The King of Elfland’s Daughter is Dunsany at his best, able to combine ancient mythological tropes with a unique love of the weird and incredible. The story, briefly, is this: the parliament of a small village called Erl wants more magic in their lives, and they tell the king of their desire. The king ponders this request, then dispatches his son to wed the daughter of the king of Elfland, which will bring magic and splendor to Erl and satisfy the parliament. The young prince travels to the resident witch, and is given by her a magic sword. So armed, he travels to the shifting and mysterious borders of Elfland, past “the fields we know” (in Dunsany’s language), to seek out the princess.
A proper fantasy story would, of course, devote nine or so books to traveling very slowly through the elfish countryside, slowly accumulating plot tokens in order to complete the quest. Dunsany spends one chapter on this journey, then gets to the real point of his story, which is what happens when a girl from Elfland is forced to live in the mortal world, and what happens when the two worlds collide. It’s 1924, and already the good baron is overthrowing tired and worn out fantasy cliches. Lord Dunsany’s story has more in it of culture shock and the price of novelty than magic mcguffin hunting and evil overlord overthrowing.
The prose itself is some of the finest and most magical in all of fantasy literature. It is like Tolkien without the idle sentiment, or like Lovecraft with a greater gift for language and more synonyms for “odd”. A brief sample should suffice:
Near the Castle of Erl there lived a lonely witch, on high land near the thunder, which used to roll in Summer along the hills. There she dwelt by herself in a narrow cottage of thatch and roamed the high fields alone to gather the thunderbolts. Of these thunderbolts, that had no earthly forging, were made, with suitable runes, such weapons as had to parry unearthly dangers.
Lord Dunsany’s prose can fairly be described as “oft-imitated”. It is the sound of fantasy. Rarely has it been surpassed.
Most of Lord Dunsany’s attention is paid to the crafting of his prose, or to the strangeness of his worlds, and not so much to the order and pacing of the story. The plot fades in and out, to be replaced by the interesting journeys of a troll, or reflection on the nature of time, or magic, or science. The formlessness of the narrative in favor of exploration is reminiscent of the animes of Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Kiki’s Delivery Service): the actual story, with its conflict and pacing and so on, takes a back seat to admiring the majesty and splendor of the world, and seeing how the characters react to the new horizons that confront them. If the characters who explored this alien world had ray guns and space suits instead of hunting hounds and rune-encrusted swords, The King of Elfland’s Daughter would be exploratory science fiction in the tradition of Clark and Niven.
Part of the power of The King of Elfland’s Daughter is that it is so very different from what many have come to understand as fantasy. Other early fantasy novels, like Three Hearts and Three Lions, helped define what fantasy is; Dunsany, by contrast, is what fantasy could have been. It’s a different branch on the same tree, one that bears enough similarities with “traditional” fantasy to make the stark differences in mood, story, and theme all the more shocking and original.
There’s nothing in the flow or content of The King of Elfland’s Daughter that resembles “fat fantasy” of the normal kind. The pacing and style of the story more closely resembles “weird fiction”, from the old pulp horror tales of Lovecraft to the dream-like short stories of Gaiman to the artistic strangeness of Unknown Armies . It’s a world where the all-powerful Plot doesn’t guide the heroes’ destinies, where affairs can be epic without the clashing of armies or the quest to overthrow the Evil Overlord, and where the strangeness of things isn’t necessarily for mankind to overcome, exploit, or even understand. It is the Other Fantasy, the hard, creative, dangerous stuff, not the pedestrian escapism that clutters up the shelves. There’s more imagination and splendor in this short book than in five-thousand pages of the latest fantasy tree-killer, and it’s time that Dunsany was remembered as an author who contributed as much as Tolkien, Howard, or any of the other big names to the existence and vibrancy of the fantasy genre.
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