The King of Elfland's Daughter (Del Rey Impact)
by Lord Dunsany
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Book Summary Information
Author: Lord DunsanyIntroduction: Neil Gaiman
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-07-06
ISBN: 034543191X
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Del Rey
Book Reviews of The King of Elfland's Daughter (Del Rey Impact)
Book Review: Ian Myles Slater on: Unfamiliar? No Surprise!
Summary: 5 Stars
Another review, after three-dozen? Is anything of interest left to be said about this 1924 fantasy novel by Lord Dunsany?
Well, yes., I think that there is. The confusion expressed by some reviewers is easy to understand. After more than three quarters of a century, "The King of Elfland's Daughter" remains remarkably hard to place. Not absolutely unique on the level of details, it stands apart when seen as a whole. Although the author's copious and skillful writing in an improbable variety of genres set him apart from the rest of the Anglo-Irish Peerage, he seems to have shared their assumption that a man of his position and rank could do as he pleased, when he pleased. Including what he wanted to write.
As a result, this book won't fit into any neat category, whether it existed then, or emerged later.
The book seems to open with an idealized medieval scene, like one of the late-Victorian medieval romances by William Morris ("The Wood Beyond the World" or "The Well at the World's End"). We meet the old, wise, and patient lord of Erl, and the skilled and industrious people of Erl, ruled by a line that goes back seven hundred years. That takes a couple of paragraphs, and is interwoven with plot developments; despite a reputation for elaborate prose ("iridescent, crystalline, singing," according to H.P. Lovecraft), Dunsany could really be quite concise.
But, in a moment worthy of Dunsany's American contemporary, James Branch Cabell, at his most mordant, we meet these stolid people as the Parliament of Erl, taking the initiative for the first time in five centuries, asks that the land be ruled by "a magic lord." And so the current lord, feeling unable to refuse so "reasonable" a request, made after so long an interval, commissions his apparently matter-of-fact son, Alveric, to meet the demand by marrying a princess of Elfland. How to arrange it is Alveric's problem.
And if, indeed, Cabell had been writing the tale, everything after these first two (!) pages would have been about the absurdities of democracy, aristocracy, celebrity, marriage, and anything else that came into sight; a version of "Jurgen" (1919) or "Figures of Earth" (1921). For sources, one would look back with certainty to the quest of an Elf-queen in Chaucer-the-pilgrim's comically inept "Tale of Sir Thopas" in "The Canterbury Tales."
But instead of Cabell's satire, or Chaucer's, we then get charming word-pictures of the obviously British countryside (England and Ireland both seem to be drawn upon), vignettes of children, and of trolls, and the sensations of dogs -- this being in fact unmistakably the work of the Anglo-Irish Lord Dunsany, travel-writer, essayist, and master of the very short story.
As Alveric tries to cross the forever-shifting borders of Elfland, seeking the Elfin Mountains across the edges of the fields we know, the author might have been anticipating Hope Mirrlees' "Lud-in-the-Mist," still two years from publication. But the nature of the traffic between Erl and Elfland is rather different than that between Mirrlees' Free State of Dorimare and the Elfin Marches, and looking forward seems no more helpful than looking back.
And, eventually, we come to an extraordinarily detailed account of hunting a unicorn with dogs, using strictly medieval methods -- for stags, not unicorns. Dunsany was an enthusiastic hunter himself, and, to judge from John Cummins' "The Hound and the Hawk: The Art of Medieval Hunting" (1988), he knew how deer were pursued and taken "par force" by his Anglo-Norman ancestors. It is rather grimly realistic. If you can't tolerate the sort of predator-kills-its-prey scene from which the cameras always pan back on wildlife shows, you may have a problem here. It is an extraordinary accomplishment, although it was years before I realized quite how good, as well as how exciting, it was. (Explanations of the hunting scenes in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" were the first to prove helpful; Turgenyev and Tolstoy provided parallels, but were too nineteenth-century, as well as Russian, to be secure guides.)
Note to (some) Robert. E. Howard fans: You don't need a well-muscled warrior laying waste to whole armies to have action scenes!
So it should be no surprise that it doesn't seem to fit any established categories. "The King of Elfland's Daughter" is "of its own kind," *sui generis,* to be enjoyed -- or not enjoyed -- on its own merits. If not as unique as the Phoenix, it still stands alone, hard to judge from any amount of experience. It is perhaps more easily absorbed by the practiced reader, who recognizes the unexpected as unusual, or even by the totally inexperienced, than by the relative novice looking for genre-based cues in a book that preceded their invention, by a writer who, if he had known the conventions, probably would have ignored them whenever he wanted to.
The 1920s seem to have been a good time for publishing fantasy, but it didn't last. Faced with the then established publishers' and retailers' belief -- or, given some actual sales figures, the superstition -- that "fantasy doesn't sell," it is not surprising that, like much of Dunsany's production, this book faded from store shelves and the publisher's list, and then from memory, known only to those fortunate enough to lay hands on a copy. Dunsany himself was hardly forgotten, of course -- he continued to publish, almost until his death in 1957. He left an impact on many writers in the first half of the century, some very different from others. H.P. Lovecraft, of course, but also Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp (and not just when they turned Mr. Jorkens' club into Gavagan's Bar); and Fritz Leiber, who would have been particularly interested in Dunsany the playwright. And he would do so again; but it would take awhile.
Then Bob Pepper presented the unicorn hunt as dark stained-glass for the front side of the wraparound cover of the June 1969 Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition, catching much of the action without the blood. (The series logo, by the way, was "The Unicorn's Head"!) That mass-market paperback of "The King of Elfland's Daughter," with a typically enthusiastic, but not terribly informative, introduction by Lin Carter, presented the book to a whole new set of readers (myself among them). Many of us wondered where it had been all our lives. Out of print for forty years! Another demonstration that the physically inaccessible will be obscure, without regard to any real merits.
It was reprinted in that format in 1973, and had a third printing, without the introduction, and with a new cover by Darrell Sweet, as a Ballantine Fantasy in January 1977. (It was part of the transition, completed in March, to the Del Rey imprint, Ballantine Books having been acquired by Random House; so no "Adult" in the label, and the new "Basilisk's Crest" insignia appeared in place of any of the versions of the "Unicorn's Head.") This seems to have been the last American-based edition for about twenty years, although there was at least one British-based trade-paperback edition, in 1982. (I say "based" because there seems to have been international distribution of both.)
The Ballantine mass-market edition, with the substitution / addition of a new introduction, was eventually the basis of the "Del Rey Impact" trade paperback of 1999 (and its "library binding" counterpart), and this of the "Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks" edition (UK) in 2001, both with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, and cover art from John William Waterhouse's vaguely relevant "La Belle Dane Sans Merci" of 1893 (illustrating the Keats poem, in the Pre-Raphaelite mode). The Gollancz edition differs visibly in the absence of the bands at the top and bottom of the cover.
These forms of the text, at 242 pages besides varying front matter, seem distinct from the 282-page Unwin Paperbacks trade edition, with a cover by Kathy Wyatt, published in 1982. Although I have not noticed any textual differences, it may, being re-set, go back independently to the original G.P. Putnam printing (301 pages); or to a reported 1972 British edition (Tom Stacey, London), which I have not seen.
Not a lot of editions and printings, but the book has been kept alive, despite some gaps in availability. And, given the corrupt (or, frankly, butchered) condition of some fantasy and science fiction classics, we may have in this case a happy state of relative reliability of all the available forms.
Summary of The King of Elfland's Daughter (Del Rey Impact)
The poetic style and sweeping grandeur of The King of Elfland's Daughter has made it one of the most beloved fantasy novels of our time, a masterpiece that influenced some of the greatest contemporary fantasists. The heartbreaking story of a marriage between a mortal man and an elf princess is a masterful tapestry of the fairy tale following the "happily ever after."All fantasy and horror fans owe it to themselves to read Lord Dunsany (1878-1957). The sword & sorcery genre was born in his early stories, and high fantasy was indelibly transformed by his novels. His profound influence on 20th-century fantastic fiction is visible in authors as dissimilar as Neil Gaiman, H.P. Lovecraft, and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Lord Dunsany's best-known novel is The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924), wherein the men of Erl desire to be "ruled by a magic lord," and the lord's heir, Alveric, ventures into Elfland to win the king's daughter, Lirazel. Their story does not progress as a reader weaned on the diluted milk of formulaic fantasy would expect; and the novel's unique journeys and events are matched by Dunsany's rich and lyrical prose and by his contagious intoxication with the magic and marvels of both Elfland and our own world. --Cynthia Ward
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