What Year Is It? II

Three Hearts And Three Lions, CHAPTER TWO.

Holger asks Mother Gerd:

"'Can you tell me what year this is?'" (p. 20)

"'What land is this? What kingdom?'" (ibid.)

"'Where is the nearest king or duke or earl...?'" (ibid.)

Year
"'...such reckonings have long slipped from me, the more so when time is often an uncanny thing here in the wings of the world since -'" (ibid.)

Holger interrupts with his second question. Gerd has already said that she lives:

"'...by the edge of the world.'"
-CHAPTER ONE, p. 18.

This must be a flat Earth but should that affect time?

Land
"'For long have these marches been in dispute between the sons of men and the folk of the Middle World... Faerie and the Holy Empire both claim it...'" (p. 20)

- but human beings, like Gerd herself, are in possession.

The Nearest King Etc
"There is a town not too many leagues away as men reckon distance...yet in truth I must warn you that space, like time, is wondrously affected by the sorceries blowing out of Faerie...'" (pp. 20-21)

Are we getting a bigger picture? This is the edge of the world because it is a disputed march between human civilization and the Middle World/Faerie. The latter somehow alters both time and space. I would not expect a Medieval witch like Gerda to talk about "time" and "space" like a modern physicist.

Space is affected in that a place can be near, then perilously far, and the route between can change. (This would explain different versions of a single story.) Holger concludes that Gerd is either an idiot or stalling him. He has not yet got it that he really is in an environment such as she describes. It sounds like the Hell realms in Heinlein's Magic, Inc. or in Anderson's Operation Chaos. In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, there are "soft places" on the borders of the Dreaming where people from different periods can meet. Again, time is variable although maybe not in the same way.