[continued from previous message]   
      
   Thomas Covenant” series, for the “The Atlas of the Land,” published in   
   1985.   
      
   In an interview, Donaldson recalled Fonstad arriving with “an enormous   
   list of scenes and places” from his books and asking questions about   
   minutiae he’d never considered.   
      
   For TSR Inc., the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game   
   and then-ubiquitous tie-in novels, Fonstad released “Atlas of the   
   Dragonlance World” (1987) and “The Forgotten Realms Atlas” (1990), both   
   of   
   which are sought-after collectibles still used as reference material by   
   artists working for the franchise.   
      
   “Her work is one of those rare occasions when fantasy maps manage to get   
   closer to ‘real cartography,’” Francesca Baerald, a contemporary Dungeons   
   & Dragons map artist, wrote in an email. “The scientific approach she   
   followed and her care for each small detail is something incredible.”   
      
   Her atlases earned Fonstad renown among fantasy readers, but only modest   
   income, which she supplemented by teaching geography part time for the   
   University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and by moonlighting as a physical   
   therapist. In the 1990s, Fonstad made occasional maps for TSR and the City   
   of Oshkosh, but she devoted more time to board and civic work, including a   
   term on the Oshkosh City Council.   
      
   She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1998 and underwent nearly seven   
   years of treatment, remission and recurrence. During that time, she   
   started mapping C.S. Lewis’s “Chronicles of Narnia,” but the Lewis estate   
   ultimately withheld permission for an atlas.   
      
   Fonstad died of complications of breast cancer on March 11, 2005, at her   
   home in Oshkosh. She was 59.   
      
   For all her devotion to fantasy worlds, Fonstad was bemused by the rise of   
   fan culture. She rarely accepted invites to conventions or conferences,   
   claiming she was too thin-skinned to field criticism. But her reluctance   
   softened near the end of her life, as Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”   
   film trilogy made the characters Frodo and Bilbo Baggins household names.   
      
   In 2004, at a conference in Atlanta, she met Alan Lee, the films’ Oscar-   
   winning conceptual designer, who mentioned that her atlas had been a vital   
   resource for his team.   
      
   “Nothing could have made my mother happier in the last few months of her   
   life,” her son, Mark Fonstad, an associate professor of geography at the   
   University of Oregon, said in an interview. “She very much enjoyed those   
   movies, even though she was among the 1 percent of people who could have   
   nitpicked every difference from the books.”   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)