NEFBETH

(the forward is aft now)

For this bit of fanfic I've borrowed two characters and a bit of real estate from JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth. I promise to put them back in one piece.

We meet "a strange elf clad in green and brown" about halfway through the Fellowship of the Ring, we muck about in his home halls with Bilbo & Co. in the Hobbit, but (unless he was the Chief of Guards who drank too much wine and fell asleep, allowing a certain Hobbit and thirteen Dwarves to escape) we know nothing about his life before that journey with the Nine Walkers. I thought it would be fun to look at one small episode when the mighty trees of Mirkwood were still older than he.

I fell in love with Legolas when Orlando Bloom was still in diapers (I read LOTR first back in 1978), I love his performance in the movie, but this tale has its roots in the book.

I have named two cats, two horses, innumerable D&D characters, many illustrations, a truck, two vans, one kayak and two kayak paddles in Elvish. I am however, as linguistically impaired as most Americans. The Elvish (mostly Sindarin) here-in is based as much as possible on the work of The Master Himself (as put forth in LOTR etc,) and on other linguists' interpretations of that work ( is wonderful).

The author is a serious student of Tolkien's works and...ok, well not really, but I have read farther than the Silmarillion. When not chasing cats off the keyboard, I play with mustangs (equine) enjoy my fur-wheel-drive (random Siberian huskies, bike, rig, and one dogsled), have decorated underwater Christmas trees and carved the Gourd of the Rings underwater too. I paddle lakes, rivers, and mosquito-infested salt marshes in my sea kayak, Mak-eh-nuk's Fin. As a volunteer for a couple of wildlife rehabbers and a county park, I've demonstrated projectile pooping to third graders (with the aid of Thermal, the Wonder Hawk), driven in an airtight van with a vomiting vulture, and illustrated a display; "Soil, It's Not Just Dirt" (ask me about the dancing salamanders). I can occasionally hit the broad side of a stack of haybales with an arrow at twenty paces. Anything else you need to know is at .com.

I do welcome feedback (and try to be nice when asked to do feedback for someone else's work). Now wheretheheck did I put that mithril plate armour...?

Teanna