I know you know this...

[thanate]

So I tried to ask this last week and got nothing particularly helpful, which I suspect means that I was asking my question wrong. Here is attempt #2:

Posit: You are going on an exciting expensive vacation through the Lands of Faerie. You've got a fine cabin in a vehicle that is rather like the cross between a cruise ship and one of those giant observation things they drive out to go look at polar bears. What places would you expect to see, or be disappointed if you didn't? All forms of fiction are fair game (anything from traditional folklore to your favorite MMORPG)

Starter list, cadged from Wikipedia and stuff:

Annwyn
Avalon
Tir na nOg
the Seelie/Unseelie courts (ok, they aren't fixed places)

Knockma (fr Martha Wells, The Element of Fire)
Rivendel/Gray Havens/other places with elves (Tolkien)
er, Narnia?
Neverland (Peter Pan)

Sleeping Beauty's castle/Faerie Market (of some sort, lots to choose from)/someone's dwarven mines (any names come to mind? Besides Moria, that is)/etc?

...Stuff like that. Particularly looking for place names, but also what they'd show off ("Over there on your right you'll see the lions, and coming up ahead on the left will be the state line between Utah and Colorado..." that sort of thing)

Comments

[grauwulf.livejournal.com]

I like the norse stuff; Alfheim, Nidavellir, Yggdrasill. The Skidbladnir and Megingjard. the chains that Loki was tied up in. One of Fenri's eye teeth (which would of course turn out to be paste and glamour on closer inspection). That kind of stuff.

I think it would be neat if the tour was of theme park style side shows of the places you mentioned. So you take this tour through faerie and visit all of these places that live in the collective mythology except now they are all tourstey like the house on the rock and so forth. There are dwarfs but they are all junk salesmen along the way to Balinnor. The elves are all emo gift shop clerks, and so forth.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

Oz. Damar. Prydain/Marshes of Moira/wherever the Sons of Don came from. The Ice Queen's castle/realm whatever it was.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

Not faerie exactly, but I'd want to see Brambly Hedge.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Wasn't that on the border between faerie and not? There are all sorts of borders, too... the river with all the blood shed on earth, hedges, mounds/ancient barrows, some invisible line in the woods...

Right! I meant to put Oz and Ev on my original list, but things keep falling out of my head.

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Oh, and which Ice Queen?

I guess I would like to see...

[jurgenzuvols.livejournal.com]

The gates of Arcadia, and Queen Madb, and the sandman faires:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_characters_in_The_Sandman#Cluracan

-Jurgen

[leimon-malakoi.livejournal.com]

the castle in the clouds.
the giant forest where the inhabitants have made houses into the living trees.
underwater kingdoms.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

There's more than one Ice Queen? Fairy tale, two kids, boy is captured and girl rescues?? Possibly I just have a corrupt memory of a particular picture book that got lost and which I still covet.

Aha. I was thinking of The Snow Queen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Snow_Queen

Dang, I miss that book.

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

Google is wonderful. I was thinking of this one illustrated by Errol Le Cain:

http://www.michaelspornanimation.com/splog/?p=1037

[thanate.livejournal.com]

Ok. That's in the Andrew Lang treasury (I think) as well.

There's also the Joan D Vinge novel (which was also "Snow Queen") and a bunch of fiction adaptations. Somebody had a grown-up short story version of it in a recent short story collection that was pretty interesting-- something about endless winter in some Russian city and the girl did things with greenhouses.

[laeticiav.livejournal.com]

Tolkien's Rohan. Actually, I want to live in Rohan (horses, awesome medieval dresses with long drapey sleeves, no cell phone reception, plus in the films it's located in the part of the world where some of my ancestors farmed -- theSouth island of New Zealand). Predictably enough I would also like to find myself tied up in Snape's dungeons.