I hope you won't take our theme for March literally. The theme is Sickness as suggested by Lily.
It can be a rather straightforward theme - if you want it to be. Everyone has been sick at least a few times, and it's easy to imagine Tolkien's characters in such situation. Elves are an exception - they supposedly don't get sick from natural causes, but that still leaves some unnatural causes to your fantasy (dark magic? poison? maybe the sealonging can be viewed as a sickness as well?). Middle-earth is based on our world, and one can assume that the same bacteria and viruses would plaque its non-elvish population as to plaque us. But some types of sickness don't have an equivalent in our world, and our medicine would not be able to deal with them, like Frodo's illness in the anniversaries of his injuries.
Besides a disease though, there can be also other forms of sickness, which are more about the state of the mind. Remember the dragon-sickness of Thorin, or madness of Denethor, for example. Even a simple home-sickness falls into this category. The land can get sick as well: imagine the scars that Sauron's rule left in Mordor, the Brown lands that used to be the Ent-wives' gardens once, or what Saruman was able to do in the Shire in even a short time. A sick land can be healed just like a sick person, but it can take much, much longer - and just like with human healing, some scars are left forever.
The deadline for this challenge is March 25th (Tolkien reading day!), but can be extended until the end of the month. If you need an extension to finish your story or picture, just write to the email below!
For writers: send your stories to teitho.contest@gmail.com The contest is anonymous and the story can't be posted publicly until the results of the challenge are announced. Aragorn or Legolas don't have to be main characters, but at least one of them must be mentioned in the story.
For artists: Submit your picture into the Teitho gallery folder of Arda-Inspired at deviantArt. The picture should be new, drawn specifically for the challenge. State that you are submitting it to the contest in the artist's comments.