July 8, 2002 Mr. Martin Gardner 3001 Chestnut Road Hendersonville, NC 28792 Dear Martin, In London recently, I bought a copy of the Definitive Edition of the Annotated Alice , at the bookshop in the British Library (where the books from the British Museum were relocated a few years ago). It was a wonderful reading experience. I had read your original Annotated Alice ages ago, but this was like reading the Mice books for the first time. I made a few notes as I was reading. 1. On p. 171, when the Red Queen says: "When you say 'hill', the Queen interrupted, "I could show you hills, in comparison with which you'd call that a valley"; and Alice objects: "a hill can't be a valley, you know. That would be nonsense--"; I suspect that Dodgson was reacting to something in Hans Christian Andersen's story "Elverhoj" (the Elf Hill , which is very famous and was even made into a ballet). The Troll King (the Mountain King, or Dovregubben, in Ibsen's Peer Gynt, written later) from Norway, is visiting the Elf King in Denmark; and the Troll King's ill-mannered son says, regarding the "Elf Hill" of the rifle, "You call this a hill ? In Norway, we would call it a hole !" (Denmark is very flat and Norway is very mountainous.) Alice expresses Dodgson's mathematical view that what is convex cannot be concave. (We would need to know when the English translation of "Elverhoj" reached Oxford, and if Dodgson is likely to have read it.)
