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The Lord of the Rings, Book 2: The Two Towers.

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In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.

I often took more than one photo a day. And when I do not like a setup, I sometimes reject it and do something totally different.

Today, for the first time, I could not decide which one I liked better. So you shall have both (Inside the posting).

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Click the picture for full view.

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Click “more” for background story…

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Today, one of the heroes of my youth (and of my whole life) would have been 100, had she lived to see the day.

Astrid Lindgren.

The woman who invented Pippi Longstocking and Emil, Lotta, Mardie, the Tomten and the children of the noisy village. She won the German Publishing Peace Prize for her creation and engagement, and even that was, imho, not enough honor.

She was an exceptional writer who chose to dedicate all her talent to children. She wrote about a little anarchical rebel girl at a time where children were still beaten at schools. She wrote a whole book about the long voyage after death – a book so revolutionary that the Swedish parliament discussed censoring it. She wrote for children, but she touched all of us to an extent that changed her time, her world, her century.

I read everything she wrote, every single line, and I still do. Her books accompanied me through my childhood, and she has influenced my life almost as much as my parents did. I still read and re-read what she wrote, and some of her books grow with time, and open to a depth of wisdom few people ever achieve.

I won’t recount you her life here, or list the books she wrote, this information can be found everywhere. I cannot find words enough to say how much I loved her, and still love her.

Thank you, thank you so much, Astrid Anna Emilia Lindgren.

“Bring literature to life” – that was a Worth 1000 challenge a while ago.

? I decided to create a scene from Tad William’s amazing series “Otherland”, a scene from the prologue that was deeply intriguing to me.

Here it is:

? From Tad Williams, The Otherworld Series, Vol 1, City Of Golden Shadow.

This is a part of the prologue, where Paul Jonas, the protagonist, enters a castle high above the clouds:

“… so he stepped through.
And found himself in a jungle. But it was not quite that, he realized a moment later. Vegetation grew thickly everywhere, but he could see shadow walls through the looping vines and long leaves, arched windows set hight on those walls looked out on a sky busy with dark storm clouds – quite a different sky than the shield of pure blue he had left beyond the front gate. The jungle was everywhere, but he was still inside, even though the outside was not his own.
[…]
In the silence, a low sound drifted to him.
Someone was weeping.He reached up with his hands and spread the leaves as though they were curtains. Framed in the twining vegetation hung a great bellshaped cage, its slender golden bars so thickly wound with flowering vines it was hard to see what it contained. He moved closer, and something inside the cage moved. Paul stopped short. It was a woman. It was a bird.

It was a woman.

She turned, her wide black eyes wet. A great cloud of dark hair framed her long face and spilled down her back to merge with the purple and iridescent green of her strange costume. But it was no costume. She was clothed in feathers, beneath her long arms pinions lay folded like a paper fan. Wings.”

This is what I envisioned (click the thumb):

I put this picture together from a bunch of sources. If you’re interested, have a look here: