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.
You did a remarkable job with this one. I really enjoyed Carnistir in this and he's the brother I never remember. You made him so real, his gift so plausible that it was perfectly natural that this would be a cause of upset and anxiety to him. Good thing Finrod came along and was willing to stick with him.
As usual your ability to place the reader right in the heart of the action makes your stories a pleasure to read. Your characters are either people we know, or are people we would like to be. In this particular case the scene with the fortune teller and Carnistir's refusal to confirm or deny the details of her reading was a hoot. Her getting more and more frustrated with him was a lot of fun.
The love story at the center is poingant and I have to admit the ending, with the tragic Noldorian undertones made me tear up. Everything about this story really moved me.
Lovely scene-setting and Carnistir's reactions are very believable--and Finrod's, too!
I was a little surprised that the quarrel with Angrod at the council did not seem to be mentioned.
Is that bit about "You’ve forgiven me when . . .” meant to be an allusion to it? (I first read it as referring to Alqualonde and the Helcaraxe.)
I suppose, in any case, Carnistir's reaction there is well enough motivated by your characterization of Carnistir in general.
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! about Angrod. Apparently, I am far too subtle for my own purposes! I hate it when people do that to me in a fic--reference things in such a sly or cagey way that one would have to be a textual sleuth to catch their points! I sincerely thought I was being clearer. Yes. I attempted to foreshadow the dispute when I had Carnistir express his casual annoyance with Finrod's brothers early in the story--long years before it happened. And I thought the reference to asking Finrod if he had forgiven him was a crashingly obvious reference to him raising such a stink with Angrod and thereby causing some significant diplomatic problems (although the story was bound to come out sooner or later, in any case!). Additionally, I thought that Carnistir's need to shorten and/or schedule any visits to Nargothrond to avoid intersecting the rest of Finrod's immediate family indicated that he was quite sure the rest of them had not forgiven him!
I felt that to mention the quarrel explicitly would end up making me take me on a chapter and half detour into a happening that was neither a significant part of the main storyline nor even its postscript.
Lesson learned--if you missed my references, who do I think would have spotted them? You me better and the canon as well as almost anyone who might stumble across this story!
I did have another aspect in the story which no one has commented upon yet and may never notice, which concerns Carnistir himself! No, I am not trying to develop the habit of being intentionally obscure in my dotage!
Thanks for reading me, despite all this. I do count on you as part of my "target audience"!
Off of topic a little, I've always thought that Finrod was likely more philosophical about Carnistir stirring up trouble than Maedhros was!
Sorry! I did pick up the references to the issues with the brothers earlier. I think that may actually even be the reason why I expected something more explicit later.
What else have I missed, I wonder? I did notice your particular take on Carnistir's relation with Belegost and how detailed Carnistir's foreknowledge is, but I think that's probably not what you mean.
I love it that you are guessing!
Oh, I forgot to mention that I thought the comments about Carnistir and mathematics/architecture were fun! (But you probably didn't mean those either)
Yes and no. Mostly, no. But thank you! OK. Now I have to tell. Many years ago, when I first met Dawn, right after my autistic granddaughter had lived with me for almost four years, I read Dawn's AMC and her little Carnistir was just like my autistic granddaughter. So made a comment about her doing such a great job with the character and she told me that she had never intended him to be autistic. But it stuck in my head. And now that my granddaughter is older and more conventionally well-behaved, she is still solidly on the autistic spectrum and a lot like the female version of Carnisitr in my story. (She's also beautiful and brilliant--math is only one of her things she is especially good at.)
I finally had time to be able to read this. It's an excellent story, beautifully written, as always. Wonderful characterizations. I really liked Carnistir's voice. Especially liked the shared osanwe, and the settings are so vivid. Love your sophisticated ability to depict youthful desire, yet tinged with the sadness of what's to come. I especially enjoyed the scene with the tarot cards. You know, I've been reading a lot of published novels of late -- rather than fanfic -- but this is better written than most of what I'm reading.
Woohoo! Thrilled to get a comment from an old friend and one of the most accomplished writers I know. So happy you liked it. (It could use a good going over--so don't look too closely. I will do it eventually--I was just months late for a challenge.)
"You know, I've been reading a lot of published novels of late -- rather than fanfic -- but this is better written than most of what I'm reading."
That's my goal. Most of the time I feel very presumptuous to even admit it, since I often feel so far off the mark. I don't write nearly as much fiction as I should. But reading really does help, don't you think? I know so many terrific fanfic writers, but one does profit a lot from getting out of the fanfic ghetto and reading more widely. I do that. [Ha! That's my only writers-workshop point that I stand by year in and year out: if one wants to write, read good writing.]
I love coming-of-age stories myself. I love the heartbreak and nostalgia of Silm fic approached from the good moments. One does not have to write tragic dark fic to tear the reader's heart out in The Silmarillion fandom.
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