The Volcanic Fortress of Surt

 His arm has grown long indeed. --Gimli in The Two Towers Larry Elmore's  Companions of the Lance I currently have two campaigns of Against the Darkmaster underway, so, though I have begun work on The Volcanic Fortress of Surt, specifically by beginning a reread of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land , I'm also keeping up with Tolkien-adjacent high fantasy. And I'm nearing a complete reading of The War of Souls Dragonlance trilogy by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. As a kid, hungry for more Lord of the Rings, I devoured both the Dragonlance Chronicles and Legends trilogies. And never read them again, just as I never read again Terry Brooks's Shannara novels or went back to however dismally far I made it into Stephen R. Donaldson's Chronicles of Thomas Covenant . I have reread Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, of course, many times, and I have read the books in that series, also, that were published almost as afterthoughts. I even have reread Lloyd Alexander...

The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost...  --Galadriel, from Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring It seems to me that, nearly every spring, I, like the land about me, shake off the dead vines that I have worn the winter through and grow new life up through them. The literary critic Northrop Frye, who developed a perspective about the conscious and/or unconscious effects of the seasons in the arts, may have observations about this. I pay them little mind: I am absorbed in what's next. Like some others I know, I am ready to "cut back" the dead growth of last summer. One reason is just regular old "spring fever." The season of Winter Nights tales is behind me. Now it's time to leave the hearth, go outside, wander the fields and forests that still are tinged with elements of boreal fantasy. But another impulse simply is to "reclaim my time." It's time to suns...