2018 read #7: The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany.

The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany
242 pages
Published 1924
Read from February 22 to March 7
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

This book had been on my must-read list for a number of years. Early modern fantasy often gets overlooked, as if the genre sprang fully formed from the pen of Tolkien in 1937, but I've always been drawn to origins and primordial stages of evolution. As a would-be fantasist myself, there's an appeal to discovering lost phyla from the genre's early diversification, before the success of Tolkien encouraged so many imitators. Of course, there are any number of good reasons for why only the crunchiest of nerdlings discuss the likes of Lord Dunsany, as I was doomed to discover here.

Lord Dunsany was primarily a short story writer, and it shows in the episodic chapters, strings of vignettes connected by repetitive and unnecessary padding. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I claim that a good editor could salvage an excellent story from this book by trimming about 80% of its bulk. My favorite passages deal with the moor-witch Ziroonderel, whether relating how she casts a stupendous sword that unites the magic of runes with the science of meteorite metal, or having her give a climactic speech that delivers the book's thesis statement: "And you that sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended." It is a generational truism that any younger demographic might apply to their elders, but which feels especially apropos when a generation that congratulated itself for decades about Woodstock votes in a fascist.

Ziroonderel is the most interesting part of the book, but the rest of it wouldn't be so bad... if, again, one could trim it down to about fifty pages. Because fifty pages is pretty much all the story there is. The rest repeats, with minor variations, motifs of getting to, leaving, and wishing to return to Elfland, or longing to return to Earth once there; the second half of the novel bogs down in an endless cycle of unicorn hunting, which my Beagle-nurtured sentiments found almost obscene. Dunsany attempts to emulate heroic poetry in his prose, but his attempts pretty much amount to repeating a few set phrases every few paragraphs. I would not be surprised if an analysis revealed that "the fields we know" comprised no less than 10% of the total word count. It's no wine-dark sea, let's say that much.

In the end, I'm glad I struggled through Elfland. A few rare moments of genuine magic shone through the dross of Dunsany's aimless wanderings in search of an editor. But I'm gonna have to put off any attempt to read MacDonald's Phantastes for a while. I'm gonna need to read some books from the age of efficient storytelling, first.