Dunsany’s ‘King of Elfland’s Daughter’ (1924)

Edward John Moreton Zinc-Trumpet St-John-Mollusc Brook-Hampster Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, Irish peer and prolific author, published many books before the war, fiction and non-fiction, some drawing on Irish mythology. The King of Elfland’s Daughter is his masterpiece, although, as a title mostly ignored until rediscovered by its republication in the ‘Ballantyne Adult Fantasy’ series in the 1970s, its belated celebrity tends to remove it from the specific context out of which it was written.

Dunsany was forty-six when he wrote The King of Elfland’s Daughter, which is not exactly young. The war was between him and that first, exuberantly imaginative phase of his career. His enchanted dreams were slipping away, but, brilliantly, rather than write weaker and weaker stories he turned this very loss into his subject matter. [Darrell Schweitzer, ‘The Novels of Lord Dunsany’, Mythlore 7:3 (1980), 39–40]

Dunsany fought on the Western Front as captain with the 5th Inniskilling Fusiliers, and was wounded during the Easter rising of 1916. The sense of something passing away, and the terrible cost of preventing, or trying to prevent, that passage, informs his novel.

The story opens in the kingdom of Erl, whose parliament petitions the king: having been ruled by ordinary men for seven hundred years, and ruled well, they now wish for a change; for now ‘the generations stream away, and there is no new thing’. Accordingly they ask for ‘a magic lord’ to rule them. The King of Erl agrees to this proposition, and sends his son Alveric off to Elfland to recruit one such.

He walked in the sparkling morning through scenes familiar from infancy; he saw the ruddy orchis flowering early, reminding the bluebells they were just past their prime; the small young leaves of the oak were yet a brownish yellow; the new beech-leaves shone like brass, where the cuckoo was calling clearly; and a birch tree looked like a wild woodland creature that had draped herself in green gauze; on favoured bushes there were buds of may. Alveric said over and over to himself farewell to all these things: the cuckoo went on calling, and not for him. And then, as he pushed through a hedge into a field untended, there suddenly close before him in the field was, as his father had told, the frontier of twilight. It stretched across the fields in front of him, blue and dense like water; and things seen through it seemed misshapen and shining. He looked back once over the fields we know; the cuckoo went on calling unconcernedly; a small bird sang about its own affairs; and, nothing seeming to answer or heed his farewells, Alveric strode on boldly into those long masses of twilight.

A man in a field not far was calling to horses, there were folk talking in a neighbouring lane, as Alveric stepped into the rampart of twilight; at once all these sounds grew dim, humming faintly, as from great distances: in a few strides he was through, and not a murmur at all came then from the fields we know. The fields through which he had come had suddenly ended; there was no trace of its hedges bright with new green; he looked back, and the frontier seemed lowering, cloudy and smoky; he looked all round and saw no familiar thing; in the place of the beauty of May were the wonders and splendours of Elfland.

The pale-blue mountains stood august in their glory, shimmering and rippling in a golden light that seemed as though it rhythmically poured from the peaks and flooded all those slopes with breezes of gold. And below them, far off as yet, he saw going up all silver into the air the spires of the palace only told of in song. He was on a plain on which the flowers were queer and the shape of the trees monstrous. He started at once toward the silver spires. [ch 2]

In Elfland Alveric immediately falls in love with Princess Lirazel, the King of Elfland’s daughter, and she with him, though her father disapproves. He loves her for her beauty and glamour, although the glamour actually runs both ways. Lizarel is enchanted by how strange is the unstrangeness of our world: ‘she sighed for a moment for those fields, for she had heard how life beautifully passes there, and how there are always in those fields young generations, and she thought of the changing seasons and children and age, of which elfin minstrels had sung when they told of Earth’ [ch 3]. Alveric woos Princess Lirazel by telling her tales of his homeland — like Othello, except that instead of wild adventures he talks of ‘the fields that are mapped and known’, of ordinariness and of such alien-to-elves concepts as ‘to-morrow’.

The King of Elfland’s guards attack Alveric, who fights them off with a sword, made with meteorite iron which he had, luckily for him, previously had embellished with magic runes by a witch called Ziroonderel. He and Lizrael run off together back to our world, where, in ‘Thomas the Rhymer’ fashion, Alveric discovers many years have passed and that his father is dead. The pair marry and have a son, Orion, and for a while Alveric rules the human kingdom of Erl. But out of Elfland the king sends a troll, bearing a magic rune written on parchment, to summon his daughter home. His elfin majesty has three such one-use runes, each of unimaginable power, though he uses up two in retrieving his daughter: ‘the rune was written with love that was stronger than magic, till those mystical characters glowed with the love that the Elf King had for his daughter, and there were blended in that mighty rune two powers, magic and love, the greatest power there is beyond the boundary of twilight with the greatest power there is in the fields we know.’

Lizrael returns to Elfland, and Alveric sets off to retrieve her. But the boundaries of Elfland have retreated from where they were before (‘with clear resonance deep down in his throat [the King of Elfland] chaunted a rhythmic spell, all made of words that Lirazel never had heard before, some age-old incantation, calling Elfland away, drawing it further from Earth’). Alveric’s search is fruitless — although his half-elfish son Orion can hear the horns of elfland blowing in the evening.

Orion grows to manhood and becomes, as his name suggests, a mighty hunter: much of the novel is given over to him hunting a magnificent unicorn. Alveric meanwhile spends decades on his quest for his lost love. When he approaches Elfland, the Elf-king (who can sense the approach of Alveric’s magic sword) withdraws the boundary, but when Alveric is off in the wrong direction he relaxes his magic:

But when Alveric with his sword was far to the North the Elf King loosened the grip with which he had withdrawn Elfland, as the Moon that withdraws the tide lets it flow back again, and Elfland came racing back as the tide over flat sands. With a long ribbon of twilight at its edge it floated back over the waste of rocks; with old songs it came, with old dreams, and with old voices. And in a while the frontier of twilight lay flashing and glimmering near the fields we know, like an endless Summer evening that lingered on out of the golden age. But bleak and far to the North where Alveric wandered the limitless rocks still heaped the desolate land … And here the unicorns fed along the border as it was their custom to do, feeding sometimes in Elfland, which is the home of all fabulous things, cropping lilies below the slopes of the Elfin Mountains, and sometimes slipping through the border of twilight at evening when all our fields are still, to feed upon earthly grass. The fox, which is born in our fields, also crosses the frontier, going into the border of twilight at certain seasons; it is thence that he gets the romance with which he comes back to our fields. He also is fabulous, but only in Elfland, as the unicorns are fabulous here. [ch 18]

Orion, who hunts these unicorns, is assisted by the troll originally sent to recover Lizrael, who has stayed-on in our world and is now working whipping the hunting hounds (we get several chapters of things from his trollish point of view). Meanwhile in Elfland Lizrael sits on her father’s knee, as he is seated on his throne of ice and mist, whilst years pass in the human realm. But she pines for the transient world she has left behind, and for her husband above all.

For a while the Elf King held all things that owed him allegiance, and all their desires and wonders and fears and dreams, floating drowsy on tides of music that was made of no sounds of Earth, but rather of that dim substance in which the planets swim, with many another marvel that only magic knows. And then as all Elfland was drinking the music in, as our Earth drinks in soft rain, he turned again to his daughter with that in his eyes that said “What land is so fair as ours?” And she turned towards him to say “Here is my home forever.” Her lips were parted to say it and love was shining in the blue of her elfin eyes; she was stretching her fair hands out towards her father; when they heard the sound of the horn of a tired hunter, wearily blowing by the border of Earth. [ch 25]

That horn? It’s being sounded by Alveric who, after twelve years of searching, has finally, and with the help of the witch Ziroonderel, found a way back into Elfland. The King yields to her daughter’s desire. In order to bring the two lovers together he uses the last of his three mighty runes to roll the borders of Elfland completely over the kingdom of Erl.

And now from upper windows of the houses the folk began to see that glittering line which was no earthly twilight: they saw it flash at them with its starry gleam and then flow on towards them. Slowly it came as though it rippled with difficulty over Earth’s rugged bulk, though moving lately over the rightful lands of the Elf King it had outspeeded the comet. And hardly had they wondered at its strangeness, when they found themselves amongst most familiar things, for the old memories that floated before it, as a wind before the thunder, beat in a sudden gust on their hearts and their houses, and lo! they were living once more amongst things long past and lost. And as that line of no earthly light came nearer there rustled before it a sound as of rain on leaves, old sighs, breathed over again, old lovers’ whispers repeated … Then Elfland poured over Erl. [ch 34]

The only place unclaimed by this magical landgrab is the house and garden of the ‘Holy Freer’ — Friar, that is — whose Christianity seals him away in a Passport to Pimlico-type situation (not that he is incommoded by his new situation: ‘there he lived happy, contented, not quite alone, amongst his holy things, for a few that had been cut off by that magical tide lived on the holy island and served him there.’) Otherwise Erl becomes a part of the larger kingdom of Elfland, and Alveric and Lizrael can be together forever.

As I say, Dunsany’s novel went almost unnoticed on its initial publication in 1924, although its republication in 1969 as part of the Ballantyne series propelled it to a place of high regard. For some readers it is one of the greatest fantasy novels ever written. Gary Westfahl [The Greenwood Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy Themes (Westport, 2005), 1124] quotes L. Sprague de Camp’s judgment that it’s on par with The Lord of the Rings ‘in terms of its quality and influence’ and Arthur C. Clarke’s claim that this one novel cements Dunsany ‘as one of the greatest writers of this century’. This, though, is to treat the book as a late century cultural phenomenon. As I’ve been jotting my thoughts down here, I’ve been listening to the 1977 folk-rock concept album adaptation of the novel, by Bob Johnson and Pete Knight (they of Steeleye Span).

It’s not the greatest record ever recorded, I must say: Christopher Lee narrates short passages that link the songs: Mary ‘Those Were The Days My Friend’ Hopkin sings Lizrael, Frankie Miller sings Alveric, P P Arnold sings the Witch — Lee himself sings one song, in a growly basso-prounfdo, as the Elf King himself. But the songs themselves are hum-hah, melodically unremarkable, the arrangements sludgy and plodding. The record doesn’t generate the affect of the book: its uncanny glamour, its balance of traditional storytelling elements with offkilter, unsettling shifts, its evocation of beauty as an asymmetric uncanny. But the album is an indicator of the way ‘Fantasy’ flooded into broader culture in the 1970s: a nostalgic ‘electric’ pop-song-commodity. In the later decades of twentieth century, the aftermath of the hippy movement, the growth of environmentalism, and the sense that neoliberal materialsm was desertifying the world, the idea of an Anschluss between fairyland and our world seemed appealing to many. But this isn’t Dunsany’s novel.

To return to its original publication in 1924 — six years after the end of the First World War, two after the secession of Ireland from the United Kingdom, which Dunsany had fought to try and prevent — is to understand its relation to these historical disruptions: conflicted but ultimately reactionary.

The prose, lusciously descriptive of landscapes and skies, is sometimes overdone, actively cloying — deliberately so, I think — just as the plotting is (again I think deliberately) associative, herky-jerky, moving from element to element in sometimes baffling or disconcerting ways. Fairyland is beautiful but airless, a realm in endless stasis. ‘Our’ world (which is to say, the realm of Erl) decays and passes, but life remains vivid and active. It’s Keats’s observation that losing something and enjoying something are the same thing: this experiential truth that consummation is both wonderful and melancholy, ‘seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine’.

It seems clear to me that in the opening scene, the closest the novel comes to ‘politics’, the parliamentary petition is styled as a misjudgement: the aristocratic disdain for democratic mob-logic: if the problem is that ‘there is no new thing’ then the last thing the realm needs is rule by the changeless idiom of Elfland. That these burghers effectively get what they want at the end of the novel seems to me a canny dramatic irony. The world trapped in amber (that Zelaznian term: though Zelazny’s version of fairyland is a lot more active and busy and even entropic than Dunsany’s).

John Clute talks of Dunsany’s ‘liquid ability to generate insightful passages’ and calls the book ‘seminal’, perhaps the first time in art (‘certainly the first time with any conviction’) that the ‘two poles’, of our world and Faerie, are treated as being ‘of equal weight’. I’m not sure about this, actually, and as I talk about in this post I have issues with Clute’s categorisation of the novel as an ‘instauration fantasy’ — instauration means ‘restoration after decay, lapse or dilapidation’, and the ‘instauration fantasies’ as Clute defines these sorts of stories as ‘fantasies about the matter of the world’. He also thinks them rare, in Fantasy literature more broadly: more usually transformations affect the secondary world of fantasy rather than ‘our’ world. But I would challenge the assumption that the subsumption of Erl by Elfland in The King of Elfland’s Daughter in an ‘instauration’ (I’m also puzzled by Clute’s description of John Crowley’s Little Big (1981) as ‘the first full-fledged instauration fantasy’, but that’s for another time.)

Let us say that Elfland is ‘poetry’ and Erl ‘prose’ — a not unreasonable way of characterising the relationship between the two realms in Mirrlees’ book as well, as well as many other Fantasy novels. Dunsany’s Elfland poetry is often vivid and beautiful, but it is also a machine of artifice, fauvist colouration (green skies, purple lawns and the like), motionless tableaux. Owen Barfield, one of the Inklings and a critic with a deep interest in Fantasy, says this about poetry (he’s not, I should add, talking about Dunsany), in whose ‘precarious’ element is force and value lie:

That precarious element in poetry, which has puzzled critics and poets alike, may at any rate become clearer to us, may even come a little more under our control, if once we can elucidate its causes. And to me the principal cause appears to be that poetic experience depends on a difference of potential, a kind of discrepancy between two moods or modes of consciousness. [Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study In Meaning (1928), 39]

This difference of potential is exteriorised by, precisely, the difference between Erl and Elfland, and dramatized in the story by the two main ‘quest’ or ‘hunt’ elements that construct it: Alveric searching Lirazel, and Alveric’s son Orion hunting the unicorn. But both are negated by the subsumption of Erl into Elfland at the novel’s end.