[edit] Summary

Another Man's Cage is a novel-length Silmarillion-based work set during the Years of the Trees. It describes a year in the life of the House of Fëanor, early in their history. The year in which the story is set does not receive a single line of mention in The Silmarillion itself and so is a largely character-based study of how the personalities and motivations of the characters might have set them up for their eventual fall.

[edit] Story History

Another Man's Cage was started on August 5, 2004. At the time, Dawn Felagund was just becoming active in the Tolkien fandom and was doing a lot of reading on Fanfiction.net, where the prevailing attitude was that Fëanor and other members of his house were evil. Frustrated by the lack of complexity in the majority of portrayals of these characters, Dawn Felagund began writing what would become the first chapters of Another Man's Cage as a private characterization exercise, describing the third and fourth sons of Fëanor, Celegorm and Caranthir, as they might have been as children.

At that point, a coherent plot began to take shape, so the story was continued as a private writing exercise without any particular goals regarding its completion or its publication. About a year later, with the story almost "complete," Dawn Felagund began to share it on her LiveJournal, where it was found by accident by Enismirdal, who recommended the story and brought in new readers. At the same time, several members of the Yahoo! group Henneth Annûn, where Dawn Felagund is a member, also learned of the story and began reading it. The story earned most of its readers through word-of-mouth from there, and by the time it was completely posted on LiveJournal a year later, it was receiving dozens of comments per chapter. The completed story was fifty-two chapters long with an epilogue and took about a year to post in its entirety, with about one chapter posted per week.