Foreword
PAUL DI FILIPPO
“That Shimmering Line of Silver . . . The Gleaming Line Comes On”
In the pages of The Times Dispatch from Richmond, Virginia, for the issue of November 23, 1924, we encounter a review by the improbably and seemingly contrivedly monikered Hunter Stagg. (In reality, Hunter Stagg was a well known book person who lived from 1895 to 1960, and came by his given and family names in the usual unassuming manner.) The item under Stagg’s critical lens is the newest book from Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (KOED, if you will). Stagg places it firmly in the then-current Gaelic Revival school populated by William Butler Yeats, James Stephens and others—a not incorrect, albeit incomplete assessment. Although Stagg admires the book’s “rhythm and cadence,” its “limpid prose” and “beautiful style,” he finds it bereft of “intellectual content,” too long, and lacking in sufficient dramatic action. He also charges Dunsany with failing to distinguish between “phantasy and whimsy.”
It is easy to see, at nearly a century’s remove, that posterity has left Stagg’s authentic, learned, but blinkered opinions on the dustheap of history, while validating and enshrining Dunsany’s novel as a fantasy classic. Far from being guilty of Stagg’s charges, the book is just long enough, rich with startling and original otherworldly conceits and imagery, and a fine blend of naturalism and “phantasy.” As for “intellectual content,” Dunsany never intended to mimic Shaw or Wells. KOED is primarily a novel of emotions, spirituality, numinous longings and romantic aspirations—matters of the heart and soul and anima, not matters of the head. But even in the latter category, the novel is not entirely lacking, since it gives us some useful insights into matters of governing.
Stagg’s misprisions, his deficit in understanding, was probably not entirely his fault, for he was generally a fair and educated judge. But Dunsany was pioneering virgin territory, as he had been doing since the start of his career, all in the service of establishing the parameters of the modern fantasy novel, a mode for which readers did not necessarily yet have the proper reading protocols. If today we see Dunsany’s achievements more clearly, it is only because we have been well trained by the thousands of books that have followed the paths charted by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878-1957), paths which extend deep “beyond the fields we know” and which have been latterly trodden by his heirs and students and lineage extenders. As critic John Clute, in his Encyclopedia of Fantasy, opines: “[Dunsany] was instrumental in creating the essential autonomous venues within which modern Fantasy could be told. Not only does any tale which Crosshatches between this world and Faerie (or any self-contained Otherworld) owe a Founder’s Debt to LD, but the Secondary World created by J R R Tolkien—from which almost all Fantasylands have devolved—also took shape and flavour from LD’s example.”
From his very first book, The Gods of Pegā na, appearing in 1905, when the author was only twenty-seven years old, a collection of near-prose poems which had the unanticipated temerity to create a whole pantheon and its myths, Dunsany seemed intent on rethinking and reinvigorating the Victorian fantasy tradition that had been exemplified by such early masters as William Morris, George MacDonald, and Andrew Lang. Although decades older than Lost Generation writers like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dunsany at times seems to have shared their impulse to rethink all the old shibboleths that had been invalidated by World War I and allied technological and cultural trends. Like James Branch Cabell, born just one year after Dunsany, our author infuses, albeit very subtly, a certain Jazz Age sensibility into his works of this period. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine Dunsany’s novel occupying the pocket of a trendy flapper’s raccoon coat, or lying on an Art Deco coffee table along with issues of The Smart Set and Black Mask. Reading the Dunsany books of this period (he continued writing very capably almost up till his death) always conjures up for me a contemporaneous visual style, associated with such artists as Sidney Sime (who did indeed illustrate many Dunsany stories), Kay Nielsen, and Maxfield Parrish.
Nonetheless, like all great fantasy, the book has its eternal aspect as well. KOED’s story—simultaneously cast as a Renaissance fable (allusion to these events as taking place in the 1500s occurs in the twentieth chapter titled “A Historical Fact”), and also as a modern parable—harks to essential and unchanging verities of the human condition.
We open in the small village of Erl, currently governed by an aging king. The town’s roster of influential advisory citizens, like a bevy of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt types (the novel of that name, we note, was 1922), want their town to stand out, become famous, and attract tourists and trade. If only we had some magic, they reason, that would do the trick! And so the king obligingly dispatches his only child, Alveric, to cross the borders of Elfland and wed Lirazel, the King of Elfland’s daughter. Alveric secures a magic sword from the witch Ziroonderel and sets out. He achieves his quest, and returns with his otherwordly bride. To the pair is born a son, Orion, whose upbringng is entrusted later to the witch Ziroonderel. When Lirazel finally heeds a numinous summons to return to her native realm, Alveric is left a romantically distraught “widow,” a bereft seeker wandering “the fields we know” in search of reentry to Elfland. Years pass, and Orion is now a young lad, a mighty hunter whose favored prey is unicorns unwisely straying from Elfland. Eventually securing from that same fabulous country a pack of troll helpers led by one Lurulu, Orion too begins to dream of reuniting with his mother. But Lirazel is fully under the sway of her imperious father, who withdraws the borders of Elfland forever away. Meanwhile, the parliament of Erl find that the desired magical attractions for their town have become a bit much. Finally the day comes when the King relents, and moves magically to encompass Erl within Elfland’s borders, granting both mortals and fey their hearts’ desires, for reunion and transcendence.
“They saw it too, a shimmering line of silver, or a little blue like steel, flickering and changing with the reflection of strange passing colours. And before it, very faint like threatening breezes breathing before a storm, came the soft sound of very old songs. It caught, as they all stood gazing, one of Vand’s furthest sheep; and instantly its fleece was that pure gold that is told of in old romance; and the shining line came on and the sheep disappeared altogether. They saw now that it was about the height of the mist from a small stream; and still Vand stood gazing at it, neither moving nor thinking. But Niv turned very soon and beckoned curtly to Zend and seized Alveric by the arm and hastened away towards Erl. The gleaming line, that seemed to bump and stumble over every unevenness of the rough fields, came not so fast as they hastened; yet it never stopped when they rested, never wearied when they were tired, but came on over all the hills and hedges of Earth; nor did sunset change its appearance or check its pace.”
My very condensed summary of KOED’s plot ignores a wealth of glorious and mundane incidents—more than enough material to satisify anyone except Hunter Stagg—everything from Orion’s unique education to his mature hunting forays; from Alveric’s long wanderings with demented companions to Lurulu’s fascination with the world of humans; from the consternation of the troll-beleaguered townspeople to the carefully cultivated nescience of the citizens who dwell close to the borderland of faerie. And all of the telling is couched in the resplendent yet humble, gloriously soaring yet earth-anchored prose of Dunsany. The temptation to quote passages at length is strong. I will indulge just once more.
“As the trolls scurried earthwards to laugh at the ways of man, Lirazel stirred where she sat on her father’s knee, who grave and calm on his throne of mist and ice had hardly moved for twelve of our earthly years. She sighed and the sigh rippled over the fells of dream and lightly troubled Elfland. And the dawns and the sunsets and twilight and the pale blue glow of stars, that are blended together forever to be the light of Elfland, felt a faint touch of sorrow and all their radiance shook. For the magic that caught these lights and the spells that bound them together, to illumine forever the land that owes no allegiance to Time, were not so strong as a sorrow rising dark from a royal mood of a princess of the elvish line. She sighed, for through her long content and across the calm of Elfland there had floated a thought of Earth; so that in the midmost splendours of Elfland, of which song can barely tell, she called to mind common cowslips, and many a trivial weed of the fields we know. And walking in those fields she saw in fancy Orion, upon the other side of the boundary of twilight, remote from her by she knew not what waste of years. And the magical glories of Elfland and its beauty beyond our dreaming, and the deep deep calm in which ages slept, unhurt unhurried by time, and the art of her father that guarded the least of the lilies from fading, and the spells by which he made day-dreams and yearnings true, held her fancy no longer from roving nor contented her any more. And so her sigh blew over the magical land and slightly troubled the flowers.”
Dunsany’s great theme, embodied across several characters, is the unfathomable innate longing among all creatures of higher consciousness, mortal, troll and elf alike, for some glimpse of a world or plane of existence where the heart can be untroubled and at peace, and where an individual may feel free of care and at ease, in harmony with the universe. The phrase “the fields we know”—present from the actual Preface onwards, cropping up frequently throughout the book—stands in contrast to this “high place” (to use Cabell’s coinage for such a nirvana). And yet, like a good Zen teacher, Dunsany’s ultimate secret is that samsara—the fields we know, full of discomfort and longing—can become identical with nirvana. The two are not really separate or antithetical after all, given the right vision or mindset. This lesson is conveyed to us by the literal merger of the two realms at book’s end.
This conception and weltanschauung has been the engine of much great fantasy subsequent to KOED, from the work of Jack Vance (note his appropriation of the name “Lurulu” for the title of his final novel) to Peter Beagle to Karin Tidbeck (her recent novel The Memory Theater is very Dunsanyesque), but finds its grandest expression in John Crowley’s Little, Big, which might almost be seen as a secret sequel to KOED, when we focus our attentions on the book’s resonant portrayal of the fey, its bittersweet melancholy tone, and its concentration on father-son dynamics, as well as its many allied stylistic and narrative riffs.
Indeed, Dunsany’s invisible hand continues to bestow its ghostly blessing across the whole field of fantasy.
Today the castle-centric, 1600-acre estate where Lord Dunsany once dwelled remains in the family’s hands. The current lord of the manse and holder of that esteemed title is not a writer, however, but a youngish fellow named Randall Plunkett, “a 38-year-old, who was once a steak-eating bodybuilding death metal fan with no interest in land, [but who] is now vegan and on an environmental mission.” Plunkett is intent on reverting his lands to their pristine, wild conditions, to encourage a diversity of flora and fauna beyond that of the typical manicured “fields we know.” In some sense this scion of his famous ancestor seems intent on turning his estate into, well, Elfland.
The human—or elvish—heart appears to want the same things throughout all eternity. It was Lord Dunsany’s gift to be able to couch that realization in beautiful and affecting tales.
NOTE
‘People think you’re an idiot’: death metal Irish baron rewilds his estate: