Tolkien Mailing Competition

The Tolkien Mailing Competition (TLV) is announced internationally for the second time this year, and I am personally very proud of this: the TLV, and especially the international category is one of the few things mentioned in this blog which is actually (partly) my doing and not only that of a society I belong to. I am part of the TLV organiser team since I joined the community, and I was the one who came up with the idea of the international category (originally it was a passing advice of a schoolmate to me when I felt being without goals, but it took me years to take it seriously).

Before going any further: check out the details about this year's competition and share!

What is the TLV? During the year it is mostly about tasks we send to the competitors in five rounds and solutions they send back: in the first years by traditional post, nowadays almost exclusively via e-mail. Among them there are quizzes, riddles, crosswords, odd-one-outs and creative tasks of drawing, writing or even composing. Originally it was a competition only for teams of schoolchildren, just like "normal" competitions of Chemistry or Literature. They had three categories for the different levels of knowledge in the world of Tolkien (and in the first year also a category for individuals who have seen the movies but haven't read the book, to make them do so). But surely life does not stop after high school? Or at the borders? So the possibility of participation shouldn't, either.

First in 2012 we started a category for Hungarian adults in English, called "Glaurung". Not many people were interested in it, but at least it proved we are able to do this in English. Next year we decided to dream big, launched the "Quendi" category, and wrote about it to all Tolkien society which we could find an e-mail address to. It was a success. The enthusiastic answers for these e-mails were already heart-warming, and afterwards we got 35 applications from 16 different countries. 17 competitors sent their solutions for the first round from Croatia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Lithuania, Slovakia, Spain, Russia and Ukraine. 

But what have the pictures of all this food have to do with the competition? Though it is impossible for the international participants, for the traditional categories there is also a sixth round: a live final. Since 2009 it is held in the beautiful palace rooms of the Main Building of the City Library of Budapest. There are various challenges to face on the spot, like finding quotes and copying a picture only by the description of a team-mate, but competitors also expected to arrive in costumes and bring foods, both fitting to the world of Middle-Earth. This is the only day when the participants meet each other and the volunteers of our society, the glorious day which makes the children realise they are not alone with their daydreaming, and make a lot of the members of our community realise how great this Tolkien Mailing Competition is. I know. I was a participant in the very first one...

The Glory of Gondor: Summer Camp 2014

So, summer camp happened. I told about the start earlier, that will now be continued. Sadly I missed the first three or four days, so could not put together all the details myself, but it turned out that added to the already mentioned goals we also wanted to find a mysterious sword for King Earnur. Who answered the challenge of the Witch-king and disappeared just while we stayed in "Thaliondor", our colony in Eregion. So, although we stole the sword from the local people, some kind of Dunlendings, we could not give it to the king. The Dunlendings kept the sword in a sanctuary, and their shaman was cursing us for quarter an hour without breathing when we got it from there in the middle of the night. Our task for the rest of the camp was to realise (mostly by transcripting tengwar texts received from NPCs) how dangerous and evil the sword was and try to deactivate it, while the Dunlendings threatened us with war because of the theft.

The other threatening thing was the weather: just after I arrived on Sunday, an exceptionally heavy rain followed me, including big pieces of ice. That was the part when I could not be too sorry that I ended up with such an indoor activity as writing. But organisers adapted professionally, one night we even had campfire-feeling with guitar and singing, but under a roof, without a fire. And although most of the days had some random showers of rain (sometimes with strong sunshine at the same time), it wasn't always like that, and the two necessarily outdoor programs, the big hike and the war-game, could happen all right. For the day of the hike everybody could choose for themselves how big they want it: the "baby tour" was only a walk of couple of hours, the "normal" version was of half a day, and the "real rangers" went up to the highest point of Hungary, which happened to be near.

Another striking characteristic of the camp was the increasing amount of the already mentioned babies (and complete families, for that: some people came with their children, some with their parents, and some with both, so we also had a grandmother of one of the babies in our team). When the teams had their performances, all but one could play the "cuteness factor" card, because they had at least one baby or very small child among their members. And the little ones also had the team-cloaks and all such thing in small size. Cuteness overload. I think, we also had the youngest tolkienist traveller of all times on board, as one of the babies came with his parents from the Czech Republic (his father, Petr, is an honorary member of ours, as he frequently visits our events for years).

 

The team performances happened on Monday. The only given thing about them was a bunch of costumes and other materials recommended to use: the first one we recognised was a nice dress, which somebody instantly wanted to be tried on one of the guys. It fitted nicely, so we created the story of the warrior of Lebennin who goes to the harem of a lord of Harad disguised as a beautiful woman, to free from the evil lord the stolen girls of his hometown. I think, it turned out well, though some people complained about seeing the oversized lord of Harad without a shirt. Éothéods presented a movie trailer; Dol Amroth was following Mithrellas all over Gondor; the Rangers' story was about an artefact of the frame-story, the Medallion of Bravery. The most modern show was presented by the people of Minas Tirith: the story of the kings of Gondor in rap and short movie clips.

 

Orders also could have their performances. We decided to write Dunlending stories, each of their own style and taste: history, legends, myths or children tales in prose or verse. We were a bit worried, as the showing of these were set in the frame-story of the camp and on that night we were decided enemies with the Dunlendings, but our leader explained to the audience our performance only being a show of how primitive the enemy is, so nobody called us traitors in the end. Why would anybody do that, anyway: on the other day everybody had to choose their sides and most of the camp decided to be a bit of a traitor, who wanted to get back the sword from the captain of the camp against his will. We did so, and buried the sword in the forest magically bounded (during the night, the faithful stalking around us in the dark), but Dunlendings still were not contented, so we had the war-game against them (which means half of the camp chosen to be in that team for the game), which they slightly won, so in the end we agreed on acceptable terms. Our team-heroes went to live with the Dunlendings as hostages, but nobody could really see the tragedy of this. After that, party.

Summer Camp 2014 is starting today!

They are already there. The organisers went yesterday, the participants today. Still one day of work and one of waiting before I can join.

I told a few basic things about our camps in general in my last summercamp-post, so won't repeat those now. The camp of this year is called "The Glory of Gondor" and its story is happening in T.A. 2050. We (the five teams of the campers) will be colonists from Minas Tirith, Dol Amroth, Lebennin, Arnor and also some Éothéod sent by King Earnur to the southern region of Eregion to civilise the local people and keep an eye on the evil things around.

I am one of the noble people of Lebennin, and cannot wait to find out the final version of our coat-of-arms: all teams and orders has a secret topic on our online forum to discuss things in advance, but of course, not all participants read the forum, so it is better not to decide every detail there. It was my idea to take the device of the House of Haleth as an example and transform the branches of the tree into the five rivers of Lebennin. Also we tried to use only our team-colours: white, green and gold. But what symbols will they choose in the end? Sun, fish, apple, flower, wheatear? I'm afraid I have to wait until Sunday to find out.

I am not good in geography and never knew much about Lebennin, but this is an advantage of these camp-identities: I did my research and now I will remember that one of our rivers, Gilrain, was named after Nimrodel, who slept on its bank so long that she could not reach Belfalas in time to meet Amroth. Also I found an error even in the (by our society) revised version of the Hungarian translation of The Lord of the Rings: in the sentence about the people of Lebennin, the mention of the "short and swarthy folk among them" is missing, and their sires from the shadow of the hills are said to be the sires of the people of Lebennin in general.

The orders of this year are about dancing, adventures and exploring, cooking and lifestyle, written and oral texts, arts and crafts, and hiking in nature. Actually I would be interested in all of them but dancing and cooking. So I applied for adventures and my secondary choices were the other three left. I was quite late with my application, perhaps that's why I ended up in the order of writers, just like in my very first camp (where my primer choice was the theatre group). Oh, and there is another order for the babies!

Every order has a leader, and every team has two leaders and one hero. The hero is a character from that folk with a background story and a role in the upcoming events (an NPC in role-playing terms, but I think the other organisers also have NPC roles). The story-section was quite active this year, so all team-heros has their own facebook page and some short stories about them were published online or in the upcoming Lassi Laurië. (Something that they, down there in the camp, already can have. Not that it can surprise me a lot, as I read the almost-final version in pdf to find mistakes in time, but I want to have it in my hands, now.) Among the organisers there is also a team to care about the team-leaders. Another for all other programs of the camp. (For example there is a card-game of competition for the individual participants and another game of strategy for the teams, and an article about the development of these games in the Lassi.) And of course the logistics. And the kitchen staff. And the main organisers to care about all these. You can see their pictures in the "camp blog".

Tolkien Day 2014

Our Tolkien Day of this year was held in another, much more beautiful, but unfortunately also a bit too small cinema building compared to the previous year: the Urania National Filmtheatre. The only point of the programme which was internationally advertised by the organisers was the art workshop by Ted Nasmith—only this could you find also on the international event-list of The Tolkienist. Although this was truly the most special extra of the program, it is still only two hours and one venue of a full-day event in a big building full of people: elves, dwarves, orcs, hobbits, nazguls and other tolkienites.

The Tolkien Day is the one of our yearly events which is really planned for the general public, advertised in newspapers, visited by total strangers and most of our community is contributing on the organiser side somehow, if only by walking around in costumes and smiling on photographs. I did so—I spent the day as a dark-haired Elf in a dress designed for Galadriel (I suppose I could be Arwen borrowing granny's clothes, at least that was the only answer I could tell to a little girl who asked me whether I am Galadriel or not). I made Elvish hairstyle for visitors, even for a nazgûl, and guarded the small modell exhibition, checked tickets, and then the day was almost over and we could join the evening programme, so I cannot say much of the details of the day. I only went upstairs for a few minutes, where the café offered special foods like chocolate Erebor and lectures could be heard about the role of The Hobbit in the mithology, the love life of the Elves, the Elvish languages and writing systems, the movie adaptations and the Gift of Ilúvatar. There were also a talk with a guest who became known in Hungary with his special styled filmcritics on youtube. This proved to be a bit too popular, the crowd did not left much space for any air there. Also upstairs were the corner for children and the board games for grown-up children, and an exhibition of the works received in our Tolkien Art Competition.

I think it is useless to list more details of a program which I could not really see myself, but I hope most of the very lot of people who were all around the place could enjoy it, otherwise why would they stay? We also had a few international guests: I was glad to meet the Austrians (and suggested them the screening of the video about our Lithuanian camp as an English-speaking program) but only heard about the presence of Slovak TLV-participants. In the evening everybody still there gathered for the theatre program: songs, dances and a musical play about the forgotten heroes of Gondor. And in the end, as always, we made the traditional birthday toast to the Professor. So, that's about it—I don't have many pictures of my own, since the Galadriel costume do not have any pockets for camera, but on this facebook page there supposed to be collected all available pictures of the event.