"Andre Norton - Witch World - Lore of the Witch World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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Lore of the Witch World by
Andre Norton

Introduction
by C. J. Cherryh
Writing an introduction for one of Andre Norton's books is rather like
applying gilt to a lily, superfluity to be sure. When I was offered the chance
to do it, I first thought it was impossible and then sat down to try, and
then began to think of thousands of readers who would love to get a line
inтАж to say some things that want saying; things I don't think can be said
too often, ever.

About the Witch World stories: For all of us who've ever created a
world to dream about, for those of us who write and for those who keep
theirs in their hearts...the Witch World stories hold a special place. It's a
land, a world, a place of dark shadows and alien powers and human beings
touched with strangeness, a place where men and women find
extraordinary things within them, and match themselves against an
environment at once marvelously detailed and full of mysteries. The Witch
World is never explored. The smallest valley holds strange happenings and
a past which reaches into things stranger still. The traveler finds the
unexpected, the ancient, the bizarre at every turn. Nature is powerful here
and those who open their hearts to it and to living things find themselves
capable of marvels and involved in an old, old warfare. One meets old
friends here, and hears of them; finds remnants of eldritch powers and
visitants; findsтАж if one looksтАж ancient truths about courage and honesty
and duty that involve the highborn and the ordinary, the young and the
old, humans and the four-footed kind all in one fabric of magic and
mystery.
 The Witch World both lies within a tradition and generates a tradition
of its own. It comes of that mythic tradition out of which comes Homer's
wine-dark and fantastically mapped Mediterranean, peopled with gods
and strange powers, which other heroes went on to sail in their turn,
because it was a Place and a Time which had to exist; and which made
heroes out of men and women of unlikely sort, because they met the
unknown with why? and what if? and why not? The Witch World is one
of those places a reader lives in, and some of those readers have.become
writers, and writers who never quite forget their journey in that
ever-surprising and yet strangely familiar terrain. A lot of us who create
worlds, whether we write them or dream them secretly, owe a great deal to
this place, for its completeness, its way of underlaying daily life with the
fantastical, its way of seeing vast forces implicit in the smallest and