.)
The Library of Tirion. The Library of Tirion was started by moderator Angelica in order to preserve Silmarillion fanfiction from before the SWG archive opened in 2007. Tracking down authors who had long gone quiet was a feat, but she amassed quite a collection of "classic" Silmarillion stories, many of which formed the foundations for fanon, tropes, pairings, and interpretations that are still alive today.
