Date: Tue, 7 May 2002 23:35:04 +0000 (GMT)
From: Josh Geller 
Subject: Re: (urth) Major new Wolfe story online



On Tue, 7 May 2002, Matthew Davis wrote:
> "Adam Stephanides"  writes:

> > So Wolfe is a Kai Lung fan.  I had no idea.

?

> > I've seen the "princess on a glass mountain" motif twice before: in a
> > novel called THE GLASS MOUNTAIN by Leonard Wolf, which I haven't read,
> > and in a Fractured Fairy Tale (in which the rescuer was a giant frog).
> > Given this, I'd expect that it occurs in some genuine fairy tale or
> > medieval romance,
> > but nothing comes to mind.

> The "princess and the glass hill" by andrew lang
> http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=LanBlue.sgm&images=image
> s/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=33&division=div1

> which I found by this nifty index to Lang's fairy tales
> http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~emily/Docs/lang.html#p

> But does the title allude to anything? One of the hobbits went under the
> false name "Mr Underhill" but nothing else leaps to mind.

'Under Hill' is an old. old euphemism for what's often called 'Faerie'
('faerie' is also a euphemism; this is the land of the Dead we are
talking about (see my post with the subject 'Mound Dwellers')).

The main fairy in John Crowley's "Little, Big" is called Mrs. Underhill.














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