[Sophia the Thunder Mistress]

This has brought to my mind several things.

When I was a little girl I used to love repeating a word over and over out loud until it became nonsense syllables. If you just mindlessly repeat the word "broom" (that was my favorite), soon it loses it's meaning altogether. By the time I was done, I always thought a broom could be all sorts of fantastic things. Am I making sense? Anyway, the point was, that there's an element of childishness in "mooreeffoc" that is important. Almost every fantasy work/writer gets into that idea, Tolkien touched on it in "The Cottage of Lost Play".

Secondly, it reminded me of the use of the Mirror in Tennyson's Lady of Shallott. She could only see the reflection in the mirror, but she wanted to see the real world. It's rather backward for us, if we take it literally, but (and here I go on a bunny trail again) I think this ties in with Tolkien's entire idea of the eucatastrophe. Both offer glimpses of a wider truth, "mooreeffoc" does it through a radically different look at a familiar thing.

I think when X-Phial talks about Sam's redefinition of the old stories, that moves it even closer to eucatastrophe, because the realization that hits when Sam realizes he's still in one of the old tales, that it's still occurring, is so poigniant.

I've rambled. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img]

Sophia