Karen Wynn Fonstad

I met Karen Fonstad in June of 1994 at the Mythic Journeys conference in Atlanta. We'd both been invited because we were in Tolkien Studies, and found ourselves part of an "event" officially listed as Tolkien but really devoted to Alan Lee. While Alan was busily signing books (which went on for most of the afternoon), Karen and I discovered a warm and ready friendship. Over the course of that and subsequent conversations, I persuaded her that our readers would be interested in how she researched and made the maps for The Atlas of Middle-earth. Tolkien Studies is proud to be able to include in this volume the last thing Karen wrote, and on which she worked very hard through her increasingly serious illness in the months before she died. We mourn her passing and we honor her work.