2023 Silmaril Awards nominations: Most Magnificent Dragon

The 8th Annual Silmaril Awards are Upon Us!

Welcome back to the Silmaril Awards, the only awards ceremony on the interwebs for fantasy characters!

We are so pleased and excited to be back for the 8th year in a row (how has it been 8 years already?!) and I am beyond thrilled to be hosting the Most Magnificent Dragon category this year!

If you have no idea what the Silmaril Awards are, keep reading, because it’s loads of fun!

If you have been around this here blog for a while now, you are already grinning and getting those fingers ready to type up nominations, but please hold on just a second because small changes have been made.

Nothing huge, but the first and most important change is to inform you that…

All Narnian Characters have been moved into “Gold Standard” status and are no longer eligible to be nominated for the awards.

There has been so much love and respect shown for the Narnian characters over the past seven years, and they have taken home so many of the Silmarils over the years. We hosts decided that it was time to honor them more highly. And since we thought seven was an appropriate number for them to have been in the running (as there are 7 books in the series, after all) this eighth year seemed the moment to give them this honor and let them step up into the wings alongside the Tolkien characters.

Keep an eye out for them at the award ceremonies, though, because all the Narnian Characters love these awards and I am sure you’ll spot them helping out all over the place!

Also, there are ELEVEN award categories this year!

You read that right! Usually we have only 10 categories, but this year we have enough willing sacrifices… erm… wonderful bloggers come alongside us that we have extended the fun to an eleventh category and blog!

We are also introducing TWO brand-new award categories this year. You will notice that we’ve swapped out the Strangest Character category, please don’t worry! This does not mean that category is gone forever, just that we couldn’t decide which of the two new awards we liked better this year, so we decided to debut them both!

So what are the silmaril awards?

The Silmaril Awards are all about celebrating fantasy fiction. But whereas most awards go to authors or books, these awards go to the characters themselves! Sound like fun? Read on.

Started in 2016, these awards are a four week online celebration of all that’s best in fantasy literature. The characters who receive them have to be from books generally considered to be in the fantasy genre. A given character cannot receive an award more than once. These are lifetime awards.

Also, as Tolkien is, for us, the gold standard of fantasy, his characters are not eligible to be nominated. That’s because they’ll be the ones presenting the awards in this cross-dimensional online ceremony.

Nominations are submitted on the blogs of each of the presenters for that year. Anyone can submit a nomination and you can second (and third and fourth, etc.) any number of nominations besides your own.

After the nomination period (lasting one week) ends, the five characters receiving the most nominations in each category will make it onto the ballot and you’ll have one week to vote. After the votes are tallied, the winners will be announced, one per day, over the final two weeks of the awards.

The awards the winners will receive are silmarils, the otherworldly gems featured in Tolkien’s book, The Silmarillion. Though there were a limited number of these gems in his world, in ours we have found a great many more!

Rules of the Silmaril Awards

1. You cannot nominate characters from Tolkien’s works. The creators of these awards saw that Tolkien’s characters are the gold standard by which we measure these categories, and they’re the official presenters of the awards. In other words: they’re doubly ineligible. And in this 8th year of the awards, the Narnian characters have also been granted gold standard status and are no longer eligible to be nominated.

2. These awards are for fantasy characters only; no science fiction characters are eligible. That said, we will consider characters from some sciencey books if there’s enough magic-y/fantastical stuff that it can be deemed science fantasy of some stripe. The primary example is characters from Marissa Meyer’s Lunar Chronicles, which we’ve decided does involve enough magic that it’s basically science fantasy.

3. When you nominate your character, please mention which book they are from. Much as we all wish we had infinite reading time, most of us are mere mortals who can only devote so much time to devouring the entire contents of any library we can access. (And those of us who aren’t mere mortals are still pretty busy.)

4. You may nominate as many characters as you wish and “second” as many characters as you want. But please, do not second your own nominations. The top five MOST seconded characters will go on to the final voting round. (Also, as a request . . . please don’t say “I second all characters from [insert book/series here].” That puts it on the hosts to make sure they don’t miss any characters from that media — sometimes a challenge when have dozens or even upwards of a hundred characters to sort through — and it creates a bit of awkwardness and uncertainty if another character from that book or series is nominated after you second them. Take the extra minute or two to write out the character names; it’ll be much appreciated.)

5. If you are an author, please refrain from nominating your own characters. You are welcome to encourage your fans to nominate them, however, and you are more than welcome to nominate others’ characters.

6. Characters who have won in a particular category in a previous year are ineligible to be nominated for the same award again. The Silmarils are Lifetime Awards. For a list of the previous winners in each category, please check out our Hall of Fame.

7. Please remember that these are Fantasy Book Awards. Therefore, a movie character is only eligible for nomination if they were in a book first!

8. Most importantly, have fun! We are celebrating our favorite characters and being a little silly in the process. And even if your personal favorite character doesn’t win or doesn’t reach voting, someone else’s did . . . and there’s always next year.

Most Magnificent Dragon

Here on my blog, I will be hosting the Magnificent Dragons of the fantasy realms. Wicked or kind, greedy or generous, helpful or more apt to eat you before looking at you… these noble and majestic creatures are such a staple of the fantasy genre.

It is your job to nominate your favorites. (Don’t worry about me, I’ve gotten a little help from a dear friend who travels around in a blue police box and he’s generously lent me a little British sci-fi technology to make my basement large enough to accommodate the rather enormous guests I am about to begin receiving!)