[mark12_30]

Maybe.

Smith of Wootton Major seems to me to be one of Tolkien's more dreamlike works; not that it is meant to all signify "And he woke up and lo it was just a dream"-- but Tolkien put a lot of stock in dreams, and wrote about them within his works as well as wrote the works because of the dreams he himself had (Alkallabeth.)

To me the dreamlike quality of Smith is akin to the dreamlike quality of Frodo's Dreme in Adventures of Tom Bombadil, or (in a less serious vein) the dreamlike quality of 'The Man In The Moon Came Down Too Soon'. They are tales about wanderers feeling very much out of their element, very much vulnerable, and actually in some danger (the danger varies from piece to piece.) But Smith's vision (did he really 'see' them? Was it a dream, a vision, or outside of time, or ...) ... Smith's vision of the "Eleven men" (sic) reminds me of Frodo's Dreme and of The Man In The Moon much more than it reminds me of the Sil, for example.

From the LOTR and the Sil and Tolkien's later works, Valinor is no dream; it has soil, trees, shores, sand, feasts. Reading about it feels very real and solid and tangible. But Smith's Faery is not; it is shifting, ethereal, dreamlike. So is the land that Frodo nightmares his way through. And The Man In The Moon's sojourn among men is humorously nightmarish too.

How would I compare Smith's Faerie to Valinor-- Not to the 'real thing'. I would compare it to Frodo's dreams of Valinor (in Tom Bombadil's house, and other of his dreams) , and perhaps to some of his foreshadowings of Valiinor (in Lorien, or in Rivendell); those times when he was enchanted or in a dreamlike state.

And yet (going back to the "eleven men"-- somehow it strikes me that Tolkien would have found that fascinating, and this discussion of the eleven elven mannish men very enjoyable) -- in dreams, if what we dream is true, it is both foggy and distilled, indistinct and purified. Life is too often mundane, so that we forget to touch, or even seek, the truth; but in dreams, we may perchance find it even when we are too distracted to seek it while we are awake. Frodo's dreams are like this. And Smith's venture into Faerie is like that; he leaves the mundane and searches for what is pure and true, even if he can't really bring *it* home with him back to the mundane; still *he* comes back changed.

And so, Novalis: Life is no dream (it is mundane, and we all too rarely touch the truth); but life ought to become less mundane and the truth shine through it more (eucatastrophe, revelation...) and perhaps someday it will.

There's a whole 'nother side of my thoughts: regarding the tower, the sea, and Tolkien's own dream of the drowning of Numenor, and how that all relates to the way he treats dreams, and how dreams so often include the sea; there it is.