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.
SWG News
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.
New & Updated Fanworks
[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.
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Random Challenge
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 ...
New in References
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.
Beyond the Silmarillion
[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.
Around the World and Web
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.
The Small and Secret Things by Dawn Felagund
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The Song
I have fallen woefully behind in the daily drabble, though the reason behind this is not entirely bad: instead of drabbling, I am working on full-length stories. Nonetheless, I am attempting to catch up with some past Words of the Day that I found particularly inspiring.
This one is for Unsung Heroine and is a (very belated) birthday gift. She asked for a surprise, which I knew to mean "Caranthir/Haleth, preferably with some angst" (and which UH quickly verified!) The following six drabbles, I hope, accomplish just that. In these drabbles, I have incorporated her AU unconventional view of canon with my AU unconventional view of canon: Caranthir and Haleth were romantically involved, and Caranthir was unusually prescient and perceptive to the hidden thoughts and emotions of others. So it's safe to assume that this piece is AU unconventional.
I.
"Nothing should ever hope to stop you," Haldad used to tease his obstinate daughter, and he'd died in proving himself right.
But Haleth is stopped now, frozen in place with her hand resting against the canvas tent flap; even her breath has stopped, and if not for the frantic lobbing of her heart, she might believe herself paralyzed. Yet it is not an enemy's sword or voiceless, fathomless grief that seizes her so; it is none of the multitude of obstacles that have sought to waylay her--indeed, end her--in the past.
It is a song.
Just a song.
II.
"I wish to give you a gift."
Caranthir was always serious, his gray eyes intent as she struggled to keep impassive. We are political allies. To both peoples, they were not even friends. But he stared, like beneath her rigid countenance, something moved that no one else could sense, something that fascinated him. He could not look away.
Nonsense.
Yet her request was akin to a lovestruck adolescent, not a fearless chieftain. "A song then," she said, and heat rose in her face.
"No," he said, and at her stricken expression, elaborated, "You are deserving. But I do not sing."
III.
Rebuked, she never named a request, and he never asked again.
It is a full moon, and they always meet on the night of the full moon. He leaves his fortress to hunt and she goes to him, and only the jewel-bright stars mark their indiscretions.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she tells him that she is leaving.
In their nights of love, his inflections never shift; his countenance never changes. But yet she senses something stirring deep within him and it makes her ache inside, like the joy and grief it contains might stop her heart, if she felt it fully.
IV.
He does not sing. Trying to feel surprised at that. I thought all Elves sang.
But Caranthir is not like all Elves--or even much like his brothers, possessing none of their self-important bluster. He'd approached her after routing the Orcs with the same flat expression as he wore while he read accounting documents.
Even when he tells me he loves me--
And he cares little for Elven finery, preferring soot-gray, too-large tunics and crude farm implements, the latter used without mercy on the weeds plaguing the roses he grows between the corn and the zucchini in his kitchen garden.
V.
"Why don't you sing?" They'd had too much wine, and in the intimacy of his embrace, she felt she could ask him anything.
"Because my voice is awful." All was simple to Caranthir, never spoken with the overwrought profusion of his kinsmen. "Fëanáro made us sing at festivals, but I pretended, and he never knew. Like this."
His mouth writhed in the shape of silent songs in Quenya, and Haleth laughed and kissed him, where the words sang against her lips, then in her throat, then wreathed her heart, and she saw how wrong he was.
His voice was beautiful.
VI.
Stopped outside his tent, she hears that voice again, deep inside where she imagines their union lies, forged of love and indestructible, no matter how far she strays.
It is the song she once requested of him, and it was written in joy by one in love. In it lie one thousand touches and kisses, and full-moon nights that neither wants to end.
But it is not sung that way.
He knows.
The song has changed to one of grief: its theme, joy; its counterpoint, loss, which--tears bright upon her face in the moonlight--she steps forward to deliver.
Chapter End Notes
Today's Word:
maudlin MAWD-lin, adjective:
Tearfully or excessively sentimental.
Maudlin is an alteration of (Mary) Magdalene, who in paintings was often represented with eyes red and swollen from weeping.
