Silmarillion Writers' Guild

For our penultimate bonus prompt, we offer two music videos for the Utopia/Dystopia challenge. Both, as songs, straddle the line between the idyllic and the dark but the videos settle where they fall. As always, you can use any aspect of the prompt--the title, the lyrics, the music, of course the videos and their imagery--in your response.

"No Rain" by Blind Melon: video | lyrics
"Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden: video | lyrics

As we wrap up the final bonus prompts for the month, a friendly reminder that you have until February 10 to get fanworks posted in order to be eligible for the stamps. Don't care about the stamps? Take as long as you'd like! :D

On the stamp front, since Russandol migrated the users to the new site last weekend, I will be working on getting stamp collections set up on the new site so, when it opens, you should come in to your stamp collection that I've been neglecting for months now!

Today's bonus prompt comes from the Laws and Customs challenge:

“‘I am in too great doubt to rule. To prepare or to let be? To prepare for war, which is yet only guessed: train craftsmen and tillers in the midst of peace for bloodspilling and battle: put iron in the hands of greedy captains who will love only conquest, and count the slain as their glory? Will they say to Eru: At least your enemies were amongst them? Or to fold hands, while friends die unjustly: let men live in blind peace, until the ravisher is at the gate? What then will they do: match naked hands against iron and die in vain, or flee leaving the cries of women behind them? Will they say to Eru: At least I spilled no blood?’”
~ Unfinished Tales, “Aldarion and Erendis”

Today's bonus prompt comes from the Postcards from Middle-earth challenge:


Message on the Card: The air, the mountains...this is what it is to be happy.

The bonus prompt for today comes from the True Leader challenge:

"If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are an excellent leader."
~ Dolly Parton

Today's bonus prompt comes from the Soundtrack challenge:

"D 92 8:50 PM" by Jim Perkins and Leah Kardos: Spotify | YouTube

January 19th's bonus prompt comes from the Laws and Customs challenge:

“Then King Felagund spoke before his people, recalling the deeds of Barahir, and his vow; and he declared that it was laid upon him to aid the son of Barahir in his need, and he sought the help of his chieftains.”
~ The Silmarillion, "Of Beren and Lúthien"

And the bonus prompt from the 20th is "The Two Trees" by William Butler Yeats, for the Utopia/Dystopia challenge:

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

I dropped the ball on posting the prompt for the 16th, so today, I come bearing two bonus prompts for this month's New Year's Resolution challenge!

The 16th's bonus prompt comes from the "Postcards from Middle-earth" challenge:

Message on the card: "As the light subsided, I enacted the plan."

And today's (January 17) bonus prompt comes from "Soundtrack": "The Selma March" by Graham Green (Spotify |
YouTube

In honor of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday tomorrow, we offer a pair of quotes as a bonus prompt for August's "Utopia/Dystopia" challenge:

“In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It’s not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. Individuals who happen to be caught up in that system, you love, but you seek to defeat the system.” ~Martin Luther King, Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, November 17, 1957

“[T]he absence of freedom is the presence of death. Any nation or government that deprives an individual of freedom is in that moment committing an act of moral and spiritual murder. Any individual who is not concerned about his freedom commits an act of moral and spiritual suicide." ~ Martin Luther King, Address at the Fiftieth Annual NAACP Convention, July 17, 1959

The bonus prompt for January 11 comes from "Utopia/Dystopia" this past August. While we generally offered two opposing prompts, this one neatly manages to roll utopia and dystopia all into one:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Today's bonus prompt returns to our True Leader challenge, featuring quotes from women who served in a leadership role:

"A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water."
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

---

Friendly reminder that we have an event coming up this weekend for January 10's "prompt." We will be holding two image instadrabbling sessions on our Discord server at 0:00 and 14:00 UTC, using prompts from the Naturalist's Guide to Middle-earth challenge. If you need an invite to the server, email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org.