Comments are one of the more perilous parts of the fanfiction-writing experience. I say "perilous" because authors really like comments (as a general rule), and when someone perceives that something they enjoy is being withheld, all sorts of thoughts and feelings and actions can ensue. If you write fanfiction, you have probably compared your comment (or click or kudos) counts to someone else. You have probably entertained dark thoughts about your skill as a writer based on that single data point. You have possibly thought unkind things about the people reading your work for free but not leaving a single word of thanks. Or maybe reasoned why that other person's numbers are higher but not actually deserved.

This month, in Cultus Dispatches, our monthly column about Tolkien fandom history, we begin to explore the world of commenting. The first article in this series looks at authors' perspectives on the comments they do (and do not) receive, using data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey to identify trends. Of course, it includes the unsurprising information that, as children like ice cream, authors like comments. (Most do anyway. I was a child who didn't like ice cream, so exceptions are always possible.) However, a deeper dive into the data shows that commenting appears to be bound up with a broader interactive component to fandom, which in turns ties in to shifts in platform use that have occurred across the fandom's history.

You can read "Fandom Chocolate ... or Authors Love Comments" here.

If you have big thoughts and big feelings on commenting (or even just regular-sized thoughts and feelings), we have an active Fandom Voices project about commenting. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of Cultus Dispatches that collects fan experiences and perceptions on fandom-related topics. Readers and creators (of all different types of fanworks, not just fanfic!) are welcome. Responses will be collected and published for next month's Cultus column. You can contribute a response to Fandom Voices here.

The SWG is rapidly approaching its twentieth anniversary next July. We have grown from an email list and LiveJournal community into a vibrant archive and community on the strength of the efforts of volunteers who have helped to grow the site and keep fun and interesting things happening here. If you enjoy the SWG and think we do cool stuff, and you want to help us keep that cool stuff going for another twenty years, you might wonder how you can get involved.

Volunteer Roles. Our Around the World and Web editor role has been vacant for more than two years now. If you scroll down this email and see the announcements we post from other groups, this role manages this section of the site and newsletter. It tends to involve a lot of copying and pasting from the announcements posted by groups and events outside the SWG and tends to max out at about a half-hour of work per week. Reply to this email if you're interested! All open volunteer roles can be found here.

Write for Us! Our newsletter goes out weekly, and we are always looking for feature articles and columns. In the next couple of months, we will be introducing a few new columns. Two of them have calls for articles available now! Lay of the Land is inspired by our nearly complete Character of the Month column but with a focus on important places in the geography of Arda. Like Character of the Month, it is aimed at creating a resource where the major details about a location can be found in one place with a lot of freedom for where the writer takes the column from there.

Our new Master Class column focuses on creating fanworks. Whether creating a tutorial for someone trying a fanwork for the first time or sharing tips and tricks for creators looking to improve their craft, all approaches and media (and of course fanworks!) are welcome. We also welcome recommendations of your favorite creators who do that particular thing amazingly well.

If you might be interested in writing a column, hit REPLY and let us know! If you're feeling nervous about it (but find yourself thinking, yeah, it might be fun to try ...) know that you will have the full support of our editors, who are willing to work with writers new to nonfiction writing. The SWG takes seriously its mission to provide a comfortable, supportive community where creators who wish to learn and try new things are able to do so, and we value expanding Tolkien scholarship beyond the voices that tend to be heard the most. If you'd like to give writing for us a try, we'd love to work with you!

Host an Event! If you are looking for a one-and-done way to get involved, we host member-run events on our Discord server.

• Instadrabbling brings creators together to create and share flash fanworks in real time with each other. You can structure your session around a theme, a particular type of prompt, or you can keep it open-ended.
• Fanfiction book clubs gather to discuss fanworks, usually around a theme, and what makes those works excellent. Book club hosts choose the theme, manage sign-ups and scheduling, and then facilitate the discussion on the day of the book club.
• Live readings can feature fanworks, passages from Tolkien, or both and can be structured or open-mic (or both!) Organizers choose the theme, manage sign-ups, and welcome readers to the "stage" during the event.

For all member-run events, you will have the support of the SWG moderators, who will be available if you run into issues or have questions.

We welcome and appreciate our volunteers, newsletter writers, and event hosts! Let us know if you'd like to become involved by replying to this email!

You may have been asked at some point if you prefer mountains or the sea, an entry in the "would you rather?" category of questions that seeks to dichotomize people as one or the other. I live in the mountains but very much prefer the sea. Part of the reason is the passing ships. I connect to Tolkien's description of Fëanor having hands and mind seldom at rest because that's me too, yet I will sit on a beach or stand on a pier and do nothing but watch ships passing for as long as you allow me. This odd interest/hobby always felt vaguely Tolkienish for reasons I couldn't quite articulate. (It is not as though a container ship poking along on the horizon is carrying Elves to Valinor! Cheap sneakers to Montreal, maybe, but not wearied souls to rest and healing in the Undying Lands.)

Simon J. Cook's latest installment in his series about towers for A Sense of History begins to explain why. For exactly a year now, Simon has been exploring towers across Tolkien's work, focusing mostly on the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" but also the many towers that dot the landscape of Middle-earth in his more familiar works.

This month's article, "Passing Ships," is just as the name suggests. Returning to the tower analogy of "Monsters and the Critics," Simon considers why the ability to look up on the sea in that analogy is so important. He considers the exordium to Beowulf, which he describes as a myth "framed by two ships" related to the mythic heathen king Scyld Scefing. Even in these days, Simon claims, the significance of these two ships, coming and returning over the sea from the west, has been lost, the poem offering a glimpse back at that forgotten tradition.

You can read Simon's article "Passing Ships" here.

You don't have to have lived through the 1970s to recognize its style when you encounter it. The influence of its music, film, and television can still be felt today. The color palettes managed to be both bright and use an unexpected amount of brown, the fashions and styles were distinctive, and it was a time of historical and technological change. People ate salads made of marshmallows and Jell-O in sunken living rooms, wore shoes chunky enough to double as fishbowls, and pecked at rudimentary forms of the digital devices that saturate our world today. It's the decade where punk and disco were born. In short, it was a decade that was ... well, funky.

Our next challenge celebrates the decade that is the Funky 70s. You will select your prompt (or prompts) from a collection that includes architecture, color palettes, fashion, food and drink, fun and games, news headlines, literature, movies, music, quotes, science, tech, discoveries, and television. As always, we encourage creative interpretations of prompts. Want to dig up the album art for a song prompt? Find a favorite quote from a book prompt? Bend an event or invention so that it fits into Tolkien's legendarium? (Of course, more straightforward use of the prompts is welcome too!)

If you want to participate in the Funky 70s challenge, your fanwork should be posted no later than July 15 in order to receive a stamp.

Also note that our Tengwar and Crossroads challenges are still accepting responses eligible for stamps through today, so it’s a rare opportunity to meet THREE challenges with one fanwork! (Late responses are always welcome, they just don’t get stamps.)

You can find complete challenge guidelines here, and you can find the Funky 70s challenge and prompts here.

When we first opened our archive in 2007, we called it our MFAQ—Most Frequently Asked Question: "Does my story count as Silmfic?" It seems like an easy question, but it's not. The Silmarillion—as in the published book—is of course but a part of the more sprawling legendarium. People, cultures, lands, and historical events spill from the pages of The Silmarillion into other works and vice versa. Tolkien himself did this, pulling bits from the "Silmarillion" into The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So at what point does something become a "Silmwork"?

Of course, we have our MFAQ among our FAQs: How does the SWG define "Silmfic" or "Silmarillion-based fanworks"? We've created a checklist there; all you need to do is check one item and you're good to go. But here's a few insider tips from the mods that may also help creators decide if their work belongs with us.

• Characters and groups that span multiple books are welcome as long as there is a strong connection to The Silmarillion. Same with multi-age works: We love multi-age works, but a significant portion should take place in one of the time periods on the list.
• Speaking of: we accept Third Age fanworks! This often gets overlooked because we tend to hear "Third Age" and think "Hobbit and Lord of the Rings," but in fact, most of the Third Age is eligible for our site. If your fanwork takes place in the vast swath of the legendarium not covered in depth in those two books, it is welcome with us—yes, even if it is about people who feature heavily in these books.
• We are all Tolkien fans here. The SWG started at a time when the Tolkien fandom was coming down from the Lord of the Rings films, and most fanworks were centered on that book and those films. Silmarillion-based fanworks were often quickly overwhelmed on other Tolkien archives (of which there were many at the time), so we carved out the SWG as a space for Silmarillion-based fanworks. However, we are Tolkien fans—works do not need to be scrubbed of all mentions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
• Fanworks that draw on adaptations of Tolkien are welcome as well, as long as there is a significant basis in the The Silmarillion or a related work. (Looking especially at Rings of Power fanworks here!) Choose Crossover as one of your genres if you're creating based on an adaptation as well. (Maybe consider posting it for our Crossroads of the Fallen King crossover challenge!)
• If you think a fanwork is on the line, post it. The mods are rarely as strict as people think we are, and we favor including more Tolkien fanworks.
• And if you've posted five fanworks or 10,000 words with us, you can post anything Tolkien-based you want in the Beyond the Silmarillion section!

When it comes to fandom topics that provoke big emotions, there are few as fraught as commenting and feedback. From creators' perspectives, feedback can feel like a just reward for the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making a fanwork. In a community where there is little opportunity for rewards or prestige for our work—we cannot be paid or traditionally published, and many of us can't even have our work tied to our names—even a few words from our readers and viewers saying that they like what we did can mean a lot. Why most people who click on our fanworks don't bother with "even a few words" can provoke discouragement and even anger from creators.

On the other hand, readers and viewers of fanworks often express that commenting isn't as easy as it may seem. Various barriers—whether language, skill with comment writing, or mental health—can stand in the way of letting a creator know how much their work means to a reader or viewer. Furthermore, social norms around commenting can feel opaque and even perilous to the fan of a fanwork who desperately wants to avoid pissing off a favorite author or artist.

I've been writing the Cultus Dispatches column about Tolkien fandom studies for more than two years now and have yet to wade into the fraught waters of the history and culture around commenting and feedback on fanworks. But over the next few months, I plan to do just that! To start, I am collecting responses for a Fandom Voices article on commenting and feedback. Fandom Voices is an ongoing project that collects and publishes responses from fans on a variety of fandom-related questions and topics. Whether you create fanworks or read/view them, if you'd like to share your views and experiences with commenting and feedback, Fandom Voices is seeking responses about commenting and feedback from anyone who engages with Tolkien-based fanworks in any way and wants to share their perspective. You can contribute a response to our current Fandom Voices collection on commenting and feedback here.

The SWG is an archive built for a community, and we have always encouraged our members to comment on each other's work. To find more about commenting on our archive:

• Logged-in members can find all of the comments on their work here (as well as the five most recent on the homepage).
• But no one wants to physically go to and check a website, right? It's 2024!! If you'd like to get email notifications of new comments (on your work or someone else's), learn how here.
• Site hack: You can always find the comments on a fanwork (including the comment form, if you're logged in) by navigating to the work and typing "/comment" after the web address, e.g. silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/##/comment.
• Likewise, if you're logged in, you can find the number of comments (and views and favorites) on any of your fanworks on My Fanworks, with a direct link to all of your comments on that work.

Chances are, if you write fanfiction, you have given thought at some point to your craft as a writer. I say this with confidence, based on 2020 data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey: 90% of you agreed that you "take [your] writing seriously when writing Tolkien-based fanfiction." In fact, writer's craft is so deeply embedded into the institutions of fandom that it can be easy to miss. How many of you use a beta reader? Have joined a writer's workshop or some other craft-focused discussion of your work? Asked for concrit? Read and reread your work umpteen times, tweaking and changing it to coax laughter or tears from your readers, to keep them turning the pages, to help them see Middle-earth and its people through your eyes?

Craft is a complicated aspect of the history of the Tolkien fanfiction fandom. Part of this, when Tolkien fanfiction moved (and exploded) online in the early 2000s, was the bad reputation of fanfiction overall and the desperation of many writers to prove they weren't the stereotypical badfic writer, i.e., they cared about craft, they were different, they deserved the right to exist as fanfiction writers. (This was also a time when it seemed rights holders might bring an end to fanfic at any moment.) Additionally, in a fandom saturated with new writers due to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy and growing access to the internet, many fandom institutions tried to stem the rising tide of writers—and turned to "writing quality" as the way to do it. Given this, it is no surprise that most writers internalized the value that their writing was serious business and that craft matters.

But, for about 5% of you, this perhaps isn't familiar. You didn't agree with the survey statement about taking your writing seriously, and you are a growing group. In this month's Cultus Dispatches column, I looked at survey data about writer's craft. It was unsurprising and even a bit boring—until I considered the emerging group of writer's who don't care much about craft. If they don't want to become better writers, then what does motivate this group to create fanfiction, and how do they differ (in both demographics and motives) from Tolkien fanfiction writers overall?

You can read "Fanfiction and the Serious Business of Writer's Craft" here.

Writing or creating a crossover is like adding another ball or three when learning to juggle. It's one thing to keep everything required of writing or creating a fanwork effortlessly aloft when you're dealing with one fandom. But crossovers demand that you add another (or more?) fandom and all that entails in terms of character, setting, plot, style, and the myriad other elements that creators juggle in their work.

This month's challenge is Crossroads of the Fallen King and it is, quite simply, a crossover challenge: Mix The Silmarillion with something else. What that "something else" is is entirely up to you. It could be a media text or another book. It could be another Tolkien book! It could be mythology, folklore, or real-world history.

If you're looking for inspiration, check out one of the 78 crossover fanworks already on our site.

Some housekeeping: We tag fanworks on our site by crossover text. Here is a list of the crossover texts already on our site. If the one you need isn't there, use the Moderator Request field when posting your fanwork, or let us know ahead of time and we'll make sure it is added. (Just reply to this email!)

We're having one of those wild months where we have two challenges running at the same time. The Tengwar challenge is still ongoing (since there are more tengwar than days in the month), and you can post Tengwar fanworks and receive a stamp up to June 15. (This is also the deadline for creator stamps for the Crossroads of the Fallen King challenge.)

If you've never done one of our challenges before, you should join us! Full challenge guidelines can be found here.

"From where does Frodo first see the sea?"

Simon J. Cook opens his A Sense of History column this month, Thálatta! Thálatta!, with this question. Do you know the answer? (I didn't!) It seems like a question suited for a Tolkien-themed pub trivia night but in fact forms the crux of his latest installment on towers in Tolkien's work, both the 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics and The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo first glimpses the sea in Galadriel's mirror, having descended into a hollow to see (versus ascending a tower, as Simon's work so far might predict). Yet Tolkien uses an interesting turn of phrase to describe Frodo's experience, as like stepping "through a high window that looked on a vanished world." One generally steps out of a high window—and falls. Frodo's safe entry into a vision of "a vanished world" aligns it with the views from towers elsewhere in the legendarium, and Simon explores that view this month.

Although Frodo's glance in Galadriel's mirror may seem anticlimactic by design—after all, Galadriel refuses the Ring and consents to fade from the story—Simon makes the case that the view Frodo sees and the actions it inspires are in fact a key turning point within the legendarium.

You can read Simon's article "Thálatta! Thálatta!" here.

When the SWG was founded in March 2005, it was intended to be a writer's workshop group and a small one. The vision was that ten or so Silmarillion writers would gather and share and provide feedback on their writing to each other, mostly using Yahoo! Groups (though we had a LiveJournal too). My (Dawn's) first post to that Yahoo! Group mentioned an archive as a down-the-road possibility, and it was this—not the writers' workshop—that captured our new members' interests. We never started the writer's workshop, but I did start learning HTML and CSS. Nineteen years later, here we are.

Likewise, when the concept of a character of the month arose, it was in conjunction with our monthly challenges. The idea was that we'd feature a character each month as a writing challenge to create fic about that character. We started including a brief bio about the character to, ostensibly, get people interested. In August 2009, Oshun took over writing these "brief bios"—and she did stick to the original vision at first. Her first biography was of Irmo and was about 560 words long. However, this idea also evolved and changed beyond anything we imagined at first, until Oshun was producing scholarship-level biographies every month—some of them so in-depth that they spanned multiple months—and ended up gifting us one of the most notable parts of our site.

Throughout the history of the SWG, we've often moved like leaves before the wind, following where enthusiasm and interest have taken us. Right now, the Character of the Month is in its sunset phase; most of the major Silmarillion characters have been written. But we are in the process of developing new columns to continue to provide a venue for fan scholarship, a space where fans who want to write nonfiction can learn the craft, and resources for fanworks creators and Tolkien fans alike.

Our next endeavor follows Oshun's Character of the Month (in fact, the idea was hers, when we realized we were running out of biographies to write) and will focus on locations in Arda. You can vote for the name of this new column here. If you want to contribute to this column (or any other!), reply to this email. As a fan group first and foremost, we are committed to welcoming beginners and experts alike and provide support to new authors, so don't let a lack of experience with nonfiction writing dissuade you!

We do have a handful of characters still in need of biographers: Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. Likewise, reply here if you are interested in taking one!

We are excited to see where the wind blows and our new column goes and will have more details on it in the weeks to come!