I'm really jumping out on a limb here, and I'm way out of my depth in scholarly terms, and most assuredly deeply wrong, but if you can take a very big leap of faith with me you might find this of interest. I made a weird mental connection that I had to share and explore. I wish I had time to be a full time anthropologist, mythologist, paleontologist and geologist, but I don't have the time , education or inclination. I am a dabbler of the worst sort and this is the kind of thing that results from having a few tidbits that look like they form a pattern. I can't help but try to force the pieces into a puzzle even if there is no puzzle to begin with. The scientific part of me knows this is all crap, but the fantasist in me finds the thoughtirresistible . Although fantasy withers in the light of explanation and science, I can't help finding the collision of the two way too much fun to ignore and so I construct explanations where none are needed or asked for.

At the Spoutwood Fairie Festival, I got into a brief exchange with Charles Vess and a few others who noted that it seemed that there was this odd alignment of faerie festivals and events running up through Maryland and central Pennsylvania (and Vess noted the magic of southern Virginia). My initial thought was well, these areas were settled by Scots Irish and it made sense that maybe some of their folk traditions still lingered in the collective consciousness of those areas -just a weak guess. But then days later, I made a mental connection in my head that I find really interesting.

Although many cultures have myths and folktales of fae and fae-like creatures, the ones that come to mind as the core of our current collective sense of the fae come from the Celtic lands of England, Ireland and Scotland as well as the Norse strain of Scandinavia with it's menagerie of elves, trolls and giants. It's easy enough to explain cultural cross-pollination in Northern Europe, but what would connect that tradition to the East Coast of the United States other than the migration of Europeans to the region? Could there be a native phenomena at play? If so, what is the connection? While pondering this, I remembered something I had seen on a television program (sorry don't remember which one), that talked about the early continental forms the Earth has gone though.

As you may or may not know, the continents as we know them are adrift upon continental plates, this concept, known as plate tectonics explains earthquakes as the plates grind and slip past each other, the creation of oceans and more germane to my thesis, the rise of mountains. For example, the Himalayas are the result of the collision of the Indian plate and the Asian plate, forcing up the mountains between them in a geological pile-up. This process has gone on and on for billions of years. The shape and arrangement of the continents has changed vastly over the ages. Continents have risen and fallen, combined and separated, oceans have been born and squeezed out of existence. Mountains have been thrown high and weathered away.

Roughly 420-390 million years ago one particular mountain range known as the Caledonian Mountains rose up between the masses that would become North America, the British Isles, Scandanavia and Africa. This range of mountains was later torn asunder by later continental drift, it's remnants are the Appalachian mountains, and the mountains and hills of northern Scotland, Ireland, England, Wales, and west Norway. These hills and mountinas are brothers and sisters in rock, separted by time and geological forces, yet at the core ,they were once one. Could there be some ancient (really ancient -like before dinosaurs ancient) force at work in the roots of these mountains, connecting these areas with the tales and myths of the fae?

I'm not the one to answer it, I just find strange connections, ignore the contradictions and highlight that which makes my case. I may have a fundamentally scientific mind, but I try not to let it spoil my fun.