Bortbyting: Part 1

“Bortbyting is the Swedish word for Changeling. This new tale takes the old stories of faeries, trolls and changeling babies and turns them on their head. Taking elements from Scandinavian folk tales and Bridge Rhodes’ own mythological inventions, Bortbyting is a quirky little story of the love between parents and children, and embracing the strangeness of your own identity.”

This is the blurb from the back cover of a short book I wrote, and illustrated, way back in March, in the early days of The Pandemic, when lock down and social distancing was fun. I thought I would share it here. Many of the names and creatures are things that are featured in other writing I've been working on. The other writing has a working title of The Eleventh for now (I posted a cover design I did a while back), and I was able to finalize (ha!) a draft over the summer and begin work on its sequel, which I am now in the process of editing and cleaning up. I have some background characters that share names with the characters in this story, though I don't expect anyone but me will ever make that connection. 

Bortbyting was exported originally as a PDF, but as this blog format does not know what to do with PDF’s, I’ve exported them again, this time to JPEG. As is always the case, some quality has been lost, but I’ll hope you’ll enjoy this cute little story about Trolls and Alfar, and Belonging as much as I enjoyed making it. 

The tale continues in Part 2!

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.” J. R. R. Tolkien