On Names

For an elusive place that cannot be geographically assigned to any particular location on a map of this world, Faerie is particularly well-known. All peoples have a word for this Otherworld in their native tongue. In some lands it has been associated more with a place one may dwell in the afterlife, while, in other lands, it is most definitely a place for the living, simply a name for any shifting part of a forest where one becomes lost and encounters strange creatures. The inhabitants of Faerie, the fey as they are called, also take many shapes, depending upon the land from whence the report emerges. From these accounts, it is said that Faerie is all at once home to a race of diminutive men who prefer to hide from the gaze of mortals, and to fair maidens who wander the woods in isolation and tempt men to their doom, and to pagan gods demoted and banished from civilized lands by the persuasive might of missionaries, and lastly to beasts of myth who find in Faerie a final refuge from extinction. In this book, we shall call this land Faerie, after one species of creature who dwells within and who has caught the imagination of many of us confined to this more physics-based reality.