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Originally Posted by davem
Verily it is very pretty, but I'm not sure its as pretty in reality as it was 'mysterious' when it was just a name in my head, like Cuivienen....
That's the thing about strange names - Ljosa Water, Cuivienen, the Lonely Mountain, Smaug the Magnificent - every name implies a story - what does 'Ljosa' mean? Why is the mountain 'lonely'? But sometimes the mystery is more attractive than the solution....
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C.S.Lewis "On Stories" agrees:
"To be stories at all they must be series of events: but it must be understood that this series—the
plot, as we call it—is only really a net whereby to catch something else. The real theme may be, and perhaps usually is, something that has no sequence in it, something other than a process and much more like a state or quality. Giantship, otherness, the desolation of space, are examples that have crossed our path [earlier in the essay]. The titles of some stories illustrate the point very well.
The Well at the World's End—can a man write a story to that title? Can he find a series of events following one another in time which will really catch and fix and bring home to us all that we grasp at on merely hearing the six words? Can a man write a story on Atlantis—or is it better to leave the word to work on its own? And I must confess that the net very seldom does succeed in catching the bird."
(For me fairy stories, Howard Pyle, CSL's Narnia and space trilogy, George MacDonald, the Old Testament, retellings of Greek mythology, the Iliad and Odyssey, SciFi including early Heinlein and Poul Anderson, were pre-baptisms for Middle Earth or verce visa. And inoculations against certain other things.)
--Rulavi