Their views and descriptions are very different. Terry Pratchett is all negative while L. M. Montgomery is all positive.
Terry Pratchett describes a kind of hell universe
that people are relieved to escape from while L. M. Montgomery describes a
heavenly paradise that produces an unbearable sense of loss in people who have
been banished from it forever.
Terry Pratchett’s Fairyland is an actual
world than can be visited by a few select people while L. M. Montgomery’s,
although not open to most people, is an inner world.
Terry Pratchett’s Fairyland drains real
worlds and has nothing to give while L. M. Montgomery’s world is a wellspring
of wonders that can be brought out into our world and shared.
L. M. Montgomery’s description of Fairyland
leaves out something important that Terry Pratchett highlights.
Terry Pratchett’s negative description
Terry Pratchetts’s Fairyland appears in Lords and Ladies and The Wee Free Men.
Just as he never has a good word to say about his Elves or Fairies and their Queen, he describes their world as parasitic and highly dangerous.
Fairyland is a place of dreams, illusions and
nightmares. In the parts ruled by the Queen, it is eternal winter.
The Elves and their world are all take and no
give - at least they cannot give or produce anything worth having. They steal
people, produce and other items when their world meets a weak point in a real
world.
Only a few humans such as witches and
creatures such as the Nac Mac Feegle are able to choose to visit the perilous
realm. It is no great loss to the others; they are better off not knowing about
it. People and animals who stray in by accident are usually destroyed.
L. M. Montgomery’s positive description
L. M. Montgomery has a more traditional
approach to Fairyland. She sees it as a kind of paradise and a source of
artistic inspiration:
“Well, the Story Girl was right. There is such a place as fairyland—but only children can find the way to it. And they do not know that it is fairyland until they have grown so old that they forget the way. One bitter day, when they seek it and cannot find it, they realize what they have lost; and that is the tragedy of life. On that day the gates of Eden are shut behind them and the age of gold is over. Henceforth they must dwell in the common light of common day.
Only a few, who remain children at heart, can ever find that fair, lost path again; and blessed are they above mortals. They, and only they, can bring us tidings from that dear country where we once sojourned and from which we must evermore be exiles. The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.”
-From The Story Girl
I see what she is getting at, but she mentions only two groups of people: the favoured few who are free to return and the miserable masses who are permanently exiled from their place of origin.
In addition to the unfortunates who can never
go back and the golden, privileged artists who visit the source from time to
time and bring back treasures to share with the others, there are the people
who never really leave Fairyland.
Terry Pratchett says that such people will never grow up. They have no sense of time passing. They live in a dream world. His character Rob Anyone, one of the Nac Mac Feegle people, says this:
“Live in dreams for too long and ye go mad—ye can never wake up prop’ly, ye can never get the hang o’ reality again.”
People who never leave Fairyland
Assuming that L. M. Montgomery is right about
artists staying children at heart, there is a great difference between being
childlike and being childish.
People who retain their sense of wonder and have the ability to return to the magical place after moving on to the adult world are indeed fortunate, but anyone who does not move on seems in some ways doomed.
Although such people may achieve great fame and fortune with their fairyland-inspired creations, they may make a mess of other aspects of their lives because they lack adult coping abilities.
For such people, the golden Eden of L. M.
Montgomery’s Fairyland may transform into the bleak and lethal domain of Terry
Pratchett’s Elves.
