This is something I worked on quite a few years ago, and I’m finally getting around to posting it.

A long time ago I ran across a fan fiction story titled The Black Company in Middle Earth by a user named McJunker. You almost certainly know Middle Earth as the setting for J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but you may not have heard of Glen Cook’s The Black Company novels. That is something you’ll probably want to rectify, as McJunker explains. The Black Company in Middle Earth is a full novel in its own right – if it were to be published as a paperback, it would be close to 200 pages long.

Anyway, I contacted the author because I loved the story. I was working on my copy editing and document formatting skills at the time because I was getting ready to have a paper published in a professional journal. I asked if I could “publish” his story in a somewhat more polished form, as a PDF. He loved the idea, and off and on over the next year or so I worked on this project. In the meantime the author entered military service, served in Afghanistan and came back home. How time flies…

Anyway, once McJunker returned I showed him the result and he loved it. But I never got around to posting it for some reason. So here it is: The Black Company in Middle Earth (PDF edition). I hope you find it as enjoyable to read as I did. If for some reason you’re prefer reading it online, you can read it here: The Black Company in Middle Earth (HTML edition). I’m partial to the version with my copy edits, but if you want to read the original, feel free to check it out via the link at the top of this post.