Can you help me find the right word? Please?

I'm writing a story where a human enters a parallel world filled with elementals, like leprechauns, gnomes, and banshees, and deities, like Shiva and Ganesh. I might throw in a Christian saint or ascended master or two.
Is there a good word I could use to describe them as a collective? Or perhaps a word for this parallel universe?

hehee..since it is a parallel world anyways..and it is filled with elementals and leprechauns, gnomes and banshees and what ever your mind can invent.

Now to find a word for the collective group of elementals and deities.

"host" or "hosts".

a good choice, as it already means something else.

Otherworld is good. Or maybe even make up some word for it.

and is just as "real" there as this world is here. It just has different rules.

Or any of Charles de Lint's work? They each write of similar things. Just came to mind when I read your post. Perhaps there may be some ideas there that would spark you?

ETA: Meant to reply to the OP.

I might read them after I finish my project. I don't want to be influenced by them while I'm still in the early stages.

A Celtic term, I believe, but don't quote me on that.

Still thinking about a collective term for the beings...

This world will have a heavy Celtic influence.

They are the unseen beings we know are there. The Irish just call them the faery folk.

Thanks, Shallah Kali.

familiars, go-betweens, netherworld, perdition, abyss, limbo, phantom, transcendents, surreal,

whatever! :shrug:

I'll look up all of them but transcendents kind of hit me. I might play with it.
Thank you.

to my gal, Cheryl Crise

glad you might consider it.

The human entering their world would be the guest, after all, so wouldn't she adopt their terminology?

I mean, how would we collectively refer to ourselves if we were visited by a leprechaun or a banshee?

I need to differentiate the worlds as the protagonist goes between them. I'm thinking the wee folk call us the big ones or the big folk. As for the gods, they call as mortals.
I don't yet have a word for the world in which we live.

If the story is told from the protagonist's perspective, then it's natural that she'd refer to "the world in which we live" as "home" or "Earth" or the like, assuming that travel between the realms is unusual.

I mean, if you yourself were suddenly dropped into the middle of Tajikistan for a week or two and then somehow managed to get back to your own neighborhood, I think the temptation to refer to the latter as "home" would be very strong. All the more so if you're traveling between dimensions or realms or whatnot, right? Especially considering that ordinary folk don't even bother to refer to our "native dimension" at all...

But if you're telling it from a third person POV, then you're right that you'd need to have a way to distinguish them.


Is it possible that the gnomes et al are aware of "our" world and view it as a subset of their own? I think that would be kind of funny, in fact, because they'd already have some way of referring to Earth, and they certainly wouldn't consider ours to be main street!

Maybe they'd consider their realm to be The World and ours to be Earth?



Fun question in any case! I'm interested to hear what you come up with!

:evilgrin:

That is the basic premise of the story so that idea fits in. Thanks for reading the thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

In Australian Aboriginal mythology, The Dreaming or Altjeringa (also called the Dreamtime) is a sacred 'once upon a time' <1> time out of time in which ancestral Totemic Spirit Beings formed The Creation.

Fred Alan Wolf opens chapter nine of The Dreaming Universe (1994) entitled The Dreamtime with a quote from The Last Wave, a film by Peter Weir:

Aboriginals believe in two forms of time; two parallel streams of activity. One is the daily objective activity, the other is an infinite spiritual cycle called the "dreamtime", more real than reality itself. Whatever happens in the dreamtime establishes the values, symbols, and laws of Aboriginal society. It was believed that some people of unusual spiritual powers had contact with the dreamtime.

more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamtime

I never heard that term before. This gives me lots to read about and learn.