About the Author and this Site
This site is a personal recreation, mainly. I came up with an idea and it seemed like more than an idea, it seemed to be a kind of playground where I could indulge my interests in both history and fantasy. Think of it as literary re-creationism, or a kind of online SCA exercise. While I try to be creative, I try hard not to be anachronistic.
Put more plainly, this site consists of various stories told about a fictional past in which many of the names and places and events are real but in which goblins and elves and magic are also real. Some of the entries are presented as works of literary fiction whereas others are presented as scholarly history or whatever literary genre I care to indulge in. I've worked pictures into this fantasy and I hope one day to include audio as well.
As for myself, I'm a historian who wandered off the path and spent many years in the Mirkwood of computers, both as a PC support tech and as a university webmaster. Over those years I continued to teach history, though not to research and publish professionally, and have kept up a good familiarity in particular with the centuries between about 1100 and 1700. My computer "day job" has given me familiarity with Photoshop, HTML and the like, so a site like this was a natural, once I had the core idea.
Although this is a personal recreation, it's published on the Net because I do hope others read it and find it amusing and interesting. If you have thoughts on AltEarth or even contributions (literary, not monetary!), feel free to send them to me. I'm at skip period knox at the lovely gmail, and if a spambot can scrape that then welcome to it.