50 Book Challenge: Book 33
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
It’s taken me a long time to get around to reading this book and quite a while to get through its slim 240-odd pages. I found it in a second-hand bookshop that is a particular favourite of mine, The Book Bug in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. It was sitting on a shelf with another book by the same author, called At the Edge of the World, both in very attractive old paperback editions, and something told me that I ought to buy them. I have a lot of faith in my own first impressions, of things and people, so I did.
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Then I spent a lot of time putting off reading them. I’m not sure why but that first rush of enthusiasm just couldn’t carry me through to actually starting either book. Partly is was a huge backlog of books bought and not read, partly my recent library-joining decision, which has hurled a huge wild card into this reading challenge business. The King of Elfland’s Daughter sat on the to-read list for months, alongside a particularly doorstoppy Grisham, until I decided to shame myself into tackling both of them by taking them on a walking holiday. My reasoning being, that if I was going to carry them in a rucksack for 60 miles along the south Devon coastline, then I would damn well have to read them.
It worked to a point. There was this Sue Grafton, A is for Alibi, which I couldn’t put down and which I ended up taking even though I was more than halfway through it (a very bad use of resources). It was posted back home from Salcombe, in the event. The Grisham wasn’t quite the draw I was expecting and took a good while to get through. Which means I’d more or less saved the Dunsany for the train journey home. But that was enough to get me started and convince me that I wanted to read it – and it is, as I said earlier, a nice slim little volume which weighed exactly 150 grams.
And so to the book itself. It’s a charming read, although not an easy one. I can see why it’s compared with Tolkien and I would say that, although quite different, it is possible to appreciate why people who like Tolkien would like this. The dreaming, immortal quality of the elves is very familiar, and some of the most endearing trolls in the history of fantasy fiction make an appearance. Not much in common with Hobbits but somehow I was reminded – perhaps the facility for coming up with charming and convincing otherwordly species? The prose is dense and poetic and highly visual – and needs a lot of concentration to take in. The story is quite spare – in one sense there is little unnecessary detail. There is an overarching plot, to do with a vain wish of the elders of Erl to have a magic lord:
The old lord sent word to his eldest son, bidding him to come before him.
And very soon the young man stood before him; in the same carven chair from which he had not moved; where light, growing late, from high windows, showed the aged eyes looking far into the future beyond that old lord’s time. And seated there he gave his son his commandment.
“Go forth,” he said, “before these days of mine are over, and therefore go in haste, and go from here eastwards and pass the fields we know, till you see the lands that clearly pertain to faery; and cross their boundary, which is made of twilight, and come to that palace that is only told of in song.”
“Is it far from here,” said the young man Alveric.
“Yes,” answered he, “It is far.”
“And further still,” the young man said, “to return. For distances in those fields are not as here.”
“Even so,” said his father.
“What do you bid me do,” said the son, “when I come to that palace?”
And his father said: “To wed the King of Elfland’s Daughter.”
The young man thought of her beauty and crown of ice, and sweetness, that fabulous runes had told were hers. Songs were sung of her on wild hills where tiny strawberries grew, at dusk and by early starlight, and if one sought the singer no man was there. Sometimes only her name was sung softly over and over. Her name was Lirazel.
She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening, and the fairies too would have gone, but that they were frightened to see on their dewy fields the long dark moving shadows of the gods, so they stayed hidden in crowds of pale pink anemones and thence blessed Lirazel.
“My people have demanded a magic lord to rule over them. They have chosen foolishly,” the old lord said, “and only the Dark Ones who show not their faces know all that this will bring: but we, who see not, follow the ancient custom and do what our people in their parliament say. It may be some spirit of wisdom they have not known will save them yet. Go then with your face turned forth to that light that beats from fairyland and that faintly illumes the dusk between sunset and early stars, and this shall guide you till you come to the frontier and have passed the fields we know.”
It would be fair to say, and not in any sense either a surprise or a spoiler, that the moral of this tale is “be careful what you wish for.” While the overarching plot is addressed in the occasional chapter along the way, the actual text of the novel is extremely episodic, almost picaresque in some senses (this is what comes of trying to read *anything* alongside Don Quixote). I’m not a great consumer of fantasy although it’s something I do enjoy reading occasionally. I found this one delightful, inspiring in its unique voice and challenging – in other words, well worth reading, and recommended. After a decent break I’ll definitely be moving on to the second of the two paperbacks I picked up in that bookshop.
Dunsany links: