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] An exercise in music... And patience by Aprilertuile
Makalaurë was sitting at the harp in his music room. He was holding a dark blindfold in his hands and was looking at it with much scepticism.
[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…
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Elrond and Celebrían celebrate their anniversary with their family.
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A short thing about Maglor, death and grieving.
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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…
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
Restoration and Rebuilding
Create a fanwork around a prompt focused on the theme of rebuilding and restoration. 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.
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Fellowship of the Fics offers four weeks of summer-themed prompts during the month of July.
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.
Scribbles & Drabbles 2024
A chill Tolkien event, where artists make art, and authors write little stories in response. Begins in June and ends in November.
This is really good. I like so many of your choices--that she married out of love, believing that the two of them could make positive changes, could repair divisions among their people.
I love this description of that,
"Would reconcile the old ways and the new.
Alas, he tasted of a stronger vintage."
I liked her prediction of a tsunami. I also loved that she prays for survivors who will carry the positive legacy of their people into the future.
I'm so happy to hear that you liked my choices. Tar-Míriel is dear to my heart (even though I don't write her much) so these headcanons (is that the word these days?) are quite important to me! I'm certain that - if we go with the version where she married Ar-Pharazôn for love - she wouldn't have done it out of selfishness or purely to spurn Elentir, but because she genuinely thought that it would be a step towards reconciliation. She probably got a lot of hostility from her fellow Faithful though. :(
I'm not sure she would even be able to see the behaviour of the sea from up there, depending on how high the mountain is and how thick the volcanic fumes etc. etc., but I felt I needed to allude to the wave somehow after all that talk of smoke and fire. Some say the world will end in fire, but Númenor ultimately didn't! Glad you liked that addition, and I'm glad that you liked her prayer for the survivors. Thank you for your lovely comment!
Tar-Miriel is very dignified, very queenly here, and the stately rhythm of the verse matches that.
I like how you make the end flow very naturally into the prompt.
It has very little to do with the original context, I'm afraid, but somehow that's what the "merely mortal" part did with my (merely mortal! ;)) brain. Glad you liked it! I've been rather suspicious about the idea of Tar-Míriel running helplessly and fruitlessly up the mountain before the waters overtake her as it's presented in the Akallabêth for a while, so this was a welcome chance to present her in a more dignified manner - and as somebody who ascended the mountain before all hell actually broke loose. (I mean. Would you run up an erupting volcano, even to escape a tsunami? I don't think I would!)
Thank you!
I absolutely adore this poem. I have already read it at least five times and saved it as a favorite. Something about it just keeps pulling me back. First of all, the writing itself. I really appreciate the way it is interwoven with rhyme, but never feels bound to it if that makes sense. The rhymes give it a sense of flowing rhythm as they are interspersed throughout, and yet they are never forced in place of emotional power. Not that there is anything wrong with fully steady rhyme schemes of course, and they certainly can hold emotional power, but I have a special fondness for pieces like yours where the rhymes allow it to flow, and yet you are never quite sure when you are going to get another, which adds something to the unsteadiness felt in the scene, and with it you are pulled along in the full weight of what is being said. I know I am rambling on about the same subject, so I will move on.
I am not particularly interested in Númenor, so I really wasn't expecting to like this as much as I did. Even though the characters are ones I hold little special fondness for, nor do I know much of the depths of their stories and lore, you wrote in such a way that I felt fully for them.
Something about this piece feels... compact, in a good way. Everything just seems to fit so perfectly into place, especially the way the prompt is inserted, so that the whole piece seems to be building up to it.
You can see that I am rather gushing about this piece, but I truly mean everything I'm saying. Well done!
Thank you so much for your lovely, long comment! And please don't worry about gushing! I love to hear what my readers think (especially if they're so generous!).
I didn't focus on rhyme at all, merely on rhythm, so any rhyme that happened just... happened. The formal language of prayer allows for a reasonably steady rhythm, but a fixed rhyme scheme would probably have taken away the sense of urgency and insecurity, and I wanted to bring just that across. I'm glad that this has worked for you! And even more thrilled that you felt the emotional impact even though you don't have any particular emotional attachment to the characters. I'm taking it as a huge compliment! I'm also happy to hear that the poem feel compact, with everything necessary in place but no undue circumlocution, and a noticeable build-up to the final line. That was my intention, and I'm very excited if I managed to pull it off!
In conclusion, thank you so much for your thoughts!
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