Author's Notes

       Several things in this story have been influenced by life experiences I've had.

       All have, I think, heard of the eruptions of Mount Saint Helens in Washington some years ago.  We could not see the clouds of ash where we lived, yet they found traces of the ash miles north of us, showing that the south wind that blew on one of the days had carried it high and far.  During one of the eruptions the wind was in the west, and the ash that time was scattered over eastern Washington state, even some into Idaho.  On another day the wind was from the northeast, and the bulk of the ash fell on Vancouver, Washington, and across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon.  The ash fall was so heavy the carburators of many older cars were blocked, and the replacement of air filters was quite heavy in the days following.

       Glassblowers used this ash to create some of the most gorgeous carnival-glass style bowls, vases, and ornaments you can imagine; thus was born the thought of Frodo's gift to Arwen and Aragorn before leaving Gondor.

       Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a great number of brown recluse spiders.  These are usually non-offending creatures, but from time to time they will bite, and the bites have been found to cause a fascinating variety of effects, from necrosis of the tissue surrounding the bite which can lead to death of the skin all over the body as the infection moves out from the bite, to autoimmune system difficulties down the road, serious arthritic symptoms, intestinal disorders, and so on.  The effects of spider and tick bites are now being treated a great deal more seriously than they ever were before in light of the variety of ills with which they have been found to be associated.

       I also admit to having wondered many times just what did happen to Ungoliant.  Cirith Ungol, after all, was named after her.  I was influenced by a fantasy story I once read, I think by Orson Scott Card, which was written as a monologue by a great male spider about the love he held for his even more immense mate, who finally ate him and was grateful for the silence at last.

       The symptoms I've given Frodo are of angina, small and perhaps some more major heart attacks, and congestive heart disease as I've seen in friends and family, and some of the digestive problems I myself have experienced over the years--I do not recommend Irritable Bowel Syndrome, hiatal hernias, or acid reflux disease, or some of the other problems I've had--they aren't a lot of fun.  I've also slipped in some of the problems my husband experienced in his myriad maladies he entertained in his last couple years.  The swiftness with which he could grow weak, then seem to recover I've given to Frodo.  I also believe that Tolkien was describing in Frodo shell shock as he perhaps had known in himself and saw in friends, colleagues, and students and his his companions in the hospitals he stayed in before his release back to his wife after his own World War One experiences.  The condition certainly was rampant in both the United States and England after the Great War, and was described in many books written in the era, including Abraham Merrit's book The Ship of Ishtar.

       We had an antique store for some years, and a bottle collector came to our Victorian-era town to dig up for them.  He found the pit from the site of the out house that once stood on the property where our house stood.  Among the things he found were a number of opium ampules from China.  These small vials were hand blown, then after being filled were sealed with a blob of molten glass placed over the lip of the vial.  The bottle collector found opium vials and often the sealing blobs as well all throughout our town, while others were found by divers off the piers of downtown and in a dump area that was covered by the waters of Puget Sound in a nearby community, and many of them passed through our shop.  Several were found below the foundations of our church as well, which makes us wonder how many sailors found the door under its floor would open for them to find a night's shelter from our area's hallmark rains and drizzles.

       I admit once more that Budgie and Viola Smallfoot and their relationship with Fredegar Bolger were borrowed from Lindelea, and I bless her for her allowing me to use them in my own stories, although their relationship with Frodo and the gender and name of their child are different in my stories than in hers.

       I've visited England many times, and it's fascinating to visit some of the older cities and see the layers to their walls, and to see the soot clinging to walls and buildings decades and often centuries after great fires.  The descriptions of the soot on the walls of Minas Anor that I gave in The King's Commission were based in part on the memories particularly of Coventry, where the effects of the fire bombing by the Nazis can still be seen.

       Some of the dialogue in Grace to Wake came from my previous story Filled with Light as with Water, so if it seems familiar, that is why.  All of my stories so far are tied together in one way or another.

       I also borrowed a bit of dialogue from The Scouring of the Shire in ROTK for use in the chapter Degradation, so it, also ought to feel familiar.

       No, I don't own any of these characters, but I certainly have come to love them in the past almost forty-two years now.