Elfland, Whether You Will or No

One of the things I love about The Kind of Elfland's Daughter is that, for most of the book, none of the characters have any agency. It's not that I'm against characters having agency, but lazy critics so often tend to reach for it as a point of criticism nowadays that it's kind of glorious to read a novel in which all characters, mortal and faerie, are tumbled about in a world of sensory experience.

It is like a dream. Characters take action but the effects of those actions are so arbitrary and have such limited or unpredictable bearing on what follows, they may as well be rolling dice. The book begins with the kingdom of Erl deciding to have the young Prince Alveric marry a princess of Elfland in order to bring magic to the mortal realm. So he gets himself a magic sword, invades the magic realm, kills some antagonistic trees, and meets the beautiful princess. All that sounds like the plot of a novel but it's all dispensed with in the first few short chapters.

As pure luck would have it, the princess, Lirazel, is willing and able to abscond with a total stranger from a strange country. She's the title character and yet the novel spends perhaps the least amount of time with her--and she's also the character with the most agency. Of all the characters, she's the only one who's able to consistently achieve desired results from her chosen actions.

She has a child with Alveric whom they call Orion before she becomes bored with the human realm and her husband's desire that she honour their religious practices. She leaves for Elfland where time doesn't seem to pass. So the bulk of the novel, which is about Orion as a young man, learning to be a great hunter, and Alveric, wandering a wasteland with madmen as companions, takes place over the course of many years while virtually no time passes in Elfland.

Orion learns to hunt and kill unicorns. He enlists the aid of a band of trolls. Alveric is seeking Elfland, which the King of Elfland has caused to recede from Alveric's approach, leaving barren desolation in its wake. In your standard novel, this would all be building to something. Orion would prove himself to his parents and achieve something great for his people by hunting. Alveric would eventually enter and conquer Elfland, perhaps. But the novel's never about that. It's not the effects of their actions that matter but the experience of their actions.

It's a mighty feat for Orion to hunt and kill a unicorn but the achievement has little real meaning. Lord Dunsany beautifully describes the animal, paying particular attention to its powerful neck. But killing it doesn't take magic from the world or anything like that. It's just a really nice trophy. We never know if Lirazel appreciates Alveric's efforts to find her or even understands the sacrifices he makes. They just don't matter next to the glorious, arbitrary and sensual will of Elfland.

One gets the impression that Dunsany worshiped women as beautiful but distant and capricious beings. The only other female character in the book is a witch, also the only other character with real agency.

There's a minor plot about the parliament of Erl becoming suspicious of the magic they invited into their realm yet, like Alveric and Orion's stories, their desires and actions ultimately have little meaning. The book leaves you feeling this may be for the best.

He Can't Talk About Elfland

I'm about halfway through The King of Elfland's Daughter, a 1924 novel by Lord Dunsany. It's good. Like a lot of great fantasy literature, its author shows good instincts for what he should linger on and what he should breeze through quickly.

Alveric, essentially the protagonist, is a young man tasked with marrying the Elfland King's daughter of the title. A lot of time is spent describing his visit to a cottage on the edge of Elfland and the old man who deals there but is peculiarly unwilling to acknowledge the existence of Elfland. Comparatively little time is spent on Lirazel, the title character, herself. She kind of comes off as a jerk, actually. She willingly goes off with Alveric, has his child, but after decades can't be bothered to honour any of the most benign human customs. The intention may have been to make her seem like an innocent child of indigenous people but she comes off more like a rich woman who married a poor man who never understands why she can't buy expensive clothes anymore.

More interesting are the humans trying to comprehend the mysteries of Elfland. And that old man, a leather worker, is a really intriguing character and I like how Dunsany draws out the old man's silence on the topic of Elfland.

And Alveric pondered on many reasons for this. Had the old man been to Elfland in his youth and seen something he greatly feared, perhaps barely escaping from death or an age-long love? Was Elfland a mystery too great to be troubled by human voices? Did these folk dwelling there at the edge of our world know well the unearthly beauty of all the glories of Elfland, and fear that even to speak of them might be a lure to draw them whither their resolution, barely perhaps, held them back? Or might a word said of the magical land bring it nearer, to make fantastic and elvish the fields we know? To all these ponderings of Alveric there was no answer.