Introduction

No one these days can produce a serious fantasy without being compared to J.R.R. Tolkien.

Comparisons, as they say, are odious, particularly as the basic framework of my fantasy was set before I ever discovered the great man. Indeed, back in the sixties when Joy Chant and I shared a flat in Ilford, we were occasionally heard uttering the lament “Thief, thief Tolkien, we hates him for ever!” Rayner Unwin described the similarities between all our works as being congruent. I had only ever heard this applied to triangles before, but of course, he was right. A quest is a quest, whether you are throwing something away or finding it. Elves, dwarves, wizards, witches, gods, goddesses, are a mutual background from which we all draw. We cannot be more inventive than this because in a fantasy so much is already strange to the reader that they need the comfort of familiarity with this semi mythological background.

I have no pretensions of being a Tolkien. I was thrown out of Latin in the third year and French in the fifth (although when I came to do New Testament Greek in my later years I began to understand how it worked). Politics are my great interest. It was curious to see Warany’s words on controlling the old Quarin Empire, which I had written some twenty five years ago, being equally applicable to the problems in Iraq.

The following pages cover things that those who had already read my manuscript were most interested in, that could not be included in the text or appendix.

Why do I write? I think Terry Pratchett (a gentleman I much admire) hit the nail on the head when he said Writing is the most fun a person can have on their own.

Allusions in the text to works by Homer, Fritz Leiber, Mozart, Henry the Eighth, Gene Rodenberry, Terry Prachett, and Mervyn Peake were intentional. The Beatles one snuck through. It comes of living in London through the sixties.

Ann Walland-Moore