Strange Dimensions

The Broken Sword, XXII.

En route to Jotunheim, Skafolc and Mananaan sail further than any mortal ship ever can over chill, dead water under stars, moon and aurora. I think that, like some lost sailors in Tolkien's Middle Earth History, they sail not around the curve of the earth but straight out from the earth. 

"Skafloc thought this realm could not lie on earth at all, but in strange dimensions near the edge of everything, where creation plunged back into the Gap whence it had arisen. He had the notion that this was the Sea of Death on which he sailed, outward bound from the world of the living." (p. 156)

Maybe so but I am quite certain that Skafloc did not think of "dimensions"! This is sf terminology intruding into heroic fantasy. 

CS Lewis, not as author but as fictional first person narrator, quotes an entirely fictitious seventeenth century writer, Natvilcius, who hypothesizes that an angelic or demonic body:

"...exists after a manner beyond our conception in the celestial frame of spatial references."

-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 1, p. 158.

Fictional Lewis comments:

"By the 'celestial frame of spatial references' I take him to mean what we should now call 'multi-dimensional space'. Not, of course, that Natvilcius knew anything about multi-dimensional geometry, but that he had reached empirically what mathematics has since reached on theoretical grounds." (ibid.)

Skafloc also reaches out empirically, not theoretically. 

While we are outside our normal dimensions, let's take another look inside the Old Phoenix:

"...I suspect that besides being at a nexus of universes, the hostel exists on several different space-time levels of its own."

-Poul Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, September 1981), pp. 9-20 AT p. 10.

If each universe comprises a four dimensional space-time continuum, then the nexus is in a fifth dimension, neither spatial nor temporal but something else? Maybe. But what is a space-time level? The narrator retreats from this suggestion:

"Well, let's not speculate about the unanswerable." (ibid.)

See:

Knowledge And Understanding