Dreaming, you fall into being
Tonight we made baked beans with cornbread for dinner. I really love this skillet.
I have never done anything with it myself and nothing ever occurs to me to, but the old association of fairies with the dead is an important piece of the folklore to me. It's the crux of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926); it never fell entirely out of the literature, but I think of it as having fallen out of fashion over the twentieth century until Susanna Clarke re-popularized it with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004); I realized while describing a scene to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch that it's present in Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). The ships of cloud sailing into the Valley carry the dead for whom the door of crystal at the highest, coldest peak of the world opens in a blaze like the sun and moon and trumpets as it never does for anything still of the mortal world and when the door is closed again, its light drains away like sunset among the precipices of ice. When some of the human characters descend in turn into the sea in search of another who has gone down to the other crystal door, the one at the bottom of the great waters that pour forever from the stars into the abyss, they do so in a shell of mother-of-pearl which was once a sail fallen like a petal from the last of the cloud-ships as it drifts past into the stars. I should be allergic to this book beyond the beauty of its imagination, but I have never hurt myself on its Christianity, which I can't say of C.S. Lewis. rushthatspeaks once accurately summarized the Valley as "theologically located on the outskirts of Heaven, but . . . metaphysically in the land of Faerie." Of course the dead pass through it. I had just forgotten that they do until I was telling someone else about it.
We watched Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960) after dinner, with milkshakes and a movie cat. I am starting to dislike the summaries on Criterion as much as the ones on TCM. Whatever the original novel was like, it is a movie about different ideas of home, including other people. In any case, it went with the mysteriously Australian ginger beer we found in the refrigerator.
I am still crushingly tired and would be fine with not being so, thanks, any time now.selkie sent me a good article about the delivery of a letter.
I have never done anything with it myself and nothing ever occurs to me to, but the old association of fairies with the dead is an important piece of the folklore to me. It's the crux of Hope Mirrlees' Lud-in-the-Mist (1926); it never fell entirely out of the literature, but I think of it as having fallen out of fashion over the twentieth century until Susanna Clarke re-popularized it with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004); I realized while describing a scene to
spatch that it's present in Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951). The ships of cloud sailing into the Valley carry the dead for whom the door of crystal at the highest, coldest peak of the world opens in a blaze like the sun and moon and trumpets as it never does for anything still of the mortal world and when the door is closed again, its light drains away like sunset among the precipices of ice. When some of the human characters descend in turn into the sea in search of another who has gone down to the other crystal door, the one at the bottom of the great waters that pour forever from the stars into the abyss, they do so in a shell of mother-of-pearl which was once a sail fallen like a petal from the last of the cloud-ships as it drifts past into the stars. I should be allergic to this book beyond the beauty of its imagination, but I have never hurt myself on its Christianity, which I can't say of C.S. Lewis. rushthatspeaks once accurately summarized the Valley as "theologically located on the outskirts of Heaven, but . . . metaphysically in the land of Faerie." Of course the dead pass through it. I had just forgotten that they do until I was telling someone else about it.We watched Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960) after dinner, with milkshakes and a movie cat. I am starting to dislike the summaries on Criterion as much as the ones on TCM. Whatever the original novel was like, it is a movie about different ideas of home, including other people. In any case, it went with the mysteriously Australian ginger beer we found in the refrigerator.
I am still crushingly tired and would be fine with not being so, thanks, any time now.
selkie sent me a good article about the delivery of a letter.
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The fact that the other door is under the sea reminds me of Jean Ritchie's singing of "The House Carpenter":
What hills, what hills down in yonder sea
What hills as black as coal
Oh, those be the hills of hell my dear
Where we must surely go
--not the black hills part (I like the image of the waters eternally pouring into the abyss a lot better), but just the fact of being under the sea.
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The whole book is full of things like that! And it is a Christian book, all of Goudge's are, she was seriously and consciously Anglican and in some of her books I find it a barrier to entry (not in the sense of the books being unfriendly to me, just in the sense of them being incomprehensible), but it's also an intensely personal book of all the mythologies she put into it, Christianity included, and there is nothing programmatic about its outskirts of Heaven any more than her ideas of Aquarius or Vulcan or snails.
--not the black hills part (I like the image of the waters eternally pouring into the abyss a lot better), but just the fact of being under the sea.
The Valley of Song has a wonderful undersea. It makes the ten-year-old protagonist a little uneasy with its unearthliness, but I always just found it beautiful. There is a mer-child named Miranda whose hair is soft green tentacles as of an anemone.
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Beautiful.
I ordered the reprint.
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I had no idea!
I wonder which illustrations, if any, the new edition has.
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I meant to say GGB Publishers, not Press.
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I can't see that at all, so thanks. That makes it likely to be a facsimile of the edition I have. (There's one illustrated by Richard Floethe, too.)
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Ah! That makes sense.
Is it a good introduction?
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We were trying to figure out last night if we could make a quiche in a skillet.
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I grew up reading the copy in the Cambridge Public Library, which was for years the only copy I had ever seen, and I really love it. It is full of shipbuilding and the living signs of the zodiac. Its deep sea is deeply strange. Every now and then its reinvention of Fairy does edge toward the twee, but then you get something like the cloud-ships or the Minstrel Swan or the adults around whom the child protagonist has spent all her life turning out to be as real and complicated people as she is herself and I can forgive a name like "Flutterloves."
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I've never read The Snow Spider, but your description of that scene makes me want to. Nimmo is certainly of an age to have encountered Elizabeth Goudge when her books were easier to come by.
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I listened to the audiobook of The Snow Spider when I was about seven, I think, so I'll never be in any position to judge its quality. It burned into my brain when my brain was still deciding how it wanted to work. Also watched the dramatization which had Sian Phillips playing the protagonist's Nain.