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Event Overview:

Ekphrasis: the description or interpretation of a piece of art, usually visual, in a different artistic medium.

Material culture and art add vibrancy to our lives, and it seems that there are so many options in Middle Earth ripe for interpretation! A poem on Nerdanel’s statues, a tapestry capturing Nessa’s dance, a prose fic describing the impact of seeing Númenor’s frescoes, a painting exploring the beautiful quotidian architecture of a Hobbit hole…

This is a Tolkien-fandom-wide event dedicated to the art of ekphrasis in Tolkien’s worlds. Its goal is to illuminate the artistic surroundings of the places, people, and stories we love, in as many media as possible. As such, fanworks are welcome to take almost any form: see the FAQ for the full list!

The prompts are multi-part. The first part of the prompt is mandatory, describing the kind of art to be interpreted. The subsequent parts are optional thematic, formal, or visual add-ons that people may choose to incorporate or not.

Keep reading below the cut for an example prompt, inclusivity rules, housekeeping, and the calendar! 

Keep reading

62 days to go until reveals! I hope everyone’s creations are coming along well. Remember that any questions can be directed to the ask box here or the Dreamwidth comments.

As a reminder, one of the fanwork forms encouraged in TEW is podfic. This post hopes to serve as encouragement for first-timers or a reminder to podficcers that podfic is welcome here.

There are various ways to find existing works to podfic. The last three years of TEW have built up a selection of theme-eligible works. A search for “Tolkien” will bring up many authors on the FPS List, and the “Podfic Welcome” tag on AO3 may also be helpful.

Noted Tolkien podficcer @the-dragongirl has a lovely how-to post for those just getting started.

I hope everything is coming along well for those working on their TEW projects! Never hesitate to ask a question here or on Dreamwidth. Happy creating!

Check them all out on this blog or at the Dreamwidth. It’s a fun bunch this year. You have from now until June 9th to create your works and post them in the unrevealed AO3 collection. That’s 84 days! If you have any questions between now and then, please ask at this blog or leave a comment on the Dreamwidth sticky post. 

In terms of rules, all is the same as last year. Please remember that, as of 2024, the use of generative AI is not welcome in TEW. Also, this is not a rule change, but please note that the TV show The War of the Rohirrim is finally eligible now that it has aired!

Please be encouraged to reblog the main post and spread the word in your communities. The more the merrier! Can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with.

Day 1’s required ekphrasis theme is dance. Dance is one of the most basic human art forms: anyone at all can dance. From virtuoso concert dancers to happy toddlers to clubbers to someone moving to music alone in their room, dance is a constant in the human experience. It does not require able bodies, hearing, or resources beyond oneself and the urge to move. As a spectacle, a social practice, a religious activity, exercise, or any of its other manifold uses, dance is at once enduring and utterly ephemeral. Before the invention of video and dance notation to preserve choreographies, specific dances survived solely through practitioners passing their body memories down to those who danced after them. Ekphrasis of dance, then, seems particularly suited to contemplation of transience, ecstasy, discipline, memory, and community.

Optional Writing Method Theme

The first suggested style for writers is the review. Common in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, and personal blogs, critical reviews weigh the strengths, weaknesses, and contexts of exhibits, performances, and individual artworks. Reviews can be more or less personal, formal, and objective in the criteria and styles they use to rate the merits of their subjects. By critically analyzing the critics, much may be revealed about the reviewer’s own biases, contexts, and artistic milieux. What kind of reviews might we see in Tolkien’s universes?

Optional Art Method Theme

The opening optional artistic theme is upcycling/creative re-use. Just as classical choreographers are forever reusing the formal steps of dance in ever-new combinations, consider literally or figuratively recycling an old art project.

Optional Pain Theme

“But of bliss and glad life there is little to be said, before it ends; as works fair and wonderful, while still they endure for eyes to see, are their own record, and only when they are in peril or broken forever do they pass into song.” – “Of the Sindar,” The Silmarillion

Today’s optional pain theme is salvage ekphrasis: lost art known only from other works of art.

Optional Joy Theme

There are strong traditions of mentorship, apprenticeship, and communal training among dancers: before the invention recording technologies and dance notation, all dance was passed down through lineages of tutelage. Learning in community can be generative and inspiring, creating lifelong bonds and ensuring the safe passage of precious knowledge from generation to generation. For a hit of happiness on Day 1, consider the benefits of cooperative learning and the importance of transferring knowledge down into the future.

Some examples for your inspiration.

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

Leathercraft is the art and craft of shaping leather through diverse means into objects of utility and art. Tanning is an art all of its own, which produces the supple, stiff, or buttery, dark, bleached, or earthy raw material which leather crafters then cut, emboss, dye, paint, mold, braid, and sew into diverse forms. These usually blend form and function: think elaborate western floral saddles and boots, deep-carved medieval purses, and the indispensable belt. Leathercraft is an intimate and animal process with perhaps an unusual level of interest in the biological properties of its materials. It encourages us to think about flexibility and transcending practicality.

Optional Writing Method Theme

Did you know Tolkien Ekphrasis Week has never produced an E-rated fanwork? Somehow, leather day just seemed like the right time to write ribaldry! Go forth, you writers of porn with or without plot, and create ekphrastic erotica!

Optional Art Method Theme

You guessed it! For leather day, consider making some tasteful (or less tasteful) ekphrastic-erotic art.

Optional Pain Theme

What if today we twist the pain theme a little and focus on that which hurts so good? A cathartic catastrophe, abreactive adversity, freeing failure: pain that leads you somewhere better.

Optional Joy Theme

Today’s joy theme is the sheer pleasure of wonderful raw materials. The sensory delight of pre-shaped tanned leather is glorious: the smell, the rich colors, the smooth or buttery texture. If you feel like it, spend some time glorying in the components of the final art piece.

Some examples for your inspiration. (All SFW)

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

Day 3’s theme is painting. While painting can refer to an action, today’s prompt is about what results: colored pigments like paint or ink applied to a matrix like canvas, wood, silk, paper, lacquer, metal, stone, clay, plaster… Paintings are dizzyingly diverse works of art in medium and subject matter. Figurative or abstract, miniature or monumental, free-standing in frames or applied as frescoes to walls, chock-full of symbolism or meant to capture beauty for beauty’s sake, paintings encourage you to think of other worlds, confrontation, microcosms, color, and illusion.

Optional Writing Method Theme

Day 3’s optional way to spice up your writing is mock-academic style. Do you think Hobbits write detailed guides for how to restore oil paintings – such nice mathoms? Have Númenorean theologians written impassioned screeds on the religious symbolism of which sort of seabird Elwing appears as in the frescoes of the Royal Gallery? Do the Noldor care a ton about the history of linear perspective? Let your inner expert fly free!

Optional Art Method Theme

Day 3’s suggestion for those committing visual art is showing your process. Just as we are fascinated by the cartoons, dessins, and sketches the Old Masters used to plan and practice for their great works on panel and canvas, we would love to see the steps of your artistic process! How do you prepare? Do you create multiple drafts? Do you enjoy a cool time-lapse? We want to see it!

Optional Pain Theme

If you want to make it sad on Day 3, consider the fact of lost authorship. For every Rubens who finagled their way into art history, there is a “from the workshop of” some other, more famous painter. Lost authorship might mean that a person who was once known was simply lost to the sands of time. It might mean anonymity never uncovered or discovered - taken on because of fear, or repression, or the exigencies of the market. It might mean a pseudonym, the real author hidden underneath for so long they cannot be found again. It might mean the author never being recorded in the first place.

Optional Joy Theme

Having now made myself very sad, I will provide an option for some joy! Paintings travel; it’s one of the wonderful things about them. Before the photograph, miniatures, illustrations, and engravings taken from paintings were some of the primary ways people learned about what distant places and people looked like, or saw works of art that lived in faraway countries. As such, they were a fantastic vehicle for cultural exchange, artistic syncretism, and communication across distances both physical and cultural. Today, consider focusing on how wonderful it can be to share art across the boundaries of space, language, and identity.

A number of examples for your inspiration.

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

Day 4 presents another new theme: tattooing, piercing, and other forms of body art. This is a broad and comprehensive umbrella category which spans from festival face-painting through ritual scarification to discreet earlobe piercings and avant-garde performance art in the style of Marina Abramović. Bodily adornment is central to culture and can be deeply normative or deeply deviant. Using the physical self as the proverbial canvas brings to mind themes of embodiment, control, individuality and conformity, and, of course, whether or not the Noldor would have invented vajazzling.

Optional Writing Method Theme

Today’s choice of method is collaborative authorship. Consider reaching out to a friend or stranger and writing together.

Optional Art Method Theme

Today’s optional artistic technique is illusionistic/trompe l’oeil. This is art that fools the eye: realistic enough for an observer to mistake what they are seeing for the real thing, in the case of trompe l’oeil, or perhaps simply trickery, in the case of other artistic illusions.

Optional Pain Theme

Your added pain for Day 4 is the fact that Art is Made in a Society. For that matter, it’s Interpreted in a Society too. Sometimes, society’s reasons for making and interpreting art are malicious, repressive, or authoritarian. One thinks of Fascist architecture, American anti-Japanese propaganda posters from WWII, and Bourbon Spain’s racist and racializing casta paintings. Art is made for reasons, and sometimes those reasons are not freedom, beauty, and responsibility.

Optional Joy Theme

“Suddenly, caught by the level beams, Frodo saw the old king’s head: it was lying rolled away by the roadside. ‘Look, Sam!’ he cried, startled into speech.‘Look! The king has got a crown again!’ The eyes were hollow and the carven beard was broken, but about the high stern forehead there was a coronal of silver and gold. A trailing plant with flowers like small white stars had bound itself across the brows as if in reverence for the fallen king, and in the crevices of his stony hair yellow stonecrop gleamed.”

This quote, one of my favorite from LOTR, possesses many valences, including religious-redemptive and destiny-progression, but I appreciate it for its argument about the potential mutuality between human-made art and nature. That seems like a good theme for today, which is all about taking our bodies as we find them and making alteration for beauty, comfort, belonging, and agency.

Some examples for your inspiration.

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

Food is a fascinating junction between craft and need. Every people responds to the constant nutritional needs of the body by using the fluctuating and diverse bounty of the land and seasons around them, producing unique cuisines. History, class, religion, gender, and other facets of identity also determine what counts as food, who prepares it, what it looks like, and what it tastes like. From extravagant royal feasts with illusionistic food sculptures, to stews left by farmers to cook in the ashes and feed them at night, to aged wine and fermented chicha, through candies and breads and preserved meats, the culinary arts sustain life and ornament it. They invite us to think about the sustaining nature of art in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Those creating for Day 5’s culinary arts theme might consider food itself, the manners involved in its consumption, the art of its preparation, and/or the dishes and utensils used to make and serve it.

Optional Writing Method Theme

Get out your egg timer! Today’s writing prompt is to write to a time limit. Perhaps a stream-of-consciousness five-minute ficlet, a flash poem, or an hour of intensive concentration will get the creative juices flowing.

Optional Art Method Theme

Inspired by Andy Warhol’s 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, the optional art theme for culinary arts day is series and iterations (this can be more like Claude Monet’s haystacks if you’d rather). Explore the impact, rhythm, scale, or facets of an iterative or repeated process or output.

Optional Pain Theme

Today’s optional pain theme is the art vs craft divide and the hierarchical assumptions such a split fosters. An easy example of what is meant is how Sarah Bland’s detailed woolwork and patterns were deemed “craft,” while William Morris’ textile designs were “art.” Who is an artist, and who is an artisan? What is preserved in a museum, and what is left on the dustheap of history?

Optional Joy Theme

Some divisions are prejudicial, but there’s a real delight to be found in shared taste. Lifelong partnerships of all kinds, artistic movements, communities of criticism and capability grow up around the generative joy of sharing your opinions! Consider, for example, the trans-oceanic bibliophilic bond between Belle da Costa Greene and Alfred Pollard, or Merve Emre’s “The Critic as Friend,” and go off and create something of *ahem* distinction.

Some examples for your inspiration.

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

The penultimate mandatory art form prompt for Day 6 is the perennially popular textiles and fashion. Like the warp and the weft of woven cloth, textiles and fashion synthesize seemingly diametrically opposed facets of the human experience. Ursula K. Le Guin’s theory of the carrier bag emphasizes the radical inclusivity of textiles, yet it was also the textile industry that helped spur chattel slavery and send us down the road of late-stage capitalism. As fashion is a powerful tool for self-expression and experimentation, so too is it a medium for enforcing conformity and rigid norms. Denigrated as “women’s work” and made contemptible through familiarity, we nonetheless depend on textiles in more areas of life than I can count. Thinking about textiles lends itself to thinking about dichotomies and the messy realities that lie between two poles: freedom/repression to agency, self/other to community, wool/linen to a comfortable washable blend.

Optional Writing Method Theme

Day 6’s optional writing theme is in-universe instructional literature. Instructions make all kinds of revealing assumptions the author and their society: think, “First, catch your hare.” Sometimes they’re seemingly straightforward technical manuals, other times desperate attempts to shut the barn door because no one actually follows instructions (cough *LaCE* cough). See what you can elaborate in what might seem to be a dry format!

Optional Art Method Theme

Today it’s the artists’ turn to work in collaboration. Consider reaching out to a friend or stranger and creating together.

Optional Pain Theme

For Day 6, let’s talk about how, in many cases, the guy whose brand designed the gown does survive to be known, but not his apprentices. Or his drapers who created the silhouette. Or the merchant who sold the precious silk, or the caravan guard who made sure it traveled safely, or the silkworm farmer who unraveled and washed the cocoons. The single genius is a popular narrative, but it is one that leaves out so many people, all equally necessary to the artwork.

Optional Joy Theme

On the other hand, the collective nature of art is a joy. Perhaps this is particularly true in fashion, where a single dress may require the services of lacemakers, dyers, teams of sewists, cutters, drapers, cloth merchants, designers, weavers, loom engineers… Today, consider how art encourages community and collaboration.

Some examples for your inspiration.

Tolkien Ekphrasis Week: Day 7 Prompts (Lapidary & Hardstone Carving)

Mandatory Art Form Prompt

The final mandatory art form prompt is lapidary and hardstone carving. These related arts encompass the decorative shaping of precious and semiprecious stones, by polishing, lathing, carving and other techniques, into art objects such as faceted gems and small ornaments. Lapidary carves out an artistic space which ranges between jewelry and sculpture. The combination of precious substances and delicate, difficult work has historically made lapidary objects highly valued in both material and ideological terms: the state-building importance of engraved seals, say, held alongside historic practices of lithotherapy and the straightforward aesthetic-financial allure of a detailed pietra dura or parchin kari furniture piece. Considering the centrality of gems and gemcraft in Tolkien’s legendarium, it is high time TEW reflects on the motifs of added value, obsession, patience, novelty, and metaphor suggested by shaped jewels. 

Optional Writing Method Theme

In honor of one of the best-known pieces of literary ekphrasis, John Keats, today’s optional writing theme is a fandom-style remix. Keat’s famous carven stone Grecian urn was actually a composite of multiple different urns he observed during the late 1810s and his own imagination. In honor of his synthesis, TEW encourages you to re-envision a previous fic in an ekphrastic direction. Be sure that, if you are remixing someone else’s fic, you obtain permission first! A list of different fic-remix techniques is available at Fanlore. 

Optional Art Method Theme

The last optional art theme is inspired by cameos, with their duochrome or two-tone color schemes. If applicable to your art, consider limiting your palette to two colors! 

Optional Pain and Joy Themes

Today’s final joy and pain themes both derive from this passage: “In those days, it is said, Daeron the Minstrel, chief loremaster of the kingdom of Thingol, devised his Runes; and the Naugrim that came to Thingol learned them, and were well-pleased with the device, esteeming Daeron’s skill higher than did the Sindar, his own people. By the Naugrim the Cirth were taken east over the mountains and passed into the knowledge of many peoples; but they were little used by the Sindar for the keeping of records, until the days of the War, and much that was held in memory perished in the ruins of Doriath.” – “Of the Sindar,” The Silmarillion

For pain: Consider the plight of an artist who is utterly out of step with the artistic mores of their time. Perhaps their style is unappreciated and mocked, or the artist’s social position relegates them to the corners of the galleries – if they can get there at all. It’s anguish to have so much to share, and so few people to share it with.

For joy:  Consider the joy of creating something that brings you together with strangers, people whom you might never have considered akin to yourself, except that something you created has also created a bond. Consider the unexpected joy of finding something of use, beauty, and worth in the place where you are a stranger. 

Some examples for your inspiration.

…is happening!

Please keep your eyes peeled for the main announcement, rules, and and prompts to be posted over the weekend.

That’s a wrap for 2024’s Tolkien Ekphrasis Week! Many thanks to everyone who participated in exploring the arts and material culture of Tolkien’s worlds.

The grand total is 51 fanworks in 5 Tolkien fandoms and media including prose, poetry, pointillism, and felt appliqué. Everyone’s enthusiasm, engagement, and joy in creation made this a wonderful third (!) year.

Moving forward, all 51 fanworks can be found on this DW and on the Tumblr in the round-up posts, and 49 of them can be found in the AO3 collection.

One last THANK YOU for an awesome and artistic week!

Please note: these round-up posts will not contain the same warnings and/or ratings as the linked fanworks. Click through advisedly.

Home Again, by Jarakrisafis. Ficlet, 495 words.

Durin the Deathless returns to his Creator’s Halls.
Seven lives is a lot of people to speak to. Can he escape, please?

Written in Water, by Chestnut_pod. Ficlet, 789 words.

A brooch, a barrow, a missive from the last days of Cardolan.

Aerin remembers…, by Outofangband. Art, pointillism.

Aerin remembers when she used to watch her uncle crafting each plate from the clay of Nen Lalaith. He would let her press her small fingers into the edges of a few and wink at her before they were set to be fired. Her uncle followed Húrin to battle and did not return. His children are slaves in her shadow. Her aunt has not spoken to nor looked at her after Midsummer. 

The plates are cracked now, from misuse and mishandling. Her prints are stained and fractured.

And that’s a wrap! Thank you all so much to every participant; this was an amazing event thanks to your efforts!