Back to Middle-earth Month

'Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got – you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you. Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?'

'No, they never end as tales,' said Frodo. 'But the people in them come and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.'
~ The Two Towers, The Stairs of Cirith Ungol

Thank you to everyone who participated in Back to Middle-earth Month this year, commenting and creating and encouraging. We especially want to thank jenni_blog for volunteering to tag one last time.

A heartfelt and deep appreciation to the hundreds of people who have participated in this version of Back to Middle-earth Month for the past nine years. We’ve had a good time and we hope you’ve had a great one.

Our prompts are always available for anyone to use, as is the Dreamwidth community and AO3 collection.

As previously stated, we don’t own the Back to Middle-earth Month concept. If you want to do something next March (and we know at least one person is already planning), please do. We want B2MeM to continue.

Namárië!

~ Independence1776, Dawn Felagund, and Linaewen

He was interested in roots and beginnings… (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I, Chapter 2)

Welcome to Back to Middle-earth Month 2020!

Our theme this year is "Endings and Beginnings." We are offering both a prompt generator for those who wish to start creating now (though please wait to post until March begins!) as well as daily prompts posted in March for those who like that particular format.

Though we chose the theme in December, it is certainly fitting due to Christopher Tolkien's recent passing. But it is with heavy hearts that we inform you of the reason for this year's theme: this is b2mem's final year. It will have had a good, enthusiastic, nine year run. Sadly, all things must come to an end.

BUT! Back to Middle-earth Month itself will not come to an end. B2MeM started off as a multi-group activity, with each group doing its own thing. (You can read the history of B2MeM on Fanlore.) We don't have a monopoly on the concept--it wasn't ours to begin with! If people want to keep on with B2MeM in the future, we welcome and encourage it.

As for what we are doing this year:

You can find the prompt generator here. There are nine fields: beginning (general words), canonical beginnings (for things that happened in canon), first line, ending, canonical endings, last line, LotR location, Silm location, and character groups. You can use one, some, or all fields and you may re-roll as many times as you like until you get prompt(s) that inspire you.

The daily prompts will be posted, as usual, around UTC midnight starting March 1.

A reminder: we post our prompts in this community and on our LiveJournal, Tumblr, and email newsletter. We also have an AO3 collection.

( FAQs )

What if I have a question that isn’t covered by the above?

Please ask us in the comments or email us at b2mem.mod@gmail.com.

Everyone, thank you for one of our busiest B2MeMs! We have over 450 fanworks posted to the Dreamwidth community, over 250 in the AO3 collection, and quite a few posted on Tumblr and SWG.

We especially want to thank just_jenni for helping tag the DW comm again this year.

We encourage you to keep working on your fanworks if you have them and to continue posting them to the Dreamwidth comm, the AO3 collection, and wherever else you feel like posting. There are no deadlines and the comm and collection do not close. Furthermore, the cards will remain available for you to use them whenever you want to.

We hope you had a great month and that we'll see you again next year!

~ Indy, Dawn, Linaewen, and Zdenka

The bingo number for March 28 is B15.

The bingo number for March 26 is O64.