The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)

Maybe not quite 4 stars overall but plenty close enough. This may drag for a lot of people but if you have the patience it should be read for the experience. ( )

I've read a bunch of Dunsany's short stuff and really liked it but this is his first novel that I've read (I don't think he has too many novels). The style is not exactly Shakespeareian but it is definitely a type of vaulted prose that would turn many people off. It's filled with run-on sentences that sometimes lose the subject but still sound beautiful.

The plot was interesting and the characters memorable, I really enjoyed reading names like Ziroonderel and Lirazel aloud in my fantasy-accented voice.

Not much happened in the way of action to be found here. It does have fairy-talesque quality but the ending was not typical and in some ways a let down for me. ( )

The twelve men making up the parliament of Erl go to their ruler one day and ask for a magic lord. The ruler agrees to grant their request and sends his son to steal and marry the King of Elfland's daughter. But of course finding her and keeping her can't be that easy.

In the introduction to this edition, Neil Gaiman compares Lord Dunsany's writing to the King James Bible. I honestly wouldn't have thought of that, but the description is perfect. The language is beautiful, but, for me, dense and a little hard to wade through. I kept thinking of those old fairy tale books by Andrew Lang, like The Orange Fairy Book. As I remember it, those books had very little dialog and just describe the story happening. That's how this was. I also mentally compared it to a beautiful, old silent movie. You're watching this beautiful story unfold, but there's no dialog. I guess I like a lot of dialog.

As I read the book, I kept thinking of a phrase my yoga teacher uses: "like you're moving through honey." That's the pace at which this book moves: like you're moving through honey. I normally tear through books so I never quite got my mind slowed down enough to fully enjoy and understand this book. When I did manage it, for a couple of paragraphs at a time, I could see what all the fuss is about. But the rest of the time, I just wished we could get on with the story. That is, if I didn't fall asleep first.

By the end, Lirazel had gotten on my nerves. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. Who doesn't, really? But asking her father to use his last all-powerful rune to give it to her just seemed whiny and self-absorbed to me. She was a very passive character generally, so I never cared for her much to begin with. The witch was much more interesting. I would have liked more about her.

If you like beautiful, slow-moving language, you'll probably like this one. If you're like me and like your stories to move along at a pretty fast pace, you'll probably want to take a pass. ( )

This is a work of astonishing lyrical beauty. It was about magic, mortality, love and many other things, but in a very subtle way. I can understand how some people could be fooled into thinking it is about nothing at all, with its meandering, beautiful prose and lack of straightforward plot. Their loss.

One of my favourite bits: "Between the spirits of Alveric and Lirazel lay all the distance there is between Earth and Elfland; and love bridged the distance, which can bridge further than that; yet when for a moment on the golden bridge he would pause and let his thoughts look down at the gulf, all his mind would grow giddy and Alveric trembled. What of the end, he thought? And feared lest it should be stranger than the beginning."

Humans wanting what they don't have and not wanting it when they have it was both heartbreaking and hilarious affair. Lirazel praying to the reflection of the stars in a pool because Alveric won't let her pray to the stars themselves, always wanting her to be more human and assume his customs. Then seeking only Elfland and shunning everything human for years when she has disappeared, wandering with a bunch of madmen, no longer any part of society. The human parliament who first ordered more magic and so started the whole thing, only to want it driven away when they actually had it.


There is much more that could be said about this book but...for now I'll just stop at saying it painted some gorgeous mental images. Absolutely beautiful. Elfland leaving behind lost bits of childhood as it recedes from some stark empty place, madmen keeping Alveric from his love because the enchantment he could find would make them uninteresting in comparison. The descriptions of the deep colours of Elfland, like the colours of the world reflected in a still pool on a summer's day.

"And as the fancies raged and sang and called, more and more over the border, all crowding on one poor mind, her body grew lighter and lighter. Her feet half rested half floated, upon the floor; Earth scarcely held her down, so fast was she becoming a thing of dreams."

It was beautiful.


( )

I'm glad I read this. I do not think I will read it again.

It felt weirdly like reading nonfiction, in how slowly I got through it, and yet it was very clearly fiction in how stylized the writing was — no sane scholar would write sentences like Dunsany does. (And, you know. The content.)

The handling of the three main characters was deft and well-balanced; they too were very stylized, so I won't say anything catty about how they were paper dolls — they were meant to be. This is not a book that delves into character at all. I thought the pacing was a little weird in that everything wraps up incredibly quickly in the last twenty-thirty pages, but I certainly don't wish the damn thing had been longer.

Definitely a book I read to have read, not for itself. ( )