APPENDIX
(pancreas, cerebellum, whatever)

Elvish art, scrivenings, stories, underwater pumpkin carving,
barfing vultures, manic mustelids and other weirdness at:
makenuk

feedback, critique, flames and fanmail: makenuk
(Input, especially constructive critique, is always useful.
Now where'd I put that mithril chainmail...)

Hawk Circle Farm, the E.L.F. and its inhabitants are an original inspiration and solely the property of this author, until I get famous enough for other people to write fanfic.
>>>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>> I learned most of my Elvish at these excellent websites:
a webring for Tolkien languages: .org
Gwaith-I-Phethdain webpage: gwaith
any mistakes are mine, not theirs
>>>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>> Though my ancestors spoke a German dialect, I am, like most Americans, linguisticaly impaired. Nightcrawler's German dialog originally came from the comics, and from .com. I must thank reader, (and librarian!) Birgit Arensmann for timely help in fixing some problems!

>>>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>
The author is a serious student of Tolkien's works and...ok, well not really, but I have read farther than the Silmarillion, and have nearly collected all the dreaded HoME stuff. (I first read LOTR half a lifetime ago in 1978...you do the math). And I do belong to an online LOTR book discussion group group/lotr_inklings who have given me far more insight into my favorite bit of literature with their intelligent discussions (which go waaaay beyond, "wow, Orli's really hot, isn't he..."). My other favorite Tolkien site is .net which contains info on the books, the films, art, writing, songs, poems, links, and nearly everything imaginable Tolkien.
When not chasing my cats off the keyboard, I play with mustangs (equine) enjoy my fur-wheel drive (three Siberian huskies and a mountain bike or dogsled, depending on the weather), and paddle lakes, rivers, and mosquito-infested salt marshes in my 17 1/2 ft. sea kayak, Makenuk's Fin. I have decorated Christmas trees and carved pumpkins underwater (with a dive knife, you can carve Cirth but not Tengwar on the Gourd of the Rings).
As a volunteer for local wildlife rehabbers I've demonstrated projectile pooping to awed third graders (with the aid of Thermal, the Wonder Hawk), driven in a stuffy van with a vomiting vulture, wrangled otters, manic Bambis and emus, and illustrated a display; "Soil, It's Not Just Dirt" for a local county park (ask me about the dancing salamanders).
I can occasionally hit the broad side of a stack of haybales with an arrow at twenty paces. I have, with accuracy and vehemence, swung broadswords in the Society for Creative Anachronisms (I see knee replacement surgery in my future), but fence exactly the way Nightcrawler doesn't. I do NOT climb trees (or rocks or climbing walls or mountains or anything else, tall horses even make me nervous). I have snowboarded once, exactly the way Lorien does (I'll stick to the dogsled, it doesn't require a lift ticket).
If I did encounter the Prince of Mirkwood, my Elvish would be just good enough to make him fall on the ground laughing his (hot little) buns off.
I live with a couple of fuzzy, pointy-eared, golden-eyed, wall-crawling, teleporting acrobats with tails. One of them is blue (the sort of blue I describe in the story as Bran's haircolor), the other is black, and blends with shadows really well. Their names are Sindarin and Nightcrawler, of course.

You have to get out of the forest to see the trees...

(on fairy stories and time travel)

With this story, I thought I would do something with the classic tried and true (ok, overused and trite) concept seen in much fanfic, and a few professional efforts (Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, multiple episodes of Star Trek) wherein a character falls into an unfamiliar world.
In fanfic it is either a mundane from the Primary World falling into Middle Earth or Star Trek's Federation future, or some other Alternate Reality; or it is one of our Beloved Characters from the Secondary (book, tv, movie) World falling into our Primary World (the one where your computer chair is anchored). I'm not sure why most of us find this amusing, except that it is; my favorite Star Trek scene ever is the one where the 1960s jet pilot is beamed aboard the Enterprise and after talking to Kirk for awhile breathes a sigh of relief that they are from the future and not "little green men". Then he walks onto the bridge and encounters Spock.
This type of story does follow the classic Hero Journey/Quest structure in which the Hero leaves his comfortable world and falls into a strange world of Dragon treasure and Dwarves, wild Elf parties (which he unceremoniously crashes, to the annoyance of woodland kings), giant spiders, orcs and wizards. Throwing a character from the past, or from a Secondary World (like Middle-earth) into our world gives us a different perspective on the mundane things we've stopped seeing; the Elf in 21st century York County sees the mundane with a sense of wonder...and bemusement...and astonishment...maybe trepidation...that we've lost.
In his essay "On Fairy-stories" JRR Tolkien says; "Stories that are actually concerned with "fairies,"that is with creatures that also in modern English be called "elves" are relatively rare, and as a rule not very interesting. Most good "fairy-stories" are about the adventures of Men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. ...elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered and our paths seldom meet."
And then he wrote the Silmarillion, which is largely about Elves.
In this tale I have done the reverse; it is the adventures of an Elf in the Perilous Realm of twenty-first century humans. I also take up the sword...or three of them...and attempt to slay the idea that our fates are sundered. In our Perilous Realm of warp speed advances in technology, overpopulation and habitat loss, we need the Elves more than ever.
A writer friend once told me that in fantasy, it's elves, in science fiction it's aliens or androids.
In the comics, the archetype is alive and well, in the form of at least one blue, fuzzy, bamfing mutant. (It is Logan, aka Wolverine, who first dubs him "elf" in X-Men issue 96, Dec. 1975)

Legolas >>>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>
For the Book-Impaired:
His skills with horses etc. are based on what can be seen in Tolkien's work (as well as real world horsemanship and dog training), including other Elves like Beleg (The Silmarillion) who is described as being able to speak with forest animals.
Tolkien never tells us what color his hair actually is, though Thranduil, as the Elvenking of the Hobbit, is described as a woodland king with a crown of leaves in his golden hair. (For the record, I have always...since Orlando bloom was in diapers...seen Legolas as blond).
And though Legolas in this tale does not look like at all like Orlando Bloom, I am in awe of the job did in the films; a kid fresh out of acting school projected something archetypically Elvish, just as I had always imagined. I will be watching his career with great interest.

(No, that is NOT my copy of Teen Beat, I bought it for my niece...)

Here are some of my favorite Legolas moments, and where they're from:

Arod: "A smaller and lighter horse, but restive and fiery, was brought to Legolas. Arod was his name. But Legolas asked them to take off saddle and rein. "I need them not," he said, and leaped lightly up, and to their wonder Arod was tame and willing beneath him, moving here and there with but a spoken word: such was the elvish way with all good beasts." (quote from The Riders of Rohan chapter, The Two Towers, LOTR)
Whitewater: When the Fellowship is given boats in Lothlorien, Celeborn says; "There are some among you who can handle boats: Legolas, whose folk know the swift Forest River..." definitely whitewater paddling skills.
Running under the stars: In the chapter, The Great River: "The heart of Legolas was running under the stars of a summer night in some northern glade amid the beechwoods:" as they are paddling down the Anduin.
Nazgul Target Practice 101: In the chapter, The Great River."Suddenly the great bow of Lorien sang."
Huorns:The chapter, The Road to Isengard, as Legolas and Gimli ride through the huorn wood outside Helm's Deep: "they have voices, and in time I might come to understand their thought."
Time Sense: "Change and growth is not in all things and places alike..." Part of Leggy's lines in "The Great River" chapter of Fellowship; (to Sam) "Nay, time does not tarry ever...but change and growth is not in all things and places alike. For the Elves the world moves, and it moves both very swift and very slow. Swift, because they themselves change little, and all else fleets by: it is a grief to them. Slow, because they do not count the running years, not for themselves. The passing years are but ripples ever repeated in the long, long stream. Yet beneath the Sun, all things must wear to an end at last."
silent and thoughtful as a young tree on a windless night. a quote from The Book describing Legolas, and an image which Orlando Bloom portrayed beautifully.

"whose keen eyes can tell a sparrow from a finch a league away"
I never apprectiated the humor of this line from the Book until I put up a bird feeder and broke out my Peterson's Field Guide to Eastern Birds (North America). My previous bird experience had been raising one parakeet, having my cats eat two more, helping round up wild geese, a fish-hooked duck, and some manic emus for a wildlife rehabber, and handling big birds with pointy feet (raptors) for another rehabber. When I couldn't find the house (English) sparrows in Peterson's, I eventually discovered it was because they are on the finch pages(under weaver finches). Sparrows and finches in Peterson's run from page 263 to page 289. They are divided into weaver finches/family ploceidae , and "grosbeaks, finches, sparrows, buntings"/family fringillidae. I can now tell a sparrow from a finch a yard away with a field guide and good binoculars. My esteem for the skills of Legolas has gone up tremendously.

...and a few favorite non-Legolas moments

Voronwe, Noldorin/Sindarin Elf of Gondolin, appears in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and Lost Tales 2 (The Fall of Gondolin) wherein he guides Tuor, father of Earendil, and guards the young Earendil. He momentarily shares the spotlight with "one Legolas Greenleaf of the House of the Tree, who knew all of that plain by day or by dark", and "whose eyes were like cats' for the dark" as the refugees escape from the sack of Gondolin. This is not our Sindarin prince, but a Noldorin Elf of Gondolin, the one Lorien mentions on the hill above EVL WMN's place. It is the first use of any of the names of the Fellowship by Tolkien in any of his tales.

Beleg Cuthalion is the Sindarin (same folk as Legolas) chief of the marchwardens (read: Elven Ranger) of King Thingol (father of that Luthien chick, ancestor of Arwen and Aragorn). He is faithful guide and swordbrother to the ill-fated Turin, was Middle-earth's best archer (yep, even better than Legolas), likes living under the trees, talks to animals, and is that rarest of the rare: a male who stops and asks for directions:
Beleg: "Which way did they go?"
Squirrel: "Thataway."

Glorfindel: Well, without Legolas available, I would have sent Glorfindel with the Fellowship. For you pop culture lemmings who have only seen the films, that's the hot blond Rivendell Elf who rides to the aid of Frodo and Co. on a really nice horse named Asfaloth; who Arwen borrows in the film, stealing Glorfindel's part. If you assume (as many fen do) that he is the same Glorfindel (reincarnated) as the Noldorin lord who died fighting a balrog in The Fall of Gondolin (Book of Lost Tales 2), the balrog in Moria would make two. I wonder if he won this time?

Fuzzy Elf~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>

It's all Alan Cumming's fault. He reminded me how much I loved Fuzzy back when. He even made me kick Legolas off my computer wallpaper...briefly.

Fuzzy Elf kind of bamfed into the tail...er tale halfway through. I was trying to catch up on thirty years of X-Men, after picking up Uncanny 423; Holy War (starring the Blue Elf).

I had first encountered the X-Men back in 1985, or 86, (a good seven years after I first met Legolas in the pages of LOTR) when I was living in State College PA with a bunch of SF/fantasy/comic fans who named my newly aquired ferret Logan.
"Logan?" I said.
They dropped a few...thousand...comics on me. Of course I fell for the Elf.

Ferrets are mustelids...like otters, minks, skunks, badgers, fishers, martens, weasels and wolverines. Ferretss are one of the oldest domesticated animals, though they are about as domesticated as cats, maybe less. Mine was short, hairy, and had an attitude the size of Canada. He was gold and brown; the colors of one of Wolverine's early costumes.

On Fuzzy's Sindarin Name:
Mor is Sindarin for black or night
rada is "make a way" (couldn't find "crawl" or "walk" in the Sindarin Dictionary)
athradon is "I cross"
So...Morathradon is as close as I can get to Nightcrawler's Elvish name...one who walks the paths of night.

I may have taken a bit of artistic license by making Kurt a huge LOTR fan, and having him know some Elvish, but it's not far from plausibility. Crawler Creator Dave Cockrum is a LOTR fan. Evidence for this can be found on several threads on Nightscrawlers. There is a lot of his art on that website, including one of Galadriel, and one of Nightcrawler (with the Vanisher) as a ...Hobbit? When asked what characters resonated most with him (Dave Cockrum), as well as with his fictional character (Nighty), he replied that he liked Theoden...and Nighty might find something in common with, who else, the Elf.

"Hey Elf...what's so funny...?" With those lines in issue 96, (the third issue after Giant Size #1, which introduced the new X-Men team of Wolverine, Colossus, Storm, Thunderbird, and Nightcrawler in 1975) Logan, aka Wolverine, short, hairy guy with a big attitude, forever changes the image of the blue fuzzy guy from the apparent demon who was nearly destroyed by crazed villagers in Winzeldorf, to fun-loving, swashbuckling elf.
The scene was a workout in the Danger Room; an accidently overexuberant swat by Colossus sends Wolvie across the room. Wolverine lands with a wicked grin and claws set to shred Colossus into steel wool. Storm short-circuits Wolvie's potential berserker rage with a wind blast, and Nightcrawler laughs his buns off;
"you don't laugh at me, Nightcrawler, you got that? Nobody laughs at the Wolverine, mister..."
Kurt bamfs out of the way, just in time. And several pages later they are saving each other's butts from impending doom. An eternal friendship is forged, like another elf and dwarf we all know so well.

blueberry muffin is from Uncanny X-Men 423, Holy War, part one, in which Kurt introduces himself with the immortal line: "Me, Kurt Wagner, A.K.A. Nightcrawler, teleporting elf, and to certain females in my past, Blueberry Muffin. But I wouldn't want that getting around."

Captain Blood is a great old pirate movie, if you can find it. I have not yet seen The Seahawks, but it comes highly recommended by the scurvy viking hordes of the good ship Fyrdraca (The Longship Company, berthed in Solomon's Maryland). Captain Blood is Errol Flynn's first starring role. The Seahawks is considered by many to be one of his best.
It is issue 97 where we first see Kurt with the image inducer. Professor Xavier tells Jean: "Please tell Nightcrawler that Tony Stark's image inducer is to make him look unobtrusive...not like some 1930's movie star."
The star he choses to look like is, of course, Errol Flynn. And he continues to use the Errol Flynn disguise for some time.
Chris Claremont, in the X-2 novelization, mentions that Nightcrawler owns a copy of Captain Blood. I believe though, that he means the book on which the movie is based.

I have seen Pirates of the Carribbean waaaaay too many times...
And Orlando Bloom, in Pirates, looks uncannily like Errol Flynn in Captain Blood.
I watched the whole movie just waiting for that image inducer to fail...

I must give great credit to the fine folks at .com, and .com and other great Nightcrawler sites you can link to from there for information ranging from Nighty's origins, history, and love life, to whether his eyes actually glow, to whether he's fuzzy...ummm...everywhere (ehhh, go talk to Dave Cockrum on the "not quite kosher" thread on Nightscrawlers).

Storm of Creativity: On several of the above websites you can find the origin and entire history of Fuzzy Elf. Apparently he was created by Dave Cockrum (along with several other characters) during a hurricane (hey, what else is there to do when your boonie bungalow is in danger of blowing away?). In honor of that creation story, at least one of the chapters of this fanfic was written during Hurricane Isabel. (part of the pirate fest; "Yo Ho Ho...and Really Bad Eggs").

Kurtisms: German 101: Though my ancestors came from Kurt's backyard only a few generations ago (I'm Pennsylvania Deutsch) and I remember a couple of great Pennsylvania Deutschisms (shussly, roochy, strubbly, and "go red up your room") I am completely German-impaired. Anything Kurt says here is courtesy of the great folks on the above websites, or the original comics themselves. Any typos, or lack of umla...umlow...whatever those dot thingies are...are purely mine. Herr-der-Ringe Filme is a great LOTR website, even if you can't read German.

junge Frau...young lady
liebes...originally I used liebling, sweetheart, but found out from Librarian Lady Birgit that liebes would actually be better. The ie is pronounced eeeee, an ei would be pronounced ai, i, eye. Various folks I grew up with, and one school I went to were named "Leib", as in vibe. Nighty's pet name (from the original comics) for various girls is "leeeebling"
miiiiiist!...mist is manure, crap, poop
Ja...yes, yeah
Unglaublich!...unbelievable! Usually used by Nighty as an exclamation of surprise.
Nein...no
Sehr gut, danke...very good, thank you
bitteschoen...you're welcome (a line from X2, the movie)
Ach!...the all-purpose word, kind of like ack!
Wunderbar...wonderful
Achja...yeah, sigh
Sehr schoen...very beautiful
Avast! that pirate word Orlando Bloom shouts in Pirates of the Caribbean...literally it means "stop!" I learned this from a captain of the Longship Fyrdraca when I shouted it once, at an inopportune moment...
snikt is the sound Wolverine's claws make popping out, snakt is the sound they make retracting and you'd better know what a bamf is by now...

"ja, picture this..bumpity bumpity bumpity splat!" X-Men: Evolution, Nightcrawler explaining to Kitty why he can't teleport out of a jet doing mach two...

You can bamf, if you want to ...
"A frumious bandersnitch."
"Ja, you learn to go through doors fast."
These lines, or something close to them, first appeared in Dave Cockrum's excellent 'Crawlerfest: Nightcrawler, a four-part mini-series which can still be found at many comic stores. It's got pirates, Bamfs (Smurfs gone horribly wrong), Lockheed the Dragon (both of them), a damsel in distress, the Well at the Center of Time, Nightcrawler without his costume or any other clothes, swashbuckling, 'Crawler swinging a cutlass with his tail, and other weirdness.

Eleven, elven: According to someone on Nightscrawlers, "elf" in German is elf, male... "elfe" is elf, female... "elben" is more than one of them, and "elf" also means elven...I mean, eleven.

'Crawler's creator and alter-ego Dave Cockrum, and his wife Paty (PAY-tee) can be found on Nightscrawlers. Proof positive that you can be over twenty...waaaaay over twenty, and still have a sense of adventure.

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Best one-liner from .com "I live with a pointy-eared blue German" the signature line of a girl who lives with a blue Doberman.

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~Middle-earth~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Coming of the Dragon to the Lonely Mountain was in the year 2770 of the Third Age. (the New Tolkien Companion, J.E.A. Tyler). It would be nearly two centuries before thirteen Dwarves and a Hobbit named Bilbo put an end to Smaug's reign of fire in the year 2941.

Elvish 101: Any linguists out there feel free to correct any goobers I made!
Like most Americans, I am somewhat linguistically impaired. So, if the Elvish in this tale is mangled, it is not the fault of my sources: Tolkien's works, the movie soundtrack, and in particular, the lovely Sindarin Dictionary by Ryszard Derdzinski found on:

.org
gwaith

Ryszard Derdzinski can be contacted at gwaith. His Sindarin dictionary can be ordered on CD. It contains art and other goodies from the website as well. The dictionary part of the CD is wonderfully trilingual, containing each word in English, Elvish and Polish.

to the sea, to the sea, the white gulls are crying
na aear, na aear, myl lain nallol
the wind is blowing, the white foam is flying
i sul ribiel, a i falf los reviol
Legolas' Song of the Sea (Gaerlin Legolas): from Return of the King, was translated on Gwaith-i-phethdain by in 2002, after I asked whether anyone had ever translated that, my favorite song in the Book. You can find the complete version along with a bit of the book's prose preceding and following the song as well at:

Lorien's Spells: Tolkien's The Fall of Gil-Galad and Treebeard's Lore of Living Things were translated into Sindarin by Mr. Derdzinski: gwaith/lore_
You can find the complete, versions there, as well as some other great songs and poems.

The Elvish titles at the beginnings of Legolas' part of the tale are (for speed and simplicity) Sindarin counting; gwaith/sindarin_

1 min 2 tad 3 nel 4 canad 5 leben 6 eneg 7 odog 8 tolodh 9 neder 10 pae 11 minig 12 uiug 13 pae-a-nel 14 pae-a-canad 15 pae-a-leben 16 pae-ar-eneg 17 pae-ar-odog 18 pae-a-tolodh 19 pae-a-neder 20 taphae 21 taphae-a-min 22 taphae-a tad 23 taphae-a-nel 24 taphae-a-canad 25 taphae-ar-leben 26 taphae-ar-leneg 27 taphae-ar-odog 28 taphae-a-tolodh 29 taphae-a-neder

30 nelphae, 40 canaphae, lephae, 60 enephae, 70 odophae, 80 tolophae, 90 nederphae 100 haran, 200 tacharan, 300 nelcharan, 400, canacharan, 500 lefaran, 600 enecharan 700 odocharan, 800 tolocharan, 900 nedercharan, 1000 meneg

I guessed that 124 would be written haran taphae-a-canad, not haran-a-taphae-a-canad.

Elvish Animals
(from Ryszard Derdzinski's Sindarin Dictionary)

amlug (dragon), andabon (elephant), araf (wolf), aras (deer), brog (bear), cabor (frog), gwilwering (butterfly), half (seashell, ok, so it was clam form), hu (dog), lyg (snake), raw (lion), roch (swift horse), ryn (swift running hound, greyhound,sighthound), thling (spider web), nar(rat), nardagnir(ratbane: there is no word for cat, so perhaps this would do, or "mu" to go with "hu" dog), thor(eagle), thornaur(could be used for phoenix, naur is fire), aew/fileg(small bird), dulin, merilin(nightingale),

Completely useless Elvish trivia: thling is Sindarin for spiderweb, thwip is the comic book sound effect for Spiderman's web-shooters...

Stray Lines and Words:

Man galadh tan; literally "what tree that"
suilad; a Sindarin greeting
Legolas Thranduilion; as in the extended version of the film: the ion suffix is son of
al na'galadh; not with trees, al;no,not, na;with, galadh;tree
noro; run as in noro lim;run fast,or ride on!
Iau in'gonathras: iau;corn/fruit, in;of, gonathras;weaving,entanglement
Gwennin Na'lim; gwennin;have gone na;to lim;fish
Uin in'Inath; uin;river in;of inath;years
Rochben Mor; rochben;rider mor;black
Pennas Galadh; galadh;tree pennas;history(tale)
ped;speak
nauth in'Roh; nauth;thought
Donn; dark color,
lim;light
gael;pale,glittering
gwind;pale blue-grey
maedh;pale,fallow,fawn
malu; pale yellow
athrad; ford
thiw;letters
U-ndae; u;not ndae or daer;great
rin; recall, have in mind
angol; magic
Tiro curu tin; tiro;watch curu;skill,craft tin;,their
Yrch; orcs, Legolas uses this word on the banks of the Anduin in The Book
andabonath; andabon;elephant ath is the collective plural meaning all things of the same name when added to the end of a word
Fileg u-gennir; u-gennir;did not see
fileg;small bird
hannon le; thank you, from the movie dialog by way of gwaith-i-phethdain
fael; just, generous, fair-minded
limlug; Sindarin for sea-dragon, or sea-serpent
gweth; manhood, manly vigour
avam; we won't
tele; end

I have looked the last upon that which is fairest. Why did I come on this Quest? Torment in the dark was the danger that I feared, and it did not hold me back. But I would not have come, had I known the danger of light and joy. Now I have taken my worst wound in this parting.
Nay, nay. For such is the way of it, to find and to lose, as it seems to those whose boat is on the running stream...but I count you blessed...and me...and the memory shall remain ever clear and unstained in your heart, and shall neither fade nor grow stale. Paraphrased from Gimli and Legolas' conversation in "Farewell to Lorien", Fellowship of the Ring.

>>>>~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>>
unci is pronounced (oo as in book) oon-chee and is Lakota for grandmother, from a Dakota lady I know: Bev Holland

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Somewhere in an interview, Orlando Bloom mentioned the fact that he has a completely weird set of skills and experience; like riding, swashbuckling, archery, axe-throwing, paddling elvenboats, sailing brigs, shield-surfing, and talking to trees; things not in high demand in the 21st century.

Unless you're an actor or some other sort of storyteller.
Here's a few bits of my weird experience that have fed into this tale.

~~~~~~~~~~Drawing from Experience~~~~~~~~~~

Manure Force One:
I earned my Manure Movers 101 membership long ago, there are two mustangs peering over the back fence at me now. More on The Black Mare and her kin (and swordbroads and flying horses) at makenuk

Tall Ships:
Thanks and a tip of the spangenhelm to Capn' Dave of the Fyrdraca
. /~eowyn/Longship/

My sole sea-going experience consists of paddling a 17 1/2 foot sea kayak out of Chincoteague channel and off the coast of Wallops Island a few times. And jumping off a perfectly good floatin' boat 20 or 30 miles off the coast of Delaware to look at the sunken boats 90 feet below; the steel freighter; Washingtonian, and the sunken schooner; Elizabeth Palmer, so technically, I have been on a tall ship, 90 feet underwater! I also dived on several similar sunken schooners in the River, Prescott, Canada. None of the sunken ships looked like the classic image; masts in place and shreds of sail wafting in the current. The Elizabeth Palmer is little more than a brief wall emerging from the ocean floor, covered with sea life, surrounded by small fish, its wood mostly devoured by sea life. The St. Lawrence wrecks are in one piece, the Canadians being properly adamant about preserving their marine history, and little in fresh water eats wood. Only the hulls remain, the masts and rigging long gone (many had already been de-masted and converted into barges). A few fish hide out in them, but nothing grows on them, like it does on sea-going wrecks.

I have sailed..ok, mostly rowed...on a very small tall ship, the longship Fyrdraca of the Longship Company out of Solomon's, Maryland. She has one mast and a square-rigged sail, which makes her a tall ship, and being a viking ship makes her one of the earliest pirate ships as well. We've journeyed on the Patuxent, the Potomac, and parts of the Chesapeake Bay, with lots of bawdy sea-chanties (so our oarsmen don't look like an epileptic centipede) and no rum. We're weird enough without any help.

The rest of my reference comes from various web sources and books:
"Tall Ships of the World, an Illustrated Encyclopedia", C. Keith Wilbur, The Globe Pequot Press)
The website for the ship that played the Interceptor in "Pirates of the Caribbean" (The Lady Washington) was most useful for general information as well as specific info on this recreation of an 18th century brig; / There is a nice documentary on her as well on the Pirates DVD.

Also: the "Master and Commander" series by Patrick O'Brian (The Far Side of the World was made into a film starring Russel Crowe) contains excellent insight to the workings of a tall ship in the early nineteenth century. Both the official film site and the Patrick O'Brian site have great info. .

I had pictured the grey ships (and so it seems have several Tolkien artists, like Alan Lee) as sort of extreme viking longships (the height of technology for their day). The movie used lateen rigged ships (one mast, slanty sort of triangular sail) for both the Corsairs and for the Elvenships.
Capn' Dave however, mentioned the fact that the Elves and the Numenoreans had an incredibly advanced seagoing culture (vanished with the sinking of "Atalante"or Numenor, and the sailing of the Elves west out of the Knowne Worlde).
So Legolas' ship became basically an extreme clipper (from the mid 1800's in our world), with its long, curved knife-like bow, v-bottomed hull, long and narrow, hugging the water and sporting vast clouds of sail on her three raked masts. (The sail plan would be much like the Dauntless or the Black Pearl from "Pirates", or the Surprise from "Master and Commander", though the "Pirates" ships are from the early 1700's, and the Surprise is from the early 1800's).
In heavy seas the extreme clipper was a wet ship, with waves crashing over the decks, and it took a large crew to manage her great heights of canvas, but she was the height of sailing technology, and the fastest, lovliest thing on the waves, until the steamship took over.

The "huge fuzzy thing" Gimli sees being braided in the first scene is a baggywrinkle, a great blob of frayed rope attached to a line to prevent it from chaffing the canvas of a sail. Sounds more than a little Hobbitish.

It's not a rope, it's a line: On a ship, "knowing the ropes" was a useful and necessary skill. Sheets tie down the sails, shrouds tie down masts and braces tie down the yards, ratlines are the horizontal lines woven across the shrouds to form rope ladders sailors use to climb aloft. One of the Lady Washington's web pages shows a map of where all those ropes...er...lines are tied. Most are tied to points around the ship's rail (belaying pins, cleats and other weirdness), a few are attached at the base of the masts. It's hideously complicated and ripping any one of them loose could bring down various spars, yards and other large unwieldy wooden objects.

Passage of the Not-Nearly-Dead-Enough Marshes:
Been there, done that, got the 100% DEET. .gov/asis/

The aforementioned 17 ft. kayak, Makenuk's Fin has journeyed in the waters of Chincoteague and Assateague Islands, Virginia (the north end being in Maryland) for three years. In my earlier landlubber years I had backpacked, hiked, ridden, and swum those two islands and their backwaters. There are, in fact, half a dozen kinds of bloodsucking mosquitoes, the same number of bloodsucking flies, and three kinds of ticks. There is no water but what you carry, and no way out but back over miles of sand, as easy to walk in as drifted snow.
There are also innumerable sea and marsh birds, wild ponies in the surf, two kinds of deer staring at you wide-eyed from the shrubbery, endangered fox squirrels bigger than the ones in Mirkwood, the call of owls in the night, dolphins breathing alongside the 'yak at twilight, a stingray lying inches from your dive mask, and the sun coming up over the edge of the world.

Crocodile Hunter: "Something big roared in the marsh, entirely too close for comfort..." Been there, done that...not on Assateague, but Kiawah and Seabrook Islands, South Carolina. I had walked into the night marsh, looking for a palmetto leaf souvenir. I looked up and stared at the wonder of the full moon over the marsh; then something the size of a dragon roared about five feet away, I heard splash splash splash as something large splooshed into the water and vanished.
Ok, it was probably fifty feet away, and the alligator was probably only a five or six footer and he was probably more scared of me than I was of him...probably.
I still have the palmetto leaf.

The Secret Lagoon:
The quarry which becomes the Pirate Lagoon in this tale is lifted from life; Bainbridge Sportsman's Club, an old limestone quarry on the banks of the Susquehanna, at the bottom of which I have carved pumpkins, gotten lost, seen sunken trees with fish for leaves, watched nesting bluegills, catfish guarding their babies, freshwater jellyfish, honed underwater navigational skills, and generally gotten wet and cold and had a great time. I don't know for sure whether a two-masted brig would fit in it, that's artistic license.

The Watcher:
Bainbridge Quarry has a number of sunken trees (still standing like an underwater forest, though bare of twig and leaf), as well as a deep hole which is over 125 feet deep. In a freshwater lake, most of the plants and fish are in the first 20 feet, where there is ample light for the plants and cover for the fish. Some plants grow down as far as 50 feet in warm gently sloping sunlit lakes, but below that is only silt and rock and bacteria breaking down the dead. I have been to 90 feet in Bainbridge, but buddies who've been deeper, in the Hole, tell me it tastes of sulphur (it tastes like the bamf smells). I envisioned the Watcher as a piece of that silty, gooey, sulpherous bottom risen to the surface. The tentacles are perhaps half a dozen of the drowned trees that grew before the quarry flooded.

Thunderbird Island classes/susquehanna_river_ .
Just below the Safe Harbor Dam on the Susquehanna River lies a maze of tree-studded islands and glacier carved bare rocks. Info can be found on the web by simply typing in "Susquehanna River petroglyphs" as a search engine. The island I describe in this tale is better known in archaeological circles as Big Indian Rock. The glyphs are just the way I've shown them in this story; there really is an X, some Wolverine clones, various "phoenixes" (thunderbirds), and a few figures with really is one that looks uncannily like Nightcrawler (although the tail may in fact be a bow, the pics are rather weathered.)
Of course, I don't know that it's an interdimensional gateway...
It is only accessible by a small shallow-draft boat such as a kayak...
...if you can find it. The currents can be strong and squirrely, especially when the dam siren goes off and they let more water through. Our kayaking group found this out; one ladder truck, six power boats and an ambulance or two later, our lone canoeist was towed back to our put-in at Connestoga Creek.
While we parked light kayaks on a no-pictograph end of the rock, it's best to leave boats in the water, and to walk elvishly light-footed (barefoot may be best) on the rock itself.
If you go there, remember to take nothing but pictures and leave nothing, not even footprints.
Well, perhaps some sage for the spirits of the place.

The Real Middle-earth:
"On the far side of the world. A land that held flightless, furry birds, mountains as great as Caradhras, great kauri trees like mallorns, and a living dinosaur with three eyes."
Gimli gave him a disbelieving look, "Three eyes?"
"And it had once held eagles as great as Gwaihir!"
Gimli's face held blatant disbelief.

Believe it Gimli, it's weirder than you can possibly imagine. My sole experience with New Zealand is (beyond endless viewings of LOTR) a wonderful program at Nixon County Park, in which half a dozen nice people from the New Zealand Embassy in Washington DC came to tell us about their land. Their first question to the native south-central Pennsylvanians was: "How many of you have been to NZ?" At least half a dozen had. The Second question was; "How many of you have seen Lord of the Rings?"
The giant eagle is the Haast eagle, and has a wingspan far larger than our native American bald or goldens (ours is 7 feet or so, females are larger), though it was not quite Gwaihir's dimensions, it might easily have carried off a Hobbit. It's now quite extinct.
The living fossil is the tuatara, not a lizard, but the last remaining example of the rhynchocephalia which became extinct in the rest of the world about 135 million years ago. The third eye is on the top of the head; a layer of retina, an eye lens and a nerve connecting the eye to the brain, all covered by a transparent scale. Nobody's sure precisely what it does.
I think my favorite weird creatures were the giant sheep-eating parrots.

Star Trek: According to Jerry Jones at Nixon County Park, every 2000 years or so the stars change their positions...(in 2000 years the handle of the Big Dipper will be straight), the stars of the Oligocene would decidedly be different. If you see Middle-earth as being in our "prehistoric" past (a sort of mythic pre-history), its stars would be quite different. Tolkien, however, describes familiar stars and constellations in LOTR, and an excellent program at the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum confirmed this:
November 24, 2001, The Smithsonian, Washinton DC, The Monthly Star Lecture at the Air and Space Museum, Sean O'Brian, Astronomer, explored the astronomy of Middle-earth, as it is set forth in LOTR and other writings. I took copious notes...in the dark of the planetarium...and wrote a spy report for .net. The program was excellent, and pointed out a few goodies like: "Menelmacar" (or Menelvagor) is Orion, "the netted stars" are the Pleiades, "the sickle rising over Bree Hill" is the Dipper (Great Bear, or Fisher), "Borgil" is probably Mars, and Earendil's star (Earendil in his ship with the Silmaril bound to his brow) is likely the planet we call Venus.

You can find Sean O'Brian's sister Maureen's Tolkien filksongs at

And yeah, I grew up on Trek Original, ah, those pointy eared guys. Sigh.

Beowulf and other names; (or reality is weirder than fiction)

Beowabbit: one of my friends has a dark bay Warmblood (Hanoverian x Thoroughbred which makes him an Oldenburg) named Beowulf (I had to paint him for Yule so he was on my mind). Beowabbit's name is, alas, not my original invention, but that of a friend, Bruce Blackistone, aka "Atli", Captain of the Longship Fyrdraca, and founder of the Longship Co of southcentral Maryland. "Beowabbit" is a poem of epic proportions (and laughs) and is the national poem of Markland, a viking age historical recreation group also based in Maryland, USA, on the Chesapeake Bay.

One of my kayaking buddies, who howls at the moon, lives with four German Shepards and is fond of paddling the Chesapeake Bay, dubbed her new boat: Bay-o-wolf.

Yes, we do have people named "Cotton" in our phone books. If you've missed the point entirely, go read The Book. (Rosie Cotton marries Sam Gamgee...a horrible pun as gamgee wool is another name for cotton). The other Shires' names are from The Hobbit.

We also have people with the name Durgin in our phone books. I do not know if they are Dwarvishly short, but they are probably, like much of Yrch County, bearded and stout.

Wagner: there are pages of Wagners in our local phone books, some of them are named Kurt.

Saurman: yes this exists in our phone books, though nowhere near as common as Wagner.

The Elvish Way With All Good Beasts:

Shires are about the size of oliphaunts...ok, not really, but it seems that way. They originated in the shires of England in the middle-ages, and are, last time I looked, the world's biggest horses. . /breeds/horses/shire/

Shenzi is the only Mary Sue in this tale: She is, of course, named for Whoopi Goldberg's hyena character in Disney's Lion King, and it is her real name, given to her by her original two-year-old owner.
Malenois are one of the Belgian Sheppard breeds and are a favorite for protection work. They're lean, hard, athletic dogs, like a dingo on steroids. Shenzi belonged to a two year old child who began going through the NO! stage in a big way. Shenzi adopted him as her own, and backed him up, against anyone, especially his parents. She quickly found a new home with one of my kayaking buddies, a dog trainer.
When I first knew Shenzi she would lie in wait in her crate till I walked by, then leap up and bark ferociously. When I peeled myself off the ceiling, I swear she was laughing at me.
I have since bought "Shenzi's Van" from paddling buddy Mona, and Shenzi no longer looks like she wants to eat me. In fact, she pastes herself to my side and holds me hostage till I give her doggie massages.

Newfoundlands are huge, hairy, slobbery, sweet dogs. Usually black, they occasionally come in copper, blue, or Landseer (black and white) models. Originally used on ships and boats in Newfoundland, they are still the kings of water rescue and drool. Nana in the original Peter Pan was actually a Newf.

Mush! Any strong, athletic dog over thirty pounds can be a sled dog, though the northern breeds like Siberians and Malamutes and Alaskan Huskies are more often associated with this growing sport. Ski-joring is a variation in which you strap several dogs to your belt and cross-coutry ski behind them (it helps if you're an excellent skier), German Shorthaired Pointers are a favorite for this. When there's no snow, you can mush on rigs or gigs or ATVs (yeah Gimli, we love those acronyms). I have tried strapping various numbers of my dogs to kids on rollerblades (hard to stop), snowboards, (after 50 feet he fell over and we caught up with the dogs at the next farm). I usually run my dogs on a beat-up mountain bike, with the gangline attached just below the handlebars and the dogs running fifteen feet or so in front of me; comments from other bikers on the Rail Trail run from astonishment to "that's cheating...". Mush comes from a French word, and is never a command, those are; hike=let's go, gee=right, haw=left, whoa=stop, on by (expletive deleted)=leave the skunk alone! /

"Last one to the creek is a poodle driver!" There was one Iditarod musher, who, out of loyalty to his breed, and a need to blow up some stereotypes, ran that 1200 mile race (somewhere in the 1980's) through the Alaskan wilderness with a team of Standard Poodles. Yep, poodles. They didn't win, but they didn't come in last, either.

Gary Paulsen wrote the funniest sled dog book ever, Winterdance. It supposedly inspired the Disney movie Snow Dogs, but is far better, though it does not have Cuba Gooding's cute butt in it. The YA version is called Woodsong.

Bernd Heinrich wrote the awesome Ravens in Winter, Mind of the Raven, and some other stuff as well as The Trees in My Forest, of which the Prince of Mirkwood would thoroughly approve.

Indricotheres and Hyaenodons:

. /beasts/evidence/prog3/page2_
Inspired by the BBC production Walking With Prehistoic Beasts (with its own excellent website) I set out to create my version of the classic fantasy Lost World. Most of these (X-Men's Savage Land, Land of the Lost in the old Saturday morning kidshow, Pelucidar, and other classic literature) contain dinosaurs, so I tried for the less known and equally amazing giant mammals.
Size matters: The movie's humongously impossible oliphaunts look great on screen; especially to an audience which is not only used to seeing (yawn) elephants on nature specials, but at fairs and circuses...in fact, most of us have ridden one at one point or another...but in Middle-earth, normal elephants would have been amazing to someone like Sam, or even Legolas. The phrase "now I've seen the elephant" originated somewhere in the 1800's when circuses and menageries were beginning to show the beasts to American audiences, and for someone to have seen one, in small town USA, was a big deal. The oliphaunts of The Book are also huge: "...the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty." But not as over the top as the film ones. The indricothere still ranks as the largest land mammal ever. (The blue whale is still the largest animal, land or sea, mammal or dinosaur or anything else, ever).
"Then it dove out of the sky, swooped to within a hand'sbreadth of my chest and sniffed; a great whoosh of air..." I've had the honor of meeting a giraffe this way once...with no fence between us. They're really, really BIG.
Indricothirrim: a pun on Rohirrim

Wildlife Rehab 101:
Vultures: I've had the honor of working with both native species: black and turkey vultures. Both are charming social birds, male and female share incubation of eggs and child-rearing duties, barf in self-defense, and have anti-bacterial poop. Turkey vultures are champion wind-surfers. Both are important members of the recycling crew, cleaning up dead things. Turkey vultures are one of the few birds with a sense of smell. Both have no sirynx (voice-box, the bird equivalent of our larynx) and only hiss and grunt. Black vultures do make the sort of sound I described here.
Emus: There are an inordinate number of these Australian natives in York County, being a popular small farming experiment; my Siberian-proof dogyard fence is courtesy of a defunct emu farm, my favorite mushing trail has the unique obstacle of an entire farm of emus I must convince the dogs to go "on by!", and I participated in The Great Emu Roundup when a local rehabber harbored four of the beasties for a few kick every direction but back (so you're safest behind them) and they're really hard to lasso, because of their aerodynamic shape.
Possums: I've had the pleasure of raising a few of these charming native north American marsupials, so I had to create Possum Woman.

O.R.C.s
One day I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that had, emblazoned across the front: O.R.C.s.
"What's that?" I asked him, intrigued.
"Off road cycles."
Yup, orcs.

Bowsnarras:
The buffalo bow; saw the first of these small Plains hunting bows at the local Rennaissance Faire, made by Bill Darr of Whipporwil Archery. Since then I have encountered a number of Native American bows made by local bowyers, and own a nice little hickory bow of the Plains style.
At about five feet long, the northeast woodland bows (Iroquois, Algonquian...think Mirkwood) were longer than bows used in other parts of the country, but were shorter than the classic English longbow. "This size no doubt proved to be best for use in the forest, being long enough to handle well (easy to make, doesn't break easily, performs well for hunter on foot) and not too long to be a handicap while moving through timber and underbrush." ( Reginald and Gladys Laubin, American Indian Archery)
I picture Legolas' original Mirkwood bow as being like these (and the one in the film is not unlike this, though that one is round, and most Indian bows were rectangular in cross-section). The woodland bows were often recurved (bent back at the tips; the resulting 'ears' shorten the working limbs and act as a lever to aid in drawing the bow, making the action springier and faster, and 'casting' the arrow farther). Indian hunters used stealth and excellent stalking skills, and shot their prey from 25 to 30 yards away, much like a modern bowhunter with his high-tech bow with training wheels. I picture Mirkwood Elves operating much like this, and they'd be the lords of stealth.
Size does not always matter, a too-big bow can lose all its power into the limbs rather than into the arrow, and a longbow is remarkably unhandy on a horse, despite how awesome Orlando Bloom made it look in Two Towers. A couple of typical Sioux (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota) bows from American Indian Archery are around 41 inches long. Again, these hunters used stealth, camoflage and a detailed knowledge of their prey, or galloped with maniacal courage straight up to an immense buffalo thundering along at warp 10 and shot it from close range.
One added quirk of horsed archery; if you are right-handed, you can only shoot things on the left side of the horse. (Unless you can spin around on your horse's back and ride backwards). Indians often did battle, riding in a counter-clockwise circle...which must have wreaked havoc on those left-handed guys...

Borrowed Lines, Odes and References:

Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree
in joy thou hast lived. Beware of the Sea!
If thou hearest the cry of the gull on the shore,
thy heart shall then rest in the forest no more.

Those are the words of Galadriel, borne by Gandalf to Legolas in "The White Rider" chapter of Two Towers, LOTR. Poem by JRR Tolkien.

Legolas Greenleaf, long under tree
in joy thou hast lived, beware of the screams
of zillions of ardent teenagery girls
but take not that grey ship, depart not this world

Those are the words of Teanna, in the epic lay "Viagraquenta" to be found on .net, .net, and a few other places who'd rather you didn't know about it.

Dangerous! And so am I...And Aragorn is dangerous and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli Son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself..." Gandalf to Gimli, The White Rider, Two Towers

He gave me a wry look, one eyebrow cocked and loaded. "Where are you going to get the rope?" Orli; Pirates of the Caribbean; "Where'd he get the rope?"

...old Carc and his wife used to live above the guard chamber at Ravenhill, and how their kin brought secret news to my kin. And how they were rewarded with such bright things as they coveted.
In The Hobbit, The Gathering of the Clouds, Bilbo learns this from Balin.

But any sufficiently advanced craft would be indistinguishable from magic. A takeoff on SF writer Arthur C. Clarke's assertation that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic.

pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain; classic line from The Wizard of Oz, (as best I remember it).

xerophilous; plants which can thrive under arid conditions, like cacti, are xerophilous

"Maybe you should put some warmer clothes on, if you're going to continue to fight evil today." A similar line (without the "warmer") was uttered by The Bowler in Mystery Men, the funniest superhero movie ever.

a leg at each corner is a nod to genius British cartoonist Thelwell whose manic Shetland ponies and doughty schoolgirls graced our 4-H horsemanship years (A Leg at Each Corner is a collection of a few of his finest).
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Great Tribe Wannabe as in want to be Indian. I've heard various Native people make the comment that if they had a nickel for every idiot who claimed to have a Cherokee (always a "princess") grandmother (always female...there's never a prince in the family tree) they would be excruciatingly rich. There is here, a strong interest in Native Culture among non-Natives, many of whom are sadly under-educated in the reality of being Indian. There are also a number of people who are truly interested in educating themselves and others. If you're in America, a local powwow is a good place to start. A Dakota woman I know went to England and found a sub-culture of historical recreationists doing Native American culture, dance, regalia (clothing) that was better than many real Indians!
The descriptions of the Thanksgiving party are drawn from my own experiences at similar local parties, and powwows.

Elvish Bedlam: And take the Elf with you. Last time I left him alone, he popped all the microwave popcorn at once, just to see how it worked." An ode to Korendil Knight of Elfhame Sundescending Magus Minor and Child of Dannan (from Mercedes Lackey and Ellen Guon's excellent Elf-fest; Bedlam's Bard, a contemporary fantasy (modern setting) centered around a trio of Rennaissance Faire musicians, it contains a number of Tolkien references).

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Monty Python and the Fellowship of the Ring:
"No, no and no. Say it with me now, the Fellowship Mantra: 'You shall count to nine, nine is the number of your counting. You shall not count to ten, nor to eleven. Nine is the number of the Fellowship.'" (Camilla Sandman, The Official Fanfiction University of Middle-earth, .net possibly the funniest fanfic ever)

For the Birds:

Alas for the wailing of the gulls...
"Mine?"
"Mine? Mine, mine."
"Mine, mine, mine, mine!" the gulls shouted.

Reading LOTR the first time, I reached the scene where Legolas recounts the tale of the Battle of the Ships to Merry and Pippin: he turns and sees the gulls beating up the Anduin, "flying far inland", and tells how the sea-longing struck him on the way to the battle when he heard the cry of the gulls in the dark. "Alas for the wailing of the gulls, for now I shall have no peace under beech or under elm." This scene struck me to the core, and I have never looked at gulls the same way since. I have heard their haunting cries in the dark of the marsh, and always think of Legolas standing, torn between loyalty to his friends, and the insistant call of the Sea.

Then I saw Finding Nemo..."Mine, mine, mine, mine mine, mine, mine!"

I will never look at gulls the same way again...

About those giant sheep-eating parrots in New Zealand: one particular group of (largish) alpine parrots (who live near the snowline) would pick at sheep's backs, eating the fat under the skin. Ranchers eventually went on a vendetta.

The kakapo is the largest parrot ever, nearly flightless, and severely endangered. It's been removed to offshore islands for rehab. An in depth article can be found in Smithsonian Magazine Oct 2002.