You're likely reading this because you have an interest, in some way, in Tolkien-based fanworks. That means that, at some point, several things had to happen. You had to pick up Tolkien. What motivated you to do that? Was it a book put in your hands by a parent, teacher, or friend? Or did you see the films and have to have more? Or did you see a work of art or read a story online that would not leave you alone until you learned more about the world that inspired it?

Then you had to, at some point, decide that, of the hours allowed to you during your week, you wanted to spend some of it on or with Tolkien fanworks. Again, what put those fanworks on your radar? Maybe you'd been part of fanworks communities before, accidentally found Tolkien fanworks online while looking for something else, or had been making stories and art about Tolkien before discovering that other people do this too. Over and over again, you choose to continue to be a part of this community. Why? What keeps you coming back?

This month, for my monthly Tolkien fandom studies and history column, Cultus Dispatches, I took on the Organization for Transformative Works' "10 things about fandom" challenge for International Fanworks Day. I thought it would be an easy column. It was not—in fact, it may be the most challenge column I've written yet! When the dust settles after a lot of thinking, discussing, writing, and phoning in favors to friends who know way more about aspects of the fandom's history than I do, what I really tried to do was find ten "moments" that explain how so many of us—sixty-four years after the first Tolkien fanfics were published—are still doing this thing. What brought us here? What keeps us here?

It's really important that this list is not definitive. It is one person's perspective, and while (appropriate enough for a tens challenge!) it is informed by ten years now formally researching Tolkien fanfiction, its cultures, and its history, it is one person's perspective. If you made or make your own "ten things" list about our fandom, please comment on my article or just hit reply here and let me know. I'd love to share others' perspectives as well!

You can read "10 Important Moments in Tolkien Fanfiction History" here.

If it seems like the newsletter is early this week, you are not mistaken. It is and intentionally so.

On Saturday, we are hosting an instadrabbling session on our Discord server, and I wanted to make sure that the newsletter arrived before the first session started. This instadrabbling session is in honor of International Fanworks Day and serves as an opportunity to swap prompts for our new challenge, Meet & Greet Matryoshka.

There was a lot of fandom jargon in that last paragraph. First things first: instadrabbling is a collaborative activity aimed at making flash fanworks together. As far as I know, it was invented by Tolkien fanfiction writers JunoMagic and Aranel Took in the mid-2000s. The way it works: A bunch of creators get together on a chat service. Someone throws out a prompt (traditionally four words chosen at random from the nearest book on hand). Everyone makes a drabble or other flash fanwork, posts the results, and everyone squees over the results.

International Fanworks Day is February 15 and sponsored by the Organization for Transformative Works. Every year, we offer an IFD stamp for challenge participants and sometimes we fly by the seats of our pants in putting something else together at the last minute to make it look like we planned ahead. This year, we remembered about IFD in time to actually plan instadrabbling and have it appear in the OTW's news announcements. (Proof, perhaps, that at age 19, the SWG is indeed entering adulthood?)

Instadrabbling also provides an occasion to gather for our current challenge. Meet & Greet is our annual Matryoshka challenge. As far as I know, we invented this challenge format, something that I'm proud of even as I want to apologize for doing so. Matryoshka challenges are hard. The Matryoshka challenge involves cumulative prompts, like the nesting dolls that it is named after, so you never know how subsequent prompts may ruin the fanwork you so lovingly planned and had half-created in your mind. Typically, the mods send a separate email for each prompt; for this one, we will send your first prompt and then you need to find the rest, either by asking other participants (hence Meet & Greet!) or finding them online. Some participants have posted them publicly, and the mods have hidden a few in plain sight to see who actually reads the stuff we post on the site.

The sum total of all of this: fandom is truly collaborative. We are using a social activity invented two decades ago by a pair of Lord of the Rings authors to celebrate a holiday coined by a huge fanworks nonprofit and to support a challenge that we invented and hope will encourage SWG members to talk to each other and visit each other's socials. It seems fitting that this amalgam will result in a bunch of creators coming together to make and celebrate fanworks together.

If you want to join us for instadrabbling, you can join our Discord server here. Full Meet & Greet challenge guidelines (and the participant list) are here. Instadrabbling will occur on 17 February 2024 at 13:00/1PM until 17:00/5PM UTC (see this in your timezone) and again on 18 February 2024 at midnight until 2:00AM UTC (see this in your timezone). We hope to see you there!

Fans of Tolkien's legendarium, once they become aware that he was the preeminent scholar of Beowulf (and in some ways still is), often seek evidence of his academic work lurking amid the hills of Eriador. This is a fruitful area of Tolkien scholarship as well.

Less often embarked upon is the opposite: looking at Tolkien's Middle-earth work and how it influenced his academic work. Part of this is because Tolkien fans and scholars have internalized the idea that, although he looms large to us for having penned The Lord of the Rings, writing about Elves and Hobbits was a side hustle for Tolkien—and one he was not always proud of. But in this month's A Sense of History, Simon J. Cook does exactly that, turning the revelations from a close-read of certain passages from The Lord of the Rings and its Appendices to shed light on Tolkien's most famous scholarly work.

"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" was a 1936 lecture given by Tolkien that marks a watershed moment in Beowulf scholarship. It is widely credited by Anglo-Saxon scholars with changing how Beowulf is read, allowing it to be interpreted as literature and not simply mined as a historical and philological source. The lecture-turned-essay includes a lengthy and beautiful analogy of an old man and a tower. This analogy has been interpreted by numerous very well-known Tolkien scholars.

For the past several months, Simon has discussed the tower analogy, including (much to Tom Shippey's chagrin) how existing scholarship about it reads it wrong. This month, he does what is so rarely done: looking at towers in The Lord of the Rings, especially as they appear in Frodo's dreams, and considering what the meaning of these towers in The Lord of the Rings can show us of the meaning behind an uncannily similar tower in "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." Tolkien's side hustle, in other words, may have shaped or at least reflected how he thought about the medieval texts he cherished and made his life's work.

You can read Simon's article "In the House of the Fairbairns" here.

The SWG is rapidly approaching its nineteenth year of existence. When I founded the group in 2005, it was a niche community, one of hundreds of Tolkien fanfiction groups, and when the website opened in 2007, it was a niche website and one of dozens of Tolkien fanfiction archives. The landscape around us looks very different now. Where there are still Tolkien groups (mostly on Tumblr and Dreamwidth), we are one of the only Tolkien-specific archives remaining. When the OTW recently published the results of its 16th Anniversary Survey, and when the SWG was listed as one of "the most popular sites not already offered as answer options," that was a splash of cold water to the face: Somehow, this niche website had assumed some degree of centrality.

Watching other independent archives fade around you (and sometimes out from under you) creates a lot of anxiety. These are, after all, hubs that hold the creative work of dozens if not hundreds of people, and they are communities of people who have come to know and care about each other. Probably many of you reading this have been personally impacted by site and community closures. When one closes, especially with little or no warning, that represents a significant loss to many people. Over the summer, while researching independent archives, I asked the question, "What concerns about independent archives do you have?" and 72% of people responded that "small archives can close without warning." This was the top response to that question.

Sites fade and close for a lot of reasons, but declining interest (from mods or members and usually both), unforeseen tragedies that cut off funding or management of a site (or both), and obsolescence of technology are among the most common. Here, we've worked really hard across the years to insulate the SWG against declining interest and obsolescence of tech. We maintain a moderator team that is interested in running events to keep the group active, and in 2021, we migrated the site to software that we have every reason to believe will sustain us for many years to come. Within the past couple of months, we've put plans in place to ensure the site's survival in the event of unforeseen tragedies as well. We've ensured that there is a clear plan for who will pay for the site and who will administer and moderate the archives and our various social media if I am unable to do so.

None of these things are a guarantee that the SWG will live forever. It won't. An enduring message of Tolkien's works is one of impermanence: things change and fade. However, we recognize the incredible community so many people have built over the last (almost) nineteen years, and we want to be fully transparent with everyone of all that we are doing to ensure that the site survives and thrives for as long as it can.

We've also set up a page on the site about Governance of the SWG that includes information on how we run the site, fund it, and make decisions, including around continuance of funding and management of the site. We welcome questions always; you can hit REPLY to this email or reach out to the moderators through any of the usual channels.

A few weeks ago, our newsletter issue was called "Characters in the Margins." This week, as we feature a biography of Olwë written by LadySternchen, we end up thinking about characters who often seem to exist mostly between the lines of The Silmarillion.

Olwë is just that character. LadySternchen's biography details the early years of his life, about which we know quite a bit. What seems to be missing—and where LadySternchen offers insightful inferences—are the emotional impacts of those events.

If we adopt today's language, we would say that Olwë experienced multiple traumas over the course of his early life. Melkor's attacks on the Quendi form a frightening foundation, followed by separation from others of the Teleri, most notably his brother Elwë, who goes missing long enough that Olwë is forced to choose between continuing to search for him and crossing the sea to join the rest of the Eldar. And of course, the Darkening and the first kinslaying form particularly brutal codas to an already tumultuous life.

As many of us are fanworks creators, these are the fertile points in a characters' life for our work, often elided by Tolkien and all the more intriguing for the open spaces left behind.

You can read LadySternchen's biography of Olwë here.

This is the first biography in 2024, the first year where we have so few major characters left to write about as part of the Character of the Month column that it will, for the first time in over sixteen years, cease being published as a monthly column and become an occasional column. If you'd like to tackle one of our nine remaining characters (Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, or Nienor!) reply to this email and let me know!

"The West" is a place numinous and longed for in Tolkien's world. It captures the sense that many of us have, standing on the shores of the sea and gazing at the pale line where sky meets sea, that something lies just over the horizon, just out of view yet somehow still perceptible as a longing in the heart. In Middle-earth, characters pine for the West. Who goes (and doesn't go) into the West is a big deal. Imagery of ships sailing toward that horizon, never to return, recurs throughout Tolkien's books, and the occasional characters allowed to transgress the boundary imposed by the sea and venture into the West act within key turning points in the narrative.

In this month's A Sense of History column, Simon J. Cook continues his series on the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture-turned-essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," and this month he too turns toward the West. In 1936, two towers arose in Tolkien's writings, both coming from drafts where they formerly did not appear. There is, of course, the tower in "Monsters and the Critics," but a tower appears in that year too in The Fall of Númenor.

As Simon has documented in his series, Tolkien scholars have engaged in a "punch up on the lawn" about what the tower in "Monsters and the Critics" actually means. Simon makes the point that they are overlooking the key connection with The Fall of Númenor and Tolkien's other towers: those familiar within his imagined world of Middle-earth. The tower in "Monsters and the Critics," like so many others in the legendarium, was built with the express purpose of looking West.

You can read Simon's article "The Peaks of Taniquetil" here.

On the radio the other day, I heard a piece about the number of people who make New Year's resolutions only to break them, sometimes within a matter of days. Anyone who creates knows that, although many of us know those near-magical days when the words and ideas and paint seem to effortlessly flow, there are also days when we have to make ourselves work on creative projects.

For many years now, the SWG has run Resolution as the first challenge of the year. While ostensibly it exists to get us all off on the right foot as creators by encouraging us to start the year creatively, it in fact lets us make up for our regrets and foibles from the previous year. Did you miss a challenge (or two or ...) that you wanted to do during 2023? Did you start a challenge piece that you never got around to finishing? Request a prompt you wanted to use but didn't? During the month of January until 15 February, the Resolution challenge lets you start and finish those fanworks like real life never got in the way during 2023!

A few tips to help make Resolution a more successful challenge:

• There is no minimum word count for challenges. Any type of fanwork counts as long as it is Silmarillion-based.
• You can combine multiple prompts into a single challenge response. Have a couple you missed doing and want to mash them up into a single fanwork? Go wild!
• If a challenge initially required you to request a prompt from the moderators, those challenges are now self-select prompts. You can find all of the challenges listed on the Resolution challenge page, and the prompts listed under the challenge you want to complete. The only exception is Secret Gate, last year's Matryoshka challenge. If you want to try that one, message the mods and let us know if you want two, three, five, or seven prompts. (Replying to this email accomplishes the same thing!)

If you're new to our challenges, the challenge guidelines are here. Questions? Reply to this email, and we'll help you get started!

Finally, our challenges also have a comment component. Comment on a 2023 challenge fanwork to receive the commenter stamp for that challenge. (Challenge fanworks are listed on the page for the challenge.) If you've commented on a challenge prior to Experimental, let us know so that we can add the stamp to your collection. (Again, just reply here!)

Here's to creativity and community in 2024!

(Quick final note that Russandol and I fixed a pretty annoying error on the site this morning that has been impacting pages with /user in the URL for the past several months. Find more about the error and the fix here. If you're a registered member, check your profile and make sure everything looks okay. If it doesn't, you can just ... you know what I'm going to say, right?? Reply here!)

I teach geography (among other things), and I often present my students with maps that center a region of the world other than Europe, present the world "upside down," or allow them to see the true size of countries with Mercator-induced distortions. The hope is that this will help offset students' perceptions of the world enough that they can center the perspectives of peoples whose voices often are not heard.

In the Tolkien fanworks world, there are many creators devoted to doing the exact same thing. Mirra Kan is one such artist. A self-described orientalist, she seeks to recalibrate our understanding of Middle-earth to center the cultures and perspectives of characters from the south and east. As many fans have observed over the years, characters from the Middle-earth equivalent of the Global South are not just marginalized but demonized, reduced to convenient villains.

"Tolkien is so much more than that," Mirra tells Anérea in this month's interview for Tolkien Fanartics, "and I felt that creative fire burning inside—the urge to tell, to share, and to spotlight some things people tend to ignore: colonial past, slavery, dark cults, necromancy, and people staying faithful with no Elves to guide them." Mirra's work amplifies the canon that shows that the people of the south and east of Middle-earth were not inherently evil but striving for the same hopes, dreams, and sense of safety as any human, and her vibrant, realistic artwork brings to life to people who live in the margins of the stories.

You can read Anérea's interview with Mirra Kan here.

When the SWG began in 2005, the year 2023 was firmly located in the realm of futuristic science fiction. And indeed, from our humble beginnings as a Yahoo! Group, LiveJournal community, and website built using a text editor and a web browser, when the idea of interacting online was very new to most of us, where we are now would have been almost impossible to imagine back then.

Every year at the New Year, I experience gratitude (and, not gonna lie, a bit of awe) for the continued existence of the SWG. And not even just a continued existence, frozen in time, where we preserve the fanworks of the past, but an ongoing thriving community that continues to make fanworks about Tolkien's world and build community among Tolkien fans.

So far for 2023 (because it's not over yet!), we've had 548 fanworks added to or updated on our archive. 139 of those fanworks were created for our 2023 challenges. We welcomed 74 new members to the archive.

Importantly, this occurs within a larger fandom context that has, for many years now, tilted toward consolidation onto large multifandom archives and social sites, which means that our own success as a small, independent archive and fan site is not accidental: It is created through the hard work of our volunteers and the dedication of our members, who continue to create, post, read, view, and discuss fanworks with us in a time when most small archives have gone inactive—or gone offline altogether. When I've occasionally mentored archive and event admins over the years, I've told them that the Field of Dreams mentality does not apply in today's fandom world. In this 1989 film, the saying goes, "If you build it, they will come," and maybe that was true of archives in the early 2000s, but it certainly is not today. A lot of effort and commitment go into fandom archives that remain active, and I am so grateful to each of you who choose to share your creativity, wisdom, and fellowship with us.

I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year and looking forward to an excellent 2024!

When I was a relatively new site owner in Tolkien fandom, I remember grousing with another site owner about how difficult it was to get Tolkien fans interested in new platforms. We (as tech as well as Tolkien nerds) wanted our friends to play on the same new toys we did, and we found they were mostly just not interested. Tolkien fans are, in other words, the Galadriels of the fandom world: They find their Lothlórien, find their people, and make magic rings to stay forever.

This was just one way—keeping a foot in Tolkien fandom and also the "acafan" community—that I found most Tolkien fans differed from fandom as a whole. As a Tolkien fan studies researcher, I have always been fascinated by how the two differed but struggled to document this as more than just a vague feeling (including, as a general rule, the complete lack of any discussion of Tolkien fandom and fans, despite the longevity of the former and number of the latter, in the fan studies scholarship).

So when the OTW 16th Annual Survey results were released and I saw there were some overlaps with my own Tolkien Fanfiction Survey, I couldn't wait to check out the results side by side. It's perilous work, comparing two different survey datasets, and I caution that this month's Cultus Dispatches should be read with a huge grain of salt. However, I there are some interesting overlaps, namely that we are Galadriels: When you look at the platform data between the two surveys, we Tolkien people show a preference for sites that aren't necessarily older but have an early-internet vibe.

You can read this month's article, "Duel of Surveys: Comparing Tolkien Fanfiction and OTW Survey Data," here.