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Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997)
Fountain of Youth

Tagged: Theme.

Legendary youth-restoring spring (see also Elixir of Life). The sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León (1460-1521) supposedly disappeared in the Americas while seeking the Fountain of Youth and Eldorado. Peter Lambourn Wilson's Time Fantasy "Fountain of Time" (1986 Interzone) sees de León washed up by the tides of time in a modern Florida Everglades bar; his cognate "Ponce da Quirm" in Terry Pratchett's Eric (1990) actually drinks at the Fountain of Youth, fatally, because – an unwise tourist – he neglects to boil it first. Tim Powers's Pirate novel On Stranger Tides (1987) includes a Fountain of Youth Quest episode in eighteenth-century Florida. In some Breton traditions, Merlin is finally reduced to a babbling infant by the Fountain of Youth in the Forest of Broceliande, entrapped by the local "lady of the fountain" Vivian or Nimuë. Such Fountain of Youth-induced infancy reappears as a Plot Device in Thorne Smith's The Glorious Pool (1934), Piers Anthony's Dragon on a Pedestal (1983) and Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides (1987). [JH/DRL]



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