panguitch's Full Review: Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany - The Ki...
When I was young I would lie on the lawn and watch through fluttering aspen leaves as the wind coaxed bright clouds across the blue desert sky. An unhealthy predilection for leisure, some might say. But to be immune to the allure of daydreams or to cultivate a reflex for squelching reverie is against my nature. I cannot amputate that dimension of myself. I hear the horns of Elfland every day.
The King of Elfland's Daughter
Lord Dunsany, 1924
Fancies from Elfland began to pour over the border. Some came that would make a clerk in the City to-day leave his desk at once to dance on the sea-shore; and some would have driven all the men in a bank to leave doors and coffers open and wander away till they came to green open land and the heathery hills; and some would have made a poet of a man, all of a sudden as he sat at his business.
Like all men, the men of Erl "trusted greatly in the words said in their parliament." Their gathered wisdom grappled with the problem of bringing fame and honor to Erl, and they resolved that having a more magical king would serve. Honoring their wishes young Prince Alveric adventures into Elfland and carries off the fairy king's daughter Lirazel. Together they have a son, but Lirazel cannot forget her mystical home, Alveric cannot be parted from her, and Erl itself can never be the same.
The 18th Baron Dunsany, Lord Edward Plunkett, captured in The King of Elfland's Daughter the classic motif of Faerie, a shadowy place of dangerous attraction, where men disappear for decades and return unaged. The inhabitants of this realm are more haughty than cute, their concerns as foreign to humankind as are the physical laws of our world to them. It is a fancy, a whimsy, of course. But take it seriously. It has haunted humanity ever since Cherubim and a flaming sword cut us off from our birthplace.
Because they often serve archetypal purposes, characters in such a story can be difficult to connect with on a personal level. Although they lack complexity, the main figures in The King of Elfland's Daughter are not static. Lirazel suffers a deep displacement, Alveric falls into a Don Quixote pattern, acquiring a motley following of mad manic dreamers, unrequited lovers and moonstruck halfwits. The star-crossed lovers name their son Orion, and orphaned by both worlds he hunts for his place. He also hunts unicorns, with the mischievous trolls of Elfland egging him on. It is a disturbing scene for the contemporary reader, raised on ardent romanticizations of the creatures.
Dunsany's style evokes earlier ages through outmoded syntax and sparse lyric descriptiveness. But it is rarely overwrought, and sometimes quite successful: "a great hush fell on the village, as though snow had suddenly fallen inches deep." The prose flows smoothly throughout the novel, almost too smoothly, enforcing its calm wonder with hardly a change of tempo. This pacing, the style, the archetypal characters, all contribute to the sense of otherworldliness. But Dunsany not only creates a pleasing mood with this sedate and nostalgic sense of wonder, he also keeps his tale at arms' length from us.
At the same time he quietly makes sidelong comments on modern society and religion, especially through the foolish Parliamentarians of Erl. Even more interesting is the Freer, who lays curses on all things magical and futilely introduces Lirazel to the rites of Christom. To Alveric's woe, Lirazel cannot understand this religion, and her natural impulse to reverence nature brings her under condemnation.
Dunsany is often cited as an influence for J. R. R. Tolkien, and many parallels in content can be drawn. But only in some minor works and some of the backstories comprising The Silmarillion does Tolkien show himself the heir of Dunsany's spirit. Instead, Tolkien partakes of a grander, more elevated and more substantive mythos. Dunsany's descendants are less likely to be found in Tolkien's epic than they are in fairy stories like Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn or Patricia A. McKillip's The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. These two books are very different stylistically, but their concerns are closely linked, and similar to The King of Elfland's Daughter. They also share in the romantic spirit of faerie so well embodied in Dunsany's seminal fantasy.
This haunting mood resonates deeply, the feeling of something unfathomably other and yet separate from us only by a shimmering veil. We have all heard the horns of Elfland, and feel that longing for the magical. The only thing that keeps us from the sense of wonder we have lost is the boundary we ourselves erect, the equally illusory construct of adulthood.
These things had risen imperceptibly up all round his imagination, and were at last a wall over which he saw no further. When he was young, yes once, he had sought for Elfland; but now, why now he was older; such things were for the young.
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