For those of you who haven't marked you calendars yet, The Magic Attic is hosting a book blog tout for Thin Air by Lynn Seresinn! As the header says the tours runs from the 3rd to the 31st of October.
Today I am very excited to have Lynn Guest Posting on my blog! She will be talking about one of the elements involved in her book- The Sylph
Sylph.
The very word conjures up a feeling of airiness, grace, and delicacy, doesn’t it? Even if you’re unfamiliar with its meaning, you probably wouldn’t imagine it associated with anything heavy, awkward, or cumbersome. It just has to refer to something…light.
A sylph, in simplest terms, is an air spirit—a male air spirit, to be precise. Females are called sylphids. The notion of nature spirits—non-physical entities inhabiting water, earth, air, and fire—held an important place in the ancient belief systems of Greece, Rome, Egypt, China, and India for thousands of years. The people of earliest antiquity did not have the scientific tools and knowledge to explain the world around them. Confronted with mysterious phenomena like lightning, earthquakes, and floods, they were compelled to personify these forces of nature in an attempt to understand them. Phillipus Aureolus Paracelus, an alchemist, astrologer, and occultist of the fifteenth century, is believed to have been the first to classify the four elements—wind, fire, water, and earth—into four distinct groups of spiritual beings: sylphs (air), salamanders (fire), undines (water), and gnomes (earth).
Sylphs, being invisible, winged, and human in form, are commonly considered a family of Fae. Unlike fairies, however, they don’t possess supernatural powers. Their only “job” is to model snowflakes and gather clouds with the help of moisture supplied by the undines. And while fairies live a few hundred years at most, sylphs can live upwards of a thousand years. They are also thought to be capable of assuming human form for brief periods of time—a feat no fairy has accomplished, to my knowledge.
Sylphs are described as being tall, slender, and lithe in appearance (think supermodel proportions), with sharp features and hawk-shaped eyes. In temperament, they are cheerful but inconstant. Like the wind, which they inhabit, they are quick to change their course—and their mind. They are also considered to be nomadic spirits, rootless and without permanent homes.
I’ve always been drawn to faeries—my first book, written at age six, was titled, “The Fairy of the Sea”—so when I stumbled upon the world of elementals, it immediately felt familiar and comfortable. Of course, I took certain liberties with the mythology in writing THIN AIR. Alice, the main character, begins the story as a sylphid but decides to transmute into a human being after falling in love with a mortal. None of my research indicated that elementals could become human (and remain so). Nor was it ever suggested that Gob, king of the gnomes, had magical powers and could bestow a body of flesh and bone. I tried to weave my own inventions into the existing mythology as seamlessly as possible to create an imaginary world that was part folklore, part pure fancy. I only hope that readers of THIN AIR, along with the remaining three books that will comprise the Thin Air saga, enjoy getting to know the elementals in the series as much as I enjoyed creating them.
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I am thrilled to be a part of this tour. Thank you Bree for the invite and Lynn for the opportunity. To my readers trail around the blog-o-sphere and follow the tour. You can sign up to win copies of the book, read excerpts, get some more exciting info on the book and get to know the character better in their interviews.
For the full schedule, click on the header! :)
Or you could buy yourself a copy off Amazon.
Or you could follow Lynn on Twitter.
And you can sign yourself up over here for the Grand Prize...
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= Grand Prize!
ALSO
You need to key in the letters you scavenge out during Blog tour. Each post has a letter hidden in it- in bold and red .You put them together, enter them in and stand a chance to win the Grand prize! :D
Good luck!
