The King of Elfland's Daughter [Paperback]

Primarily concerned with maintaining its remarkable and subtle mood, the book's action is largely painted in broadly-drawn strokes which may be too slow to meet the expectations of most genre fans. However, The King of Elfland's Daughter regally demands its readers proceed at its own careful tempo; drowsy, somnolent, and poetic, its prose works quietly but confidently on the reader until he or she is pleasantly intoxicated and emotionally malleable. Since the quickening and halting of time is one of the book's central motifs, Dunsany doubly ensnares his audience, affording the even initially hesitant reader full entre into his moody twin worlds of Erl and Elfland.

The king of Erl's son, Alveric, is sent by his father to Elfland to seize the Elf King's daughter and ask that she become his bride. Only a day's journey from the king's castle, Elfland is literally fairyland, a radiantly stark and shifting kingdom existing in full sight of humanity, but protected by a perpetually twilit borderland above which only the pale blue elvish mountains can be glimpsed. Dunsany's unmatched descriptions of Elfland's interior are extraordinarily beautiful and otherworldly; by cleverly tying the reality of Elfland to the reader's initial childhood perceptions and memories, Dunsany creates a fairyland which we've all known and participated in but have lost and only very vaguely remember.

One of the constants of the book and its rightful theme is the perpetual lack of significant, emotionally meaningful verbal communication between the characters. The people of Erl and Elfland seem to speak as infrequently to one another as possible, and, unknowingly, always at rather than to one another when they do. Often, even the simplest words which could forestall tragedy go unspoken among the verbally discouraged inhabitants. Thus periods of personal happiness are dream states which have not as yet been shattered by knowledge; and dismay, regret, and melancholy inevitably arrive in the wake of brusque, honest communication, which is all the more brutal for having been so long delayed. The isolation and emotional solitude which surrounds everyone in both kingdoms is what gives the novel its poignancy. Only blunt, self-centered and happy-go-lucky border-jumping troll Lurulu, the novel's comic relief, seems free of sadness.

There is very little evil in either Erl or Elfland; there are no villains, only conflicts between those who do not understand one another, hear only themselves, and thus fall to cross purposes. Except for the wise witch who lives high on the hill among the cabbages, all of the characters in The King of Elfland's Daughter are a combination of naivete and self-concern for whom objectivity is impossible. Dunsany illustrates clashes between male and female temperaments, Christianity and paganism, tradition and originality, Erl and Elfland, hunter and hunted. In each case, neither is entirely in the wrong; but each lacks the ability to see as the other sees. Thus another of the book's themes is an appeal for tolerance, empathy, clarity, and expanded individual perspective.

In spite of a visceral, unexpected, and unusually specific scene involving the hunting of a unicorn, The King of Elfland's Daughter is much closer in tone and scope to Ursula K. LeGuin's masterful A Wizard Of Earthsea and its sequels than it is to Tolkien's coarser epic. However, readers can expect to find themselves immersed to the full in questors, witches, elfin knights, magic runes, moving trees, barren wastelands, disappearing kingdoms, strangling vines, enchanted farmers, talking animals and courtly love.

Though the overall tone of the book suggests early Winter, there are also glorious Springs in first flower, golden early-Autumn afternoons in the harvest fields, and, in Elfland, the eternal and unchanging face of magic, beyond all seasons, time, influence, and fluctuation.

Highly recommended.