[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

I know what you mean. It's the kind of thing that I really want to write about, but seems just beyond my grasp. Still, there can't be complete chaos, or Faery would be unliveable and not only in regard to humans. But cause & effect, immutability of solids (if you take my meaning); these would be up for grabs; transformation would be typical. And words fail to adequately convey my meaning.

I suppose it could be that Faery has different rules, which would seem entirely logical to its inhabitants, but not to humans, just as it may be that it has its own laws & moral codes. Tolkien presents us with a Faery whose rules, laws & morality are the same as our (Christian) ones.

I'm referring to things like 'Geasa' (taboos),

Irish taboo, and inferentially all Celtic taboo, dates back to an unknown pagan antiquity. It is imposed at or before birth, or again during life, usually at some critical period, and when broken brings disaster and death to the breaker. Its whole background appears to rest on a supernatural relationship between divine men and the Otherworld of the Tuatha De Danann; and it is very certain that this ancient relationship survives in the living Fairy-Faith as one between ordinary men and the fairy-world. Therefore, almost all taboos surviving among Celts ought to be interpreted psychologically or even psychically, and not as ordinary social regulationshttp://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt...30.htm#fr_236/

where, for instance in the story of Cuchulain the hero was forbidden to eat the flesh of a dog, & when he is tricked into doing so his fate is sealed - there's no logical reason for that to be a consequence, but once he has eaten it there is no way to avoid his fate. Or we could look to the story of Baldur in Norse Myth - he could only be slain by a spear of misletoe. There are similar things in the Legendarium (Turin, for instance, seems to to have a number of Geasa imposed on him by Morgoth) but nothing like the traditional accounts of Faeries stealing babies & replacing them with changelings, or Selkies leaving their seal skins on the beach & appearing as young women.

Of course Geasa are rules, so maybe I'm now arguing against myself, but what I was referring to was the absence of what we would call 'rules' or 'laws' of nature - like cause & effect, thermodynamics, logical consistency. As I say, Tolkien does have something similar to geasa in Turin's story, but he gives it a 'logical reason - Morgoth's malice - rather than simply having it as a 'given' in his world that heroes have strange fates, that Faeries are an unknown quantity & that Faery is just a place where wierd stuff happens...