What I wanted to name this blog

Dweoming Well was not the first choice for my book imprint or blog name. My first choice was some version of Green Sun. But that was nixed by an Israeli one-man band that does “relaxing chillout music”. (If I were a superhero, I would make my arch nemesis an Israeli one-man band, and my sole weakness relaxing chillout music.)

Why Green Sun? If you're a Tolkien fan, you may already know.

The term “green sun” represents a very powerful idea. An idea expressed by a term Tolkien coined: sub-creation. The rest of us know it simply as fiction. But big fiction. Universe-conjuring fiction.

Here is Tolkien in his essay On Fairy Stories defending fantasy from the charge of childish escapism:

“The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things ..., but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. … We may put a deadly green upon a man's face and produce a horror; we may make the rare and terrible blue moon to shine; or we may cause woods to spring with silver leaves and rams to wear fleeces of gold, and put hot fire into the belly of the cold worm. But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.”

Then the idea that captured me:

“Anyone inheriting the fantastic device of human language can say the green sun.”

Green is a concept drawn from the real world. So too is Sun. But put them together and you have the seed of an entire universe distinct from ours--a universe where the laws of physics (if there be any) cause star-fire to flame green, and… Cool, huh?

He goes on to say that fantasy renews us, as it tends to look again with fresh eyes at the real. That we should “meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like the ancient shepherds, sheep, and dogs, and horses—and wolves. This recovery fairy-stories help us to make. In that sense only a taste for them may make us, or keep us, childish.”

So what on earth is a Dweoming Well? I'll get to that.