Christmas 2017

I bought this year's Christmas tree from Bohetherick Farm: I think it's a Nordmann fir: a very nice compact tree with a good shape to the trunk.  I had to squelch through the mud to find it and Rosie had to endure an excessively friendly springer spaniel.  It's almost exactly the right height without having to chop any bits off too, though that does mean that I don't have a chunk of the trunk to carve with.   I've sort of lost track of the number of carvings made from previous trees now, but there are quite a lot of them.   I have taken a lower branch off to make the 2017 carving, but haven't started work on it yet.

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What else has happened?  Oh yes, we went to see The Last Jedi, and it was surprisingly good.  I wasn't expecting much to be honest, but it had a lot of plot and felt like it was properly part of the original movie series somehow.

A rather belated Merry Christmas and I hope you all have a Happy New Year!

Maps of Beleriand

My admiration for Tolkien's map-making skills has been greatly enhanced by my own efforts to make maps of Beleriand.  It's way harder than it looks!

I've made two attempts now: This is the first one, for chapter 8 of Quenta Narquelion (my Ghost Feanor story)


And this is a War of Wrath map  for Chapter 12: In Armour of the Elder Days.


(Yes, I know I've missed the 'g' in Angband!  I can't see a non-obvious way to fix it and I can't bear to re-draw it, so it's staying like that.  Digital mapmaking would be SO much easier.)