10th Annual Silmaril Awards: Nominations Open for Epic Heroes
Hear ye, hear ye! The 10th Annual Silmaril Awards is upon us!
10 years.
Wow.
That must needs mean we shouldst do something special to celebrate… no?
YES!
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Silmaril Awards, we are running not one, but TWO contests. Five winners will be chosen for each contest. You'll have the chance to win one of many fantasy-themed prizes. Here are the details!
Puzzle Contest
Anyone is eligible to enter this contest by visiting the CONTEST PAGE and submitting the form.
Each host of the Silmaril Awards will post a line from one of Tolkien's poems on their nomination page. Gather all of them together and enter it when you submit your entry to receive NINE extra entries for a chance to win.
My piece of the puzzle is:
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
By entering you will be added to the Silmaril Awards mailing list and may receive news about the awards or the authors participating as hosts in the future. You may unsubscribe at any time.
The contest will run from September 1-5.
Winners will be contacted via email after September 8th.
Voting Contest
While anyone can vote for their favorite fantasy characters, everyone who also signs up to our email newsletter while voting will be entered into the contest.
Voting will run from September 8-12.
Once it opens, you may cast your vote HERE
2nd runners-up will be contacted via email after September 15th. However, two people will be selected to be entered into the grand prize contest. Then on September 26th, the hosts will meet online for a Lord of the Rings trivia contest, with half of the hosts competing for one entrant and half for the other. Whoever's team wins will walk away with the grand prize and the other entrant will receive the runner-up prize.
The Prizes You Could Win
Stained glass dragon sun catcher
Painted gold "One Ring" bowl
A Mines of Moria journal
A 12×18 inch poster of the Fellowship of the Ring
Four paperbacks by authors H.L. Burke, DJ Edwardson, J.L. Mbewe, and Jenelle Leanne Schmidt
Four ebooks by those same authors
A Lord of the Rings scarf with a map of Middle-earth imprinted on it
A sign stating "No admittance except on party business"
A Leaf of Lorien pin
A 3D printed Tree of Gondor bookmark
A Gandalf quote sticker
A Door of Moria sticker
We hope you'll join us for these awards and the contest and that it will be a celebration worthy of Bilbo's hundred and eleventieth birthday party. May the best hobbit win!
The Usual Instructions
Here on my blog, I will be hosting the Most Epic Heroes. Characters nominated for this award should follow in the footsteps of the great heroes of J.R.R. Tolkien such as Aragorn, Boromir, Thorin Oakenshield, Faramir, Legolas, Gimli, Beren…. to name just a few.
I am thrilled to be welcome these heroic characters into my home, where I will not need to worry about them setting fire to anything or rearranging all my cabinets (glares at the imps) or trying to take over the world…
But hark! Some of you are shaking your heads in confusion and asking “what are the Silmaril Awards?” or “what dost thou mean about nominations?”
The Silmaril Awards is an annual event in which readers like you vote for your favorite Fantasy Characters across 10 different categories (and 10 different blogs).
From magnificent dragons to nefarious villains to wise counselors to the most heroic of heroes and heroines, this event celebrates all the FANTASY BOOK CHARACTERS we know and love (and some we love to hate).
But it doesn’t happen without a very important ingredient: you.
So for the next 5 days, your mission—should you choose to accept it—is to travel across cyberspace to each of the various blogs and nominate your favorite characters in each category and “second” any characters you love that have already been nominated.
The TOP FIVE characters in EACH CATEGORY (those with the most “seconds”) will advance to the second voting round.
But wait… I can see your fingers itching to type, but… there are a few RULES you must follow first. Please read the following rules to make sure that ALL your nominations and seconds count!
The Rules
Only literary fantasy characters are allowed to participate for the Silmaril Awards. Characters from sci-fi, contemporary, romance, dystopian, etc are not eligible. We love these characters too, but this is a fantasy awards event. Also, if a character is from a TV show or a Movie, they are ineligible unless the tv show or movie is based on a book that came first!
On that note: NO characters from Lord Of The Rings can be nominated! LoTR characters are to us the Gold Standard of fantasy characters, and they also co-host and present the awards, so make sure your nominations aren’t from Tolkien’s universe!
As of three years ago, all Narnia characters were granted lifetime Silmarils and are thus ineligible to be nominated. They have often swept the awards and they were getting a little embarrassed by all the attention, so we had a special ceremony and granted them Silver Status. Some of them may still show up at the ceremonies to help present awards, but that is up to the characters and their hosts to decide.
You can nominate as many characters as you wish for each category! The sky’s the limit! Nominate to your heart’s content! You can also second as many characters you wish for each category! (or third, fourth, etc…. though you don’t have to keep track, if you see a character that has been nominated, you can just say you “second” them, even if you’re actually fifteenthing them… it’s up to us hosts to count up all the nominations and seconds)
If you’re a Fantasy Author, we would love to have your character in the Silmaril Awards! Our only request is that authors don’t nominate their own characters. However, please feel free to let all your fans know about the awards, and which characters you feel might do well in which categories, and direct them to nominate and second! (If you bribe them with cookies, we won’t tell)
Please mention which book/series your nominee is from within your nomination! We hosts/bloggers read a lot, and we even read a lot of fantasy, but we haven’t all read ALL the fantasy (sadly) so we may not always know who you’re talking about. We would like to know who to give the vote to, but you’d be surprised how many fantasy characters actually have similar or even the same name (and some characters even have more than one name… it’s fantasy, it’s confusing, we love it… but we also need a little help sometimes!)
Please make sure to keep your nominations for the correct categories on each blog. For example, I am hosting the Imps. I do not want Dragons invading my house and banding together with the Imps to help burn the place down. I will not accept dragons who show up at my door unless they are ALSO imps and being nominated for the Imp category. If you want to nominate dragons for the Most Magnificent Dragon category, please go do so on the blog hosting the dragon category!
Silmaril Awards are lifetime achievement awards. This means that previous winners cannot win again. So for the EPIC HEROES, the following characters each already have a Silmaril of their very own hanging on their wall:
2024 The Florid Sword from Wingfeather Saga
2023 Artham from Wingfeather Saga
2022 Janner from Wingfeather Saga
2021 Zero from The City Between Series
2020 Reepicheep from The Chronicles of Narnia
2019 Westley from The Princess Bride
2018 Edmund Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia
2017 Peter Pevensie from The Chronicles of Narnia
2016 Robin Hood from The Adventures of Robin Hood
Now. Go forth and nominate!
Nominations are open starting TODAY until September 5th. Tallying up the nominations is a big job, and late nominations will not be counted, so make sure you vote early! And get your friends involved! Please help us spread the word about this fantastical and fun event!