Smith of Wootton Major in Middle Earth?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by lmp

Same author; different technique? I suppose so, but I doubt that technique is at the heart of it.

It could have something to do with it. I've been thinking how different the worlds of Smith and LotR etc are. To get to Middle Earth or Valinor all we have to do is pick up the books and we are there straight away, there is in fact a Straight Path for us. But to get to Smith's Faery we have to first travel through his world. And that in itself is a world unlike our own where bakers make fabulous cakes for the luckiest of the children at the party. Smith's Faery is harder to get to and harder to hold on to because it is one step removed from us.

That's like our dreams, too. To get to them we have to step into sleep, another world away from our conscious thoughts. Sometimes this is a good thing when we have bad dreams, but it can leave us feeling like we can't quite touch something wonderful when we have vivid dreams of places we have never been to or see people we will never talk to or meet.

[littlemanpoet]

Don't know if either of you have read Flieger's A Question of Time, but in that work she devotes a great deal of time examining Tolkien's use of dreams in his stories. They seem to be of two kinds: there are 'symbolic' dreams - like Sam's in the 'Crossroads' chapter we've recently been discussing, & then there are dreams in which the dreamer enters another 'deeper' kind of reality - like Frodo's dream in the House of Bombadil, or Merry's dream in the Barrow. The first kind are 'subjective', what Jung would call 'little' dreams, the others are 'objective', 'big' dreams.

You may be interested, davem, that this thread has been experimenting with precisely the objective, big dreams. An example would be posts # 689 & 690. Really, they are just idle attempts, but you may find them mildly worth the distraction.

Lalwendë, you are pointing, I think, to the technique that I call "transitional fantasy"; i.e., starting in our world and moving to Faerie. Except that you're saying that the "our world" Tolkien describes is already at one remove. The remove, which I think is late medieval European life, is nevertheless somehow "home". You say that stepping into dream is a world away from our conscious thoughts. I submit to you that our conscious thoughts are not true "home". When we move into sleep, we are more in touch with our real selves than when wakeful; that's how it feels to me when reading Smith; thus, when we move with Smith into Faerie, it feels just, barely just, out of reach. As if, could I just find a star somehow, some way, I could get there.