I have banished most politics from my content consumption and that has left me with time for other things, such as reading. It’s been a while since I did much reading — most books are entirely too predictable for my tastes, usually because they’re written to please marketing departments instead of readers. But I have decided to give it all a go once again in the hopes of at least keeping me off of the internet and all the angry algorithms to be found there.
But first up isn’t something new. It’s something old.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter was written in 1924 by someone I’ve never heard of before — Lord Dunsany who, according to Wikipedia, was an English-born Irishman. (Bit of whiplash, to be honest.) Somehow my English degree from way back in the 1980’s managed to skip this guy. I’m not surprised. It skipped a great many things.
But Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (no commoner, there) was prolific and important (at least from a literary perspective) in his day. And among his 90 published books was The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
I found this book because I was curious to see how far back in time the concept of a half elf went. Looks like the idea of it goes back to Norse mythology, but most people who first encounter the half elf these days do it (I think) via Tolkien or, probably, Dungeons and Dragons.
But a predecessor to Tolkien’s work was Lord Dunsany and The King of Elfland’s Daughter. This is a short (by modern standards) novel — 232 pages on Kindle — and it employs a writing style that is archaic by current sensibilities but somehow enjoyable nevertheless. I found myself slowing down reading this, savoring the language, enjoying the trip. Still, if you didn’t spend four years of your life somewhere along the way reading classic English literature, you might find this a bit of a slog.
The story centers around the Kingdom of Erl and “these fields we know.” They’ve got themselves a Lord and a Parliament and between the two they decided that they needed some magic in their lands. For fame and fortune, you see. So the Lord sent his son, Alveric, off to the elflands to get him a wife and thus some of that magic.
Alveric does exactly that (I was surprised at how excited the Elf King’s daughter was to run off with him) and, well, it all goes sideways from there. I suppose the moral of the story is, “Be careful what you wish for,” although Lord Dunsany doesn’t quite rub our noses in it that explicitly. Not quite.
All in all, this was an entertaining foray into a book that seems to have been extremely influential in fantasy literature, even if most people these days know nothing about it. As I was reading it, I kept having flashbacks to Critical Role’s descriptions of the Feywild which, I suppose, is based on the Forgotten Realms source material. Yep, this is where all that started, although now I’m a bit interested to see how Norse mythology handled the subject. Maybe sometime down the road when I have more time I’ll poke my nose into that stuff.
C’ya!