When Brian and I were working on The Runes of Elfland, at one point we realized that we'd have to decide on an order for placement of the runes in the book. I remember we took all the original paintings and stood them up on the medieval flagstones of his living room floor. We kept moving them around, swapping one for another, trying to listen to what the people in the paintings, in the stories, had to say to us and to each other. Finally a rhythm began to rise and we stood there in the middle of the circle of the paintings and heard the music of Faerie.

   The first rune tells the story of a child who walks into the woods; the last one tells the story of a child who flies out of the forest to create the dawn. In between we visit worlds of wonder, hope, and deeply rooted feelings, all connected to the most basic forms of nature: water, stone, wood, flesh, and fire.  Each rune is separate and self-contained, but read in order (and perhaps in a single sitting) they can create a rhythmic cycle of coming and going, gain and loss, joy and sorrow, past and future.  You end where you began, and my hope in writing these stories was that a sense of rhythm and return would help make the "Tellings" in The Runes of Elfland deeply comforting.  Not because they reassure us that everything will be OK; sometimes things just aren't, and death and suffering are as integral to the fabric of life as joy and pleasure.  But they do comfort us by showing that we are not alone in time or in space.  Other people have walked our paths before us. Other people have lived our stories.  Other people have felt joy and sorrow. Most importantly, other communities have flourished and faded, and new ones have taken their place. Yes, it's sad that whole peoples have lived and died many times over (the Rune of Arrival that refers to the vanished glory of the Tuatha de Danaan is  one such example), and the emptiness of ruins is almost unbearable, at least to me, not because they are merely empty, but because it's so palpable that they are abandoned, that something was there and is no more. But such lonely places on the land also imbue a feeling of peace when you visit them, a sense of long and deep presence as well as melancholy absence.  Such sadness is softened by the knowledge that those peoples are not completely gone. Their stories echo through our own history; their music pulses under our songs; their wisdom shines from the eyes of our children.