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.
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…
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…
Current Challenge
Bollywood
Prompts this month are films, songs, and tropes from India's dazzling film industry, Bollywood. Read more ...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.
Well, this was extremely unsettling as a conclusion! But I really like it, and I like how it solves the issue of survival logistics. I might even adopt it as a headcanon myself.
You're welcome to it! I've always assumed that Morgoth's power must have been behind those unnatural survivals, so of course it feels like the easiest solution to me. ^^
Excellent response to the prompt! Creepy too (in all the best ways-- lets the reader construct their own parameters without doling out a litany of specific and explicit descriptions like some sort of pulp-fiction horror--sorry, sorry carried away there! Low tolerance for dark fic unless it is done extremely well).
Frankly, in my fandom history, I spent a lot of time over a decade ago discussing the question that maybe Tolkien's in-story time is poetically or narratively enhanced for effect in these particular instances. I decided for my own storytelling purposes, that Maedhros might have spent a couple to a few years in captivity (equal roughly to the time it took Fingolfin's followers to cross the Helcraxe--obviously I could not suspend my disbelief for much longer than that) and less than two weeks hanging by one hand. Already we are assuming a whole lot of Elven magic and enhanced healing powers to allow them to last even those greatly foreshortened periods in either case.
It never occurred to me to consider Morgoth to help extend their lives to drag out the period of suffering, although one could do that version also!
Great story. You've packed a lot into a few words. Well done!
Trying to decide if I can write something some the array of implausible facts available to me. Did flowers spring up under the Noldor's feet as they entered Beleriand--probably not but it must have felt like it to them with the Sun awakening all of those unnaturally hibernating life forms!
I wasn't setting out to write darkfic, so maybe that's why it ended up working. >_> The beautiful (or not so beautiful, if you're discussing with die-hard canatics) thing about Tolkien's stories is that you not just have unreliable narrators, but also unreliable translators and unreliable compilers, so in the end, conflicting versions or 'unrealistic' elements just add to the sense of history. But of course, with purported Elven magic and enhanced healing powers, as well as supernatural forces at work, there's a lot of leverage all around. Like you, I tend to imprison Maedhros in Angband for several years, but I still hang him up on Thangorodrim for years after that (it's too poetic - in an evil way - to have him witness the first sunrise from up there!)...
Amusingly, since I personally don't enjoy the idea of Elven ultra-fast healing, I assumed right from the start (well, on my second reading -- on the first I was so overwhelmed tha I just took things at face value XD) that Morgoth would make Maedhros' (and later, Húrin's) body withstand the enormous stress it is put under. So this for me was my first and easiest interpretation.
Ah, the flowers under their marching feet... it's entirely implausible, but what a powerful image! I agree that it probably must have felt like that, especially after they came from the entirely lifeless Helcaraxe. But it's such a moving scene that I still want to see some of it happen literally. XD Perhaps some flowers also began to bud and sprout under the Moon (which already was more light than they were used to) so when the Sun rose, their flower-buds actually did spring open? Anyway, if you do write it, I'd love to read it!
Oh, I absolutely buy this--that Morgoth could extend life in that horrible, unnatural way, and that he absolutely would. And the title works so well for it, too--and as a description for what happens to the Nazgul, too.
I think that that is a very clever way of drawing connections between things that at first glance seem rather different, Melkor's methods of torture and Sauron's promises of eternal life!
The discussion gains resonance by its setting and the story throws an interesting light on the relationship between the brothers and their views of the situation in late Numenor.
Of course, Anarion cannot know, at this time, of what the outcome for Pharazon will be and he probably doesn't know much about the business with the Rings. But we do and it adds an extra layer.
Thank you so much! It took a while until the connection offered itself, but when it did, I thought "You know what? Let's go with that..." because it does seem to work.
Thank you for the observation that the setting and our knowledge about the future add more resonance to the story. I didn't consciously choose that - it was more a question of "Who would in-universe be in a position to see this connection, and how do I put it in a story" than a conscious choice, but I'm glad that it seems to have been a clever choice! ;)
This is really interesting! I had thought about the Maedhros situation, and how he might have been kept alive, but hadn't made the connection to Hurin, and certainly never made the connection to Sauron's promises in Numenor!
I really like what you've done with this; even the framing device is great.
Strangely, the connection between Maedhros and Húrin sprang to mind on my first - well, no, second reading of the /Silmarillion/ (the first time I was just overwhelmed and didn't understand a thing ;)) - so it's such an "old" interpretation (to me) that I need to remind myself that it isn't actually in the text. The connection to Sauron's promises in Númenor came as a surprise to me, too. But once it was there, I felt that it might actually work. Glad that it works for you, too, and that you enjoy the framing also! Thank you!
Great frame story to set up an interesting discussion! Funny thing, I always assumed since I first read the Simarillion that Morgoth was keeping Maethros alve unnaturally and was surprised to discover that no one else in the fandom seemed to think so. Glad this idea has occurred to someone else!
Comments
The Silmarillion Writers' Guild is more than just an archive--we are a community! If you enjoy a fanwork or enjoy a creator's work, please consider letting them know in a comment.