Looking through my Pinterest feed for Tolkien images, I found this cover for a French edition of The Hobbit. It looked awfully familiar to me. Then I figured out where I had seen it before. Now, I wish the artist had been just a little more creative and not cribbed what is obvious, particularly as …
This beautiful cover, reminiscent of Chinese jade carvings, was part of a competition by WenJing Publishing to release the trilogy for an Asian market. I like it when the books receive artistic interpretations of the country they are released in.
There he lay, a vast red-golden dragon, fast asleep; a thrumming came from his jaws and nostrils, and wisps of smoke, but his fires were low in slumber. Beneath him, under all his limbs and his huge coiled tail, and about him on all sides stretching away across the unseen floors, lay countless piles of …
German edition This German cover of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit changes the title slightly to “The Little Hobbit” and pairs a bloated, toadlike, crazy-eyed Smaug with a tap-dancing Hobbit waving a top hat. The whole is enclosed in a trompe l’oeil frame with a spider crawling on the bottom, which alludes to the dwarves’ misadventures …
Sauron’s forces on the move It’s Tolkien Month here on my website! A little odd considering I have been writing mostly erotica and horror, but my roots are in SF and Fantasy. Reading E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, a progenitor of Tolkien’s and a probable influence, has made me appreciate the good professor even more. …
You don’t want to play with these ladies. They always get their way in the end. Art by Vergvoktre
No other creature is as evocative of the contemporary fantasy genre as the dragon. They combine snakes, lizards, dinosaurs, large mammalian predators, and human intellects into one massive, armored, fire-breathing package. (Their drives, however, are their own.) The current version of the dragon dates from within the last 100 years. Tolkien gave us a deadly …
Continuing on my theme of randomly-generated magic spells items, let’s look at wizards and magic users in fantasy fiction. There are many memorable characters that come to mind, and if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s an unforgettable name. For example, Gandalf the Gray. Short and to the point; and more importantly, much …
Because it was just too much damn fun to come up with these. Another selection of free spells to add to your campaign, story, novel, game, comic, whatever. Chantsuma’s Wondrous Cacophony: Creates a mosaic of noise around the target, a mix of music, voices, animal cries, thunder, chants, roaring waves, bird calls, crashing objects, etc. …