This is a rare newsletter where I have neither a new article nor a new challenge to announce, so it seems a good opportunity to do my semi-regular State of the SWG, which really amounts to an update on areas where we currently need volunteer help.

Open Volunteer Roles. I've posted two new volunteer roles this morning, in addition to the "evergreen" roles that always accept new people. We are looking for both a social media manager and an Around the World and Web editor.

The social media manager will work with the moderator team to ensure that announcements posted to the site make it onto our social media accounts on Discord, Tumblr, and Dreamwidth.

The Around the World and Web editor ensures that that section of the site is updated at least weekly. Both roles require about 30 minutes to an hour of time commitment per week. SWG moderators and volunteers always work together to ensure that we cover time off for each other when needed.

We also have "evergreen" volunteer roles that are always open to join: Around the World and Web scouts, inclusivity committee members, and newsletter contributors and committee members. The volunteer page has more information on all of these roles, including more detailed job descriptions for the two new postings. If you are interested or have questions, just hit REPLY on this email and let me know!

Character of the Month. Oshun responded to a call much like this in 2007, asking for someone who would be willing to write up a paragraph or two each month about our featured Character of the Month. Over the fifteen years that she was our lead biographer, she evolved from "one or two paragraphs" to ... quite a bit more. Our character biographies are one of the favorite parts of our site, and it was Oshun who consistently raised the bar to create this wonderful resource for all of us to use.

In those fifteen years, we have covered almost all of the major Silmarillion characters and quite a few minor characters as well. We are beginning to sunset the project, which means that we want to first ensure that all major characters have biographies on the site, at which point the column will drop from monthly to periodical, when there is interest in writing about minor characters.

Major characters we are looking to have written are Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Manwë, Hador, Nienor, Melkor, Curufin, Marach, and Olwë. You do not need to have experience with research writing; we are glad to support newcomers, so if you want to give it a try, hit REPLY and let me know the character you want.

Fandom Voices. We have a new Fandom Voices question up, asking about your experiences with fanon. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of our monthly Cultus Dispatches column on Tolkien fan studies, and it seeks fan input on topics related to the Tolkien fandom. This month, if you read, view, or create fanworks, we want to know all about your thoughts, perspectives, and experiences with fanon! You can learn more or send your thoughts on fanon here. 

Thank you. Finally, this is a good opportunity to recognize that many people already help keep the SWG not only running behind the scenes but a vibrant Tolkien fan community. Thank you to all of our volunteers, past and current, who have given their time to making our community what it is today!

Identity theft is seemingly a modern-day fear, where someone uses another's identity to act in ways they would not under their own name. Terms like "data breach" and "deep fake" have a very 21st-century feel to them.

Yet this month's character of the month might be one of the legendarium's most clear-cut examples of identity theft: Amlach. Initially a dissenting voice against Marach's embrace of the Elven mission against Melkor in Beleriand, Amlach would find himself one of Melkor's victims in a bizarre episode that Himring, the author of this month's biography, rightly classifies as a First Age example of identity theft. Amlach stands up and speaks against attacking Morgoth ... but the speaker isn't actually Amlach.

In fandom, the Edain rarely achieve the same popularity as the Elves, except those (like Haleth and Andreth) whose lives intersect with the history of the Elves. Amlach, however, is evidence that the relationship between those two peoples—and between the various groups of Edain—was far from simple, and the role of the Edain involved more than simply acting the supporting role in the Eldarin drama of the First Age. Amlach's story raises interesting questions about the allegiances and politics that must have simmered beneath the story we read in the published Silmarillion.

You can read Himring's biography of Amlach here.

When I was a kid, the only thing better than a new book was a new book with a map inside. Even to this day, if I receive a new book, and it has a map inside? I will usually spend five or ten minutes looking at the map before even thinking about reading even a word of the text, and I will return to the map nearly every time I open the book, curious what mysteries it holds that have been further revealed by reading the text it precedes.

Maps occupy a magical space between story and art. Traditionally, they are visual representations of information, yet they contain questions and, yes, stories within their lines and labels. They are visual but are often anchored and oriented with the addition of text. Not surprisingly, many Tolkien fans love maps. In this, they take after Tolkien himself, who put great care into his maps and into the geography of Arda more generally. Many Tolkien books contain maps, and many of us remember poring over them—or, better yet, getting our hands on one of those special copies with an enlarged, fold-out copy of the map. Some Tolkien fans go even further, making their own copies of maps, either to clarify geography for their own fanworks or to build on Tolkien's work with their own fan art.

With this love of cartography in mind, our art editor Anérea has embarked on a four-part series as part of her Tolkien Fanartics column, looking at fan-made maps across the ages of Arda. In the first article, she goes back to the beginnings of the universe, looking at artists who have crafted maps about the shaping of the world and Aman. These are often blanks among the maps Tolkien left us, calling on fan artists to extrapolate from what details he did leave, fill in the missing pieces from their own imaginations, and then overlay it all with their own style and artistry. Just like all maps do, their work invites contemplation and questions and ultimately opens new ways  of seeing Tolkien's world.

You can read Anérea's "Mapping Arda, Part I: Terraforming" here.

Music is central to the legendarium. At its foundation is a creation myth where the world is sung into being. Throughout, we have songs and poems, duels of song, and musicians who are elevated to the same status as great warriors.

Probably not surprisingly, given this, the SWG moderator team (who are nerdy enough about Tolkien to make working for this website a volunteer part-time job) love challenges with music prompts. We generally offer several challenges each year with music as some or all of the prompts. If you asked us why, we would likely have a good answer about how music prompts offer a rich array of options—you can use the whole song, a single line (or word!), the title, the band name, the music video, the music itself, the mood it creates, its theme ... anything!—with a high level of accessibility. Part of it too is that these prompts are really fun to make and the fanworks they inspire really fun to read and view.

In this spirit, this month's challenge is Turgon's Rock Opera. The prompts are rock songs, and you can request one by clicking Reply on this message. If you want to see the full challenge or challenge guidelines, you can find those here.

Keep on rocking, Tolkien fans!

Fandom is a dialogue. What we do, as fans, around our beloved source texts is largely centered on conversing with other fans. Through discussions and, of course, fanworks, we share and respond to each others' ideas. If you create fanworks, you are doubtlessly familiar with the experience of making a creative choice to cosign a particular fanon, theory, or idea that you like, or making a choice that pushes back against those that you don't.

Tolkien looms so large in our popular imagination that it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that he, too, was a fan, and much of his work was fannish in nature. As one of the preeminent scholars of Anglo-Saxon philology, his interest in the landmark Anglo-Saxon poem "Beowulf" was more than professional; it was fannish too. He loved "Beowulf," and his scholarly work advocated for it to be taken seriously as art and for others to appreciate what he saw, and loved, about the poem.

And just like, as fans, we respond to each other through our fanworks, Tolkien too used writing to respond to other scholars of "Beowulf." In this month's "A Sense of History" column, Simon J. Cook continues his investigation of Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" by making the case that the famous tower analogy in the essay should very much be seen as a response to actual people whom Tolkien knew and interacted with, both professionally and socially. By using an early draft of the lecture, which features a simplified version of the analogy, Simon shows how the various figures in the tower analogy match up to the other "Beowulf" scholars who were writing in Tolkien's day. Without this context, Simon makes the case that understanding the tower analogy often goes astray. Instead, we must understand the tower analogy as responding to specific people and their specific claims about the poem ... indeed, much as fans often direct their fanworks very directly at specific fans, fanworks, and theories.

You can read Simon's essay "The Rock Garden" here: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/7014

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Our newsletter continues to look a mucky plain-text mess because we continue to have issues with our email. We are working with escalated support from our webhost at this point to resolve the issue, but it is a lot of slow back-and-forth with all the challenges that customer service in the modern era bring. Currently, our moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org address is not receiving email. Fortunately, notifications from the site appear to all be sending. We are hoping an end is in sight for this issue. In the meantime, current site issues are documented here: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/site-issues

Ómar-Amillo is a character who barely exists in the legendarium. He appears briefly in the earliest "Silmarillion" that Tolkien wrote down, the Book of Lost Tales, where he is a god of music, Salmar's brother, and not much else. He is, in other words, a mayfly: disappearing from the story just after he emerged, before Tolkien even gave up his work on the Lost Tales.

The Lost Tales, though, are full of mayflies. Ideas, events, and characters pop into the story, only to be replaced or just never seen again. Because most of my character biographies for the site focus on the Ainur—who were among the earliest of Tolkien's characters and thus, in many cases (though not Ómar's!), the longest enduring—it can be a tempting and fun activity to theorize about which ideas stuck around and which didn't.

But I'm a writer. Chances are, if you're reading this, you too are a writer or engage in some other type of creative pursuit, or you hang out with creatives. I believe the perspectives of writers and other creatives offer an approach to Tolkien's work that is sometimes missing in scholarship from those who don't necessarily have that perspective, who don't (in other words) necessarily appreciate how often ideas end up written down that really don't represent where we want the story to go. These whims just happen to be in mind when we can grab the rare moment to put pencil to page.

As I tackled Ómar's biography this month, I can't help theorizing about what he means: about why Tolkien included him, what he shows of the evolving legendarium, and why Tolkien so quickly decided, without fanfare, to simply stop including him in the story. But as a writer, I know the explanation could be as simple as Tolkien writing him down, including him a handful of times, and then deciding he didn't add to the story and moving on.

You can read Ómar's biography here: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/7004

You might notice that this newsletter looks different, and not in a good way. (You might also have noticed that last week's newsletter never arrived at all!) We've been back and forth this week with our webhost after an upgrade broke our email system. The only way, right now, that we can send the newsletter is via plain text. Hence it look rather ... plain.

That being said, they've fixed most of the problems ... we hope. However, when using the site to send messages or make requests, do be aware that the system is a bit shaky right now. If you're messaging or making a request of the mods (like a new character tag) using the site and we don't take care of it in twenty-four hours, feel free to follow up. Just reply to this email or use our address moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org. It is emails sent via the site that are impacted.

Now onto better things, namely gorgeous art and how it is made!

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Ringed by wordless faces, the portrait room in an art museum has a certain hush to it. There is the human face, many times over, a deceptively simple theme. Yet within those faces, lines hint at past pain. Eyes flash from a face defined by age or youth. The best portraits seem to capture just a moment in a story passing on either side of that brief second in time. It is possible to imagine what happened leading up to the portrait and what transpired after.

The impeccable, impressionistic paintings of Ylieke seem to belong in such a gallery. Although Ylieke describes her work as centered on storytelling, these are not complicated action scenes. Instead, it is the eyes, the hands, the faces of her characters that speak to what they are feeling and experiencing in that moment, leaving no doubt that there is a rich story happening on either side of it. In our latest Tolkien Fanartics column, firstamazon caught up with Ylieke to learn more about her technique, goals, and beliefs as a fan artist.

Interestingly, Ylieke describes her own work as, "not so good at drawing emotions," with which this viewer would strongly disagree. However, no matter what you creative form of choosing, Ylieke's careful look at her own work and approach to art might be useful advice:

"Sometimes illustrations just don’t come out as they were envisioned. The best course of action in this case is to finalize the work as well as you can and move on. The next work will be 0.001% better."

You can read firstamazon's interview with Ylieke here: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/6965

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SWG News: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/news

Around the World and Web, announcements from around the fandom: https://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/atwaw

When we look at Tolkien's work today, we look at it from the vantage point of 2023. We see the trajectory of his decades of work on the legendarium. We see, within a historical context, texts that seem to respond to or even predict what would have been the breaking news of the day.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues his series of articles on the tower analogy found in Tolkien's pivotal essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," considered even today to be the most important scholarship penned on Beowulf. Simon makes the case that the tower analogy present in the essay has connections to the legendarium: that the tower-builder climbs his tower to look upon the same sea that so seduces the characters of the legendarium, separating Middle-earth from Valinor. From the view from his tower, the man glimpses the wisdom of a lost world, but to do so requires imagination.

In 1936, when he delivered "Monsters and the Critics" (and was also in the midst of some of his most productive work on the "Silmarillion" materials), Tolkien would have been grappling with a world again on the brink of war and all of the fear and uncertainty that provoked. Much like the Beowulf-poet and the man and his tower, he turned to the past for answers and for courage.

You can read Simon's article "1936" here.

Back in June, we published the first part of Melesta's biography of Húrin. In this article, they make the case that "Húrin's story is one of the backbones of Tolkien's legendarium, whose influence is felt in the narrative ages after his passing," specifically finding connections between Húrin's character and those of Tolkien's later heroes, including Aragorn, due to the influence of estel on Húrin's early life and outlook.

But this is the First Age, and things never fail to get grim fast. If you are reading this, you know that estel is a shaky concept in The Silmarillion compared to Tolkien's later and more eucatastrophic works. In the second part of Húrin's biography, Melesta traces the next half of Húrin's life, which is marked by tragedy, suffering, and betrayal*—yet as Melesta points out, Húrin's courage and loyalty to those he loves never wavers.

* In Húrin's story, we see Tolkien prefigure Kurt Vonnegut's later exhortation to writers to "be a sadist" to even the most likable of characters.

Of course, Húrin is an apt illustration of why Vonnegut's advice is so well-known among writers. Through Húrin, Tolkien unfolds what happens to an exceptional person when put under exceptional duress. And, as Melesta notes, the ending of Húrin's story is left vague, so we can never be entirely sure what our hero was really made of. Yet through Húrin's story and what he endures and how he endures it, many of Tolkien's most important themes—among the many reasons readers have loved his work for the better part of a century—are unveiled, defining heroism in such a way that will be remembered across the ages in the legendarium.

You can read the second part of Melesta's biography of Húrin here (and make your own decision about how you interpret the ending).

I remember when the cover art for the recent Tolkien Society Seminar proceedings Tolkien and Diversity—which includes essays by several SWG members and friends—was announced and I saw Ismene's portrait A Elbereth Gilthoniel for the first time. Seeming to glance over her shoulder as though interrupted at an important task, Varda Elentári gazed out from the screen with a look of casual challenge. In that moment, I learned it was exactly the look befitting the goddess who both painted the sky with stars and scared the heck out of Melkor.

I immediately looked up more about Ismene and discovered she was a fan artist (which I'd been secretly hoping for). Shadow had already signed on to review Tolkien and Diversity, so I asked Anérea: Would she be willing to see if Ismene would talk to us for Tolkien Fanartics, as a complement to the book review? Thankfully, both Anérea and Ismene agreed, and that interview is our column this week.

In the interview, Ismene talks about her creative process, her artistic training (she's self-taught!), and what makes The Silmarillion such an appealing text to build on creatively. Ismene describes a road trip where some internet digging revealed that "Sauron apparently did not always look like that suit of armour [from the films] at all … And what was more, there was another dark lord??? ... I started digging into it to learn the lore, and I got hooked."

Ismene's story is familiar. Tolkien's world invites fannish engagement because the more you learn, the more it seems you must find out. And that deep fannish engagement creates the kinds of personal stories where looking up images of Tolkien characters online one day brings the artist, many years later, to the place where her own work stands to shift how Tolkien fans see his characters and his world.

You can read Anérea's interview with Ismene here.