The area where they overlap is the "Underworld", or Elphame. The realm where there is some semblance of this world, either in geological features, structures, or perception of the physical, while still being paired with imagery of the spirit realm.
Myself, I also count the borders. The Hedge is the border. In the illustration, it is the black line that surrounds each circle.
It was impressed upon me that borders are areas that simultaneously exist and don't exist. While you generally think of a wall as a two dimensional surface, an entire ecosystem can thrive between two bits of drywall. Such is the Hedge, for me at least. Just as it can be a boundary marker, so can it be a strangely dappled world where things live and thrive.
One author (oddly enough, an author of fanfiction) described something like this as an interstitial dimension. Depending on where, and how, the border is approached, it can be a very different experience.
In addition, consider that the two circles may not be the only ones. Multiple spheres and worlds can just as easily be chained along existence (one upon the other) meaning that the borders of multiple worlds overlap.
Some plants I speak to beneath "our" Hedge. In this border, everything is very much like our world, only a bit louder, so to speak. Others, I deal with beneath the Hedge beyond the Underworld, but only the plants that I trust. The images we deal with, even in the Underworld are nothing compared to how they appear beneath that hedge. Or beneath the hedge where the Underworld meets with something far more distant.
This reminds me of the concept of the fairy road. I came across this first in Arthur Machen and then saw it expanded upon in the novel "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell." You probably have heard of these things, but for those who have not, the fairy road is both a sort of physical depression or line in the ground and a path traveled in the other world by other beings (and sometimes by humans who have to do with them) and actually a sort of door to that world (and to this world).
ReplyDeleteI have found that some of the most interesting magical stuff I have come across has been in fiction, so it isn't strange that a fanfic writer could come up with a good magical concept. It also fits with the concept of borders in the Romanticism of literary history. The Romantics considered borders and boundaries to be moments of transition (dusk being the example usually given). But even in architecture (the newly built "ruin," for instance), they prized that rubbing away of definiteness.
Anyway, you got me thinking.:)