Smith of Wootton Major in Middle Earth?

[davem]

Might be worth considering John Crowley's novel Aegypt in this context http://www.pd.org/Perforations/perf21/bess.html

Crowley,.... creates a mythic world in which the popular origin of the Gypsies, not in Egypt but in "Aegypt" is taken to represent the birth of wisdom in a fabled land of the imagination, someplace older than and farther in than the merely literal Egypt.

As Crowley has it in the novel "There is more than one history of the world." There's the 'factual' one we find in the history books, & constructed through historical record & archaeology, but alongside that one (or beneath/underlying it) is another made up of Tradition, folklore/music, myth & folklore. Both are equally 'valid', but valid in different ways, & both serve different purposes. Unfortunately the former has come to dominate (in the past the latter dominated).

Or, once Egypt (as Aegypt) was very much within the realm of Faery, but over time we have removed it. Yet this is what we do - we turn Merlyn's Isle of Grammarye into a realm of brutal warlords vying for power. Interestingly, we do this to both Aegypt & Albion by our desire for Faery - we want Arthur, Merlin & Hermes to be 'real' so we attempt to fit it into our world, our history, yet the only way we can do that is by removing all the magic from it - we draw Arthur into our world, but end up not with the destined King, with his magical blade, his wizard counsellor, Grail, Lady of the Lake & the fabled Isle of Avalon, but with a fifth century warlord absent all magic - we can have King Arthur in our world, all we have to do is sacrifice everything that we found attractive about him.

[littlemanpoet]

Great observations, Puddleglum & davem. Somehow, though, for me (yes, subjectively), before I had ever heard of Tolkien, Lewis, & Nordic or Celtic myth, I had grown disappointed with Greek and Egyptian myth. There was something flat about it, something dead. When I discovered Nordic & Celtic myth, I found Faery. Granted, this is my experience and thus ideosyncratic.

Your suggestions do not seem entirely to account for that - er - quiddity - that is essential Faery as accessed in the North. I'm reaching for something but I don't know what. Perhaps it is that my ancestry is Celtic/Germanic/Northern and thus Greek/Aegyptian could never speak to me. Don't know, it's a guess.

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Your suggestions do not seem entirely to account for that - er - quiddity - that is essential Faery as accessed in the North. I'm reaching for something but I don't know what.

Maybe there is no word or describable quality for it. Maybe it just, well, is.

I suppose that ancient Greeks and Egyptians, as known to us (and as davem pointed out, it is only half of what they probably were), are too "mathimatical" and "scientific" for Faerie. In Faerie, things happen more spontaneously, or maybe more because they just need to happen, and not because something made them happen. I don't know.

I don't think I ever thought of any ancient civilizations - or "lack of such" - as Faerie. I think my Faerie is in books. Non-scientific books.

[mark12_30]

When (as a child) I stepped out of the warm dry house, into a compelling spring breeze, onto dewy grass, and fresh air, and had a wild desire rise up inside of me that I could not explain, but was so full of longing I did not know what to do, I wished I knew how to dance... somehow...

in later years, I found things that resonated and I said, "THAT'S IT!" for only a moment. A glimpse. And those things were varied, like The Highland Fling, or a wild reel, or a song from the Highlands, or a far-off glimpse of mountains. A glimpse (from the highway) of a green hill, dotted with Cedar trees, reminded me somehow of the Shire, and caught my breath. There was a wildness in it, an untamed... something, pulling me and compelling me; a hope; a glimpse; a scent of beauty. ...The rising sun in the woods in my own back yard. ...Crocuses in the grass. Hurricane Ridge, Washington State. A moment of three- or four-part harmony.

When I read Tolkien, I found that Frodo lived there. Bilbo walked there. And the golden enchantment flowed, not from them, but from their sudden SEEING of what was already (forever?) there, that they had not seen before. Rivendell enchantments are about Frodo seeing through things and beyond things and into things. Faery doesn't make those things; it just lets you see them.

I think Faery happens when we see the beauties that were there all the time, but we did not see, that God put there for us to find, hoping that in them we would be called to His beauty. It is supernatural, ethereal, and so we explain it in stories, try to replay it somehow, write up the history-- just the facts!-- and then we wonder where the wonder went. Like davem's Aurthur... robbed of his mystery, what's the point?

Death, embalming, fascination with burial, coarse humanity, dry desert, vain imaginations, self-serving aspirations, power trips, and the fantastic quibbling of empowered arrogance has very rarely (perhaps never) escorted me into a profound sense of invisible beauty made visible.

(EDIT: Egypt isn't Faerie for me, any more than Numenor is Faerie. In fact, Tolkien used it as a direct contrast. And I think he was right.)

Go back to Lorien, and slowly reread Cerin Amroth, and touch the trees with Frodo. Then, early when the air is fresh, go take a good look at a tree you see every day. Was the tree somehow changed? Did you see something in it you never quite noticed before?

I agree with lmp. It's different near the Shire.

[littlemanpoet]

Wow, Helen. Wow.

That helps me understand why Japanese folk tales and Native American stories can do it for me, too.

And white billowing clouds blown by a north wind in an otherwise blue sky.

And Orion in August just before dawn.

[mark12_30]

Menelvagor of the shining belt. Yes. I can hear you singing...

My husband and I were looking at it two nights ago. He was struck by it, too.

Since it's about glimpses of eternal Beauty, and tasting God's life, that's why I think cultures of death don't fit. So while Ireland has plenty of Faerie, I wouldn't look for Faerie in a typical Irish wake. Yet, for MacDonald, a Scot who sees death in a very different way, death is drenched in Faerie because Death is the doorway to life eternal:

"You have tasted of death now," said the old man. "Is it good?"

"It is good," said Mossy. "It is better than life."

"No," said the old man: "it is only more life.--Your feet will make no holes in the water now."

Wilder and wilder.

Edit: I have to add.... and for C. S. Lewis-- doesn't The Last Battle, when they all go through the door, and then say farewell to Narnia, and then begin to explore where they are, and slowly begin to realize Where They Are-- doesn't your heart just break? ...Wilder and wilder.

"More life."

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by mark12_30

I think Faery happens when we see the beauties that were there all the time, but we did not see, that God put there for us to find, hoping that in them we would be called to His beauty.

Exactly. Like Frodo in the scene on Cerin Amroth you mentioned:

He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.

(Btw isn't it marvellous how Tolkien makes us share Frodo's experience here and, just by naming the colours, evokes them before our inner eye in newborn splendour?)
And I have to echo LMP's Wow!. That whole post was mindblowing.

Originally Posted by mark12_30

Since it's about glimpses of eternal Beauty, and tasting God's life, that's why I think cultures of death don't fit. So while Ireland has plenty of Faerie, I wouldn't look for Faerie in a typical Irish wake. Yet, for MacDonald, a Scot who sees death in a very different way, death is drenched in Faerie because Death is the doorway to life eternal

And isn't Faerie somehow intimately related to Death? At least in some versions of folk belief the fairies are the Dead, or the dead go to live with the fairies, and the Otherworld is also the Underworld (cf Evans-Wentz's The fairy-faith in Celtic countries). In Welsh mythology, Gwyn ap Nudd is king of the Fair Folk and the gatherer of dead souls.

I think the difference with Egypt and Greece is that they kept the world of the Dead safely separated from the world of the Living - at least the Egyptians did, with their pyramids and embalming culture; and Odysseus had to find the entrance to the underworld and make the right offering to conjure up the spirit of Teiresias - , whereas in the North and Northwest the border between the two worlds seems to be thinner, permitting crossovers in both directions.

Not sure how (if at all) this is relevant to Smith - I have to admit it's thirty years since I read it, and my memory's a bit hazy. Time for a reread.

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

Great observations, Puddleglum & davem. Somehow, though, for me (yes, subjectively), before I had ever heard of Tolkien, Lewis, & Nordic or Celtic myth, I had grown disappointed with Greek and Egyptian myth. There was something flat about it, something dead. When I discovered Nordic & Celtic myth, I found Faery. Granted, this is my experience and thus ideosyncratic.

Your suggestions do not seem entirely to account for that - er - quiddity - that is essential Faery as accessed in the North. I'm reaching for something but I don't know what. Perhaps it is that my ancestry is Celtic/Germanic/Northern and thus Greek/Aegyptian could never speak to me. Don't know, it's a guess.

I think that's a common perception, Elempi.

This is a viewpoint that I share in the book I am writing currently. Egypt and Greece eventually viewed their pantheons with skepticism, if not outright disdain (this cynicism bordering on atheism occuring before the birth of Christ). The traditions faded and their religious rites became ceremonial (and all such tradition was eradicated eventually by Islam and Byzantine Christianity).

However, in the areas where the Celtic tribes remained strong (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany), the rural folk kept their folkloric traditions well past the Enlightenment and the beginning of the Industrial Age. Even the Norse peoples maintained a vestige of their traditions into the Christian Era in Europe, where historical records indicate a reversion to the Old Religion even after conversion to Catholicism, or a duality of Odinic and Christian symbols and rites simultaneously.

It is this immediacy, the nearness in time to an older tradition, that draws us closer to the Faery tradition of the Celts and Norse. This has been further conditioned by the continued retelling and popularity of the Arthurian Cycle, from Chretien de Troyes, Eschenbach and Malory up to T.H. White and Mary Stewart, as well as 18th century Irish folklorists along with authors and poets of the Irish Renaissance (Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge, Crofton Croker, W.B. Yeats. etc.).