Teitho
| Challenge | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Teitho |
| Date(s): | 2005- |
| Moderator(s): | |
| Founder: | |
| Type: | gen fanfic challenge and archive |
| Fandom: | The Lord of the Rings |
| URL: | http://teitho.waking-vision.com, https://teitho.proboards.com/ |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Teitho is a monthly fanfiction challenge for the Lord of the Rings fandom. Teitho means "Write!" in Sindarin, one of Tolkien's invented elven languages. Teitho is a gen challenge, neither slash nor smut are allowed. The challenge was an original idea by Aragornwriter and is now run by Nautika, StarLight [1] and Mirach [2]. Past moderators are Alina and Michelle. It has been running non-stop since 2005.
The challenge focuses on stories either about Aragorn or Legolas - or both. An author writing for Teitho must include at least one of these characters, be it in passing or as the protagonist. There is no minimum wordcount, authors can send in drabbles or poems. But the story should not be longer than appr. twenty doc-pages to give readers a fair chance to read all stories in the two-week voting period.
The most obvious feature of Teitho is the fact that stories are posted anonymously. While there is a number of faithful authors returning to Teitho month after month, the fact that posting is done anonymously makes the challenge attractive for new writers as well. They have a chance to get their stories listed right next to well-known authors while readers are more likely to vote for the best story (instead for their favourite author), simply because they do not know who wrote which story. Of course it adds a little whodunit for readers as well, as some like to guess and place authors with their respective stories.
A new challenge theme is posted each month. One challenge will take six weeks - four weeks for authors to write and send in their story and two weeks for voters to read and decide on their top three. Voting is done by email. At the end of the voting period, the winners are announced and it is revealed which author wrote which story.
When the challenge had its debut in 2005, it was tied to the Mellon Chronicles up to the point that the challenge entries were posted on the MC-website. It soon became apparant that maintaining the challenge on a hand-coded archive would take a lot of work. Therefore, in March 2005 Teitho migrated to its own webspace, to make updating easier. It is now automated, running on a modified version of PHP Nuke, which was kindly provided by Buffy Fanfiction Archiv.
In an attempt to further pomote the challenge and to list all stories (at least those posted on ff.net, MP brennan founded the community All Things Teitho in January 2009. To cover stories that are posted to other archives, Teitho also has its own social bookmarking account since February 2009: Teitho@Jumptags.
Every author is invited to write for Teitho. There is no need to subscribe or join anywhere - one only needs to send in a story by email. Though, announcements and general information is posted to Owners of Aragorn Angst. It is therefore advised to be a member of this list, but it is definitely not a must.
| Related Links | |
| People | Michelle, Nautika |
| Places | Owners of Aragorn Angst, All Things Teitho, Teitho@Jumptags |
| Things | Fanfiction, Challenge |