LB, no sarcasm here

Adam responded:

No sarcasm intended! (I can see how it might have seemed sarcastic, and I'm sorry for that, but) I only thought, wow, what if it is true, just like in GWOT: that the fairies and fairy world actually didn't =exist= until the year AD 18xx (perhaps they were only fictions until that moment of creation), and the fairies, once in existance (created by the process of endless colonization, or whatever), began sending out their feelers into the Drinkwater family immediately (rather than almost as an afterthought while getting ready for the Big Migration). Thus the date of first contact would be very close to fairy genesis, rather than, you know, centuries of fairy this and that, going on back to whatever year an encyclopedia says fairy tales first started. This would be an interesting twist: instead of the fairies doing nothing for centuries except playing tricks on farmwives and other arcadian drolleries, it would be bam! they hit the ground running. I haven't done that much work on LB; it is a =big= book, after all. I've done a pathetic amount of work on tracing some of the Lewis Carroll bits, including the labored reading of SYLVIE & BRUNO, which was a big fat waste of my life essence. (That particular task begun mainly because people like alga and David Langford mention such things as worthy things that they would like to see, and Lewis Carroll seems to have such a strong presence in the text that it seems rather easy, but JC gets slippery that way. Or then again, maybe I've dug up all there is--that's about as likely, but hardly something to celebrate.) I have notes on the cards, some of the details of the family tree, notes on a timeline of the family, notes on "five states that begin with I," and things like that. =mantis=