The River Has Roots

In rural England, the River Liss runs south from “its secret sources in Arcadia” in the north (1). The river carries the magic of grammar in its water, turning the wilderness around it strange. Transformed by the conjugation of grammar, the rocks become jewels and the flowers bloom out of season, mixing time and space in unpredictable ways.

However, as the river continues south, it meets two enormous willow trees that stand on either bank. Willow trees are “great grammarians,” taking what the river conjugates and transforms and “translat[ing] its grammar into their growth” (2). These two enormous willow trees that stretch across the river are the Professors. The willows remind people of “something or someone [they’ve] lost” (3). As the river passes into a long procession of willows, it grows slow and steady so that by the time it reaches the town of Thistleford, it is “quite tame.”

The Hawthorn family owns the land and willows along the River Liss, from Thistleford to the region just past the Professors, called the Modal Lands. The Modal Lands are a shifting, in-between space separating the human lands from Arcadia, the land of Faerie (also called Antiquity).