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3.66 AVERAGE
3.66 AVERAGE
http://lolantaczyta.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/corka-krola-elfow-lord-dunsany-edward-plunkett/
hopeful
inspiring
relaxing
slow-paced
fast-paced
What an odd, interesting book.
I picked it up by chance (and Geo’s idea of what bookshops should carry), and was persuaded to try it by Gaiman, who quoted your favourite jam rolls as an excuse not to be whisked off to the land of the faeries in his introduction to the book, and vouched for Lord Dunsany as a spider Georg among the English nobility. That is to say, that Lord Dunsany was not incapable of writing fantasy.
I personally took tremendous joy in observing just how much it was written by an English lord, because the very first chapter starts like this:
The Parliament of Erl (twelve village men, if you were wondering) convened to decide that they want a magical king to rule over Erl, so that it can become famous across all lands. Their current king, having heard their petition, called his son and said, “The Parliament wants a magical king. I, for one, think it’s a remarkably stupid idea, but it is the Parliament and and the Parliament has spoken, so go fetch your heirloom sword, my son, and win the hand of the King of Elfland’s daughter.”
The back cover of the book advertises the story as a “what happens after a happily ever after” -- which to me is a better pitch than breathless adulations on formative and inspirational footprint of the book on the fantasy genre -- and that wasn't off the mark. There was a lot of poetics waxed about the English meadows and magic of everyday human ways, too, and it wasn’t even too overbearing, but what I liked best was this constantly exhibited attention to social conventions of the people involved, and the curiosity to follow events beyond their usual fairy tale horizon.
Speaking of events, zomg. The pacing. THE PACING. I had war flashbacks to back when I watched Rose of Versailles, an average twenty-minute episode of which had enough plot to fuel a season and a half of Game of Thrones: time flies, the seeds of intrigues get sown, harvested, cooked and served, and there is ample time for a moral lesson at the end. And while not as rich in guillotine action and sparkly candelabras as the RoV, this book’s pacing was breakneck compared to how they write novels these days.
A few more details on the plot below, which could be considered as SPOILERS but are actually an extended way of making a point.
Prince Alveric, who as you now know, had been tasked by his father to find himself a bride from Elfland-- and in the same chapter as the Parliament made its ruling, mind you -- decided that his dad’s sword won’t do him much good, seeing how it isn’t magical as none of his ancestors were magical, either. So he went to seek the help of a witch named Ziroonderel, who lived on the hills where thunderbolts made of meteorites fell from the sky, and where she grew her cabbages. (Ziroonderel is a true fucking MVP of the book.) Prince Alveric interacted with her propelled by narrative inevitability rather than any self-awareness, and simply asked for a magical sword to be made on these hills of meteorite thunderbolts (not cabbages), and completely failed to register how just fucking terrifying and awesome Ziroonderel is.
“Alveric watched her in silence, wondering, not counting time; it may have been for moments, it may have been while the stars went far on their courses. Suddenly she was finished. She stood up with the sword lying on both her hands. She stretched it out curtly to Alveric; he took it, she turned away; and there was a look in her eyes as though she would have kept that sword, or kept Alveric. He turned to pour out his thanks, but she was gone.”
I mean, prince charming or not, Alveric had some room for improvement in his people skills.
The quest, which takes a few chapters of its own, was successful: he got to the saturated and static idyll of the Elfland, captured the attention of princess Lirazel, and stole her away from her daddy, who had issues not unlike Shakespearean Prospero’s. Note to all the single-dad girls out there: do not grow up in a remote location with only your dad for the company, it is known to adversely impact your social life and breed some clingy habits that easily tip into murderlove.
So the princess Lirazel, who is a human -- or elven -- equivalent of a goldfish, was now in the human lands (codeword “fields we know”, thank you Lord Dunsany), getting all “ooh shiny!” over the change of seasons and haystacks and shit. Romance at its finest!
Except not. Realism strikes true.
Alveric needed now to marry the girl, but the local priest went like, nope, no can do. She is not a Christian, and moreover, she is not human. Sorry, my lord, this is above my paygrade. Alveric, the true British lord, told him to “find a way”, so the bureaucratic cleric sighed and set off to find a precedent. (Don’t you love this detail? I sure do.) The closest he got was “marriage vows used by a mermaid who has forsaken the sea” and decided that it would have to do, because even if the elven princess is not the same as a mermaid, they are both heathens anyway and will go to hell.
(See what I mean? Such lordship very fantasy, much delighted.)
Lirazel really tried to understand Christianity and praying, since Alveric wanted her to be Like Other Girls, but she just got so distracted every time by trying to worship some butterflies or moonbeams or haystacks, and all worship looked pretty fucking heathen when she did it anyway. So you could say this bit never really worked out. But they have a baby, so at least the parliament is happy -- one day they will have themselves a magical lord after all, good job Alveric. The baby eventually was called Orion (it took them a while, supposedly Lirazel was too busy spacing out and Alveric was too busy preaching Christian values at her) and grew up babysat by Ziroonderel, who entertained him with magical charms and tales of strange things.
Papa Elf was not happy with this arragnement, because his beloved daughter was no longer warming his lap (I wish I was making this bit up), so he cast a magical rune to bring her back. Except it’s not that straightforward, so the rune was carried into the fields we know by some ADHD troll, who sponsors some of the trippiest chapters in the book, because he’s even more of a goldfish than Lirazel, and actually communes with pigeons and dogs and foxes instead of admiring them at a distance. The troll bypassed Ziroonderel’s magic, handed the rune over to Lirazel, and fucked right off. Lirazel contemplated the rune for a while, but eventually opened it on one of the nights when Christianity got especially annoying. Thus, she made a conscious choice to abandon her son and husband and their village and be back in her daddy's lap, where she could be sad and cry. (Lirazel is not my favourite character, can you tell?)
From here on, the tale of magical divorce continues -- what I said above is barely a half of it, and I haven’t yet recovered from the last radioscript summary to do it in full-- but it does so in the same manner. The book consistently mixes the magical and the mundane, and to me personally, it’s the mixture of registers that was most interesting, leading to more of those hilarious burocratic caveats and lyrical digressions. That, and Ziroonderel, of course.
I picked it up by chance (and Geo’s idea of what bookshops should carry), and was persuaded to try it by Gaiman, who quoted your favourite jam rolls as an excuse not to be whisked off to the land of the faeries in his introduction to the book, and vouched for Lord Dunsany as a spider Georg among the English nobility. That is to say, that Lord Dunsany was not incapable of writing fantasy.
I personally took tremendous joy in observing just how much it was written by an English lord, because the very first chapter starts like this:
The Parliament of Erl (twelve village men, if you were wondering) convened to decide that they want a magical king to rule over Erl, so that it can become famous across all lands. Their current king, having heard their petition, called his son and said, “The Parliament wants a magical king. I, for one, think it’s a remarkably stupid idea, but it is the Parliament and and the Parliament has spoken, so go fetch your heirloom sword, my son, and win the hand of the King of Elfland’s daughter.”
The back cover of the book advertises the story as a “what happens after a happily ever after” -- which to me is a better pitch than breathless adulations on formative and inspirational footprint of the book on the fantasy genre -- and that wasn't off the mark. There was a lot of poetics waxed about the English meadows and magic of everyday human ways, too, and it wasn’t even too overbearing, but what I liked best was this constantly exhibited attention to social conventions of the people involved, and the curiosity to follow events beyond their usual fairy tale horizon.
Speaking of events, zomg. The pacing. THE PACING. I had war flashbacks to back when I watched Rose of Versailles, an average twenty-minute episode of which had enough plot to fuel a season and a half of Game of Thrones: time flies, the seeds of intrigues get sown, harvested, cooked and served, and there is ample time for a moral lesson at the end. And while not as rich in guillotine action and sparkly candelabras as the RoV, this book’s pacing was breakneck compared to how they write novels these days.
A few more details on the plot below, which could be considered as SPOILERS but are actually an extended way of making a point.
Prince Alveric, who as you now know, had been tasked by his father to find himself a bride from Elfland-- and in the same chapter as the Parliament made its ruling, mind you -- decided that his dad’s sword won’t do him much good, seeing how it isn’t magical as none of his ancestors were magical, either. So he went to seek the help of a witch named Ziroonderel, who lived on the hills where thunderbolts made of meteorites fell from the sky, and where she grew her cabbages. (Ziroonderel is a true fucking MVP of the book.) Prince Alveric interacted with her propelled by narrative inevitability rather than any self-awareness, and simply asked for a magical sword to be made on these hills of meteorite thunderbolts (not cabbages), and completely failed to register how just fucking terrifying and awesome Ziroonderel is.
“Alveric watched her in silence, wondering, not counting time; it may have been for moments, it may have been while the stars went far on their courses. Suddenly she was finished. She stood up with the sword lying on both her hands. She stretched it out curtly to Alveric; he took it, she turned away; and there was a look in her eyes as though she would have kept that sword, or kept Alveric. He turned to pour out his thanks, but she was gone.”
I mean, prince charming or not, Alveric had some room for improvement in his people skills.
The quest, which takes a few chapters of its own, was successful: he got to the saturated and static idyll of the Elfland, captured the attention of princess Lirazel, and stole her away from her daddy, who had issues not unlike Shakespearean Prospero’s. Note to all the single-dad girls out there: do not grow up in a remote location with only your dad for the company, it is known to adversely impact your social life and breed some clingy habits that easily tip into murderlove.
So the princess Lirazel, who is a human -- or elven -- equivalent of a goldfish, was now in the human lands (codeword “fields we know”, thank you Lord Dunsany), getting all “ooh shiny!” over the change of seasons and haystacks and shit. Romance at its finest!
Except not. Realism strikes true.
Alveric needed now to marry the girl, but the local priest went like, nope, no can do. She is not a Christian, and moreover, she is not human. Sorry, my lord, this is above my paygrade. Alveric, the true British lord, told him to “find a way”, so the bureaucratic cleric sighed and set off to find a precedent. (Don’t you love this detail? I sure do.) The closest he got was “marriage vows used by a mermaid who has forsaken the sea” and decided that it would have to do, because even if the elven princess is not the same as a mermaid, they are both heathens anyway and will go to hell.
(See what I mean? Such lordship very fantasy, much delighted.)
Lirazel really tried to understand Christianity and praying, since Alveric wanted her to be Like Other Girls, but she just got so distracted every time by trying to worship some butterflies or moonbeams or haystacks, and all worship looked pretty fucking heathen when she did it anyway. So you could say this bit never really worked out. But they have a baby, so at least the parliament is happy -- one day they will have themselves a magical lord after all, good job Alveric. The baby eventually was called Orion (it took them a while, supposedly Lirazel was too busy spacing out and Alveric was too busy preaching Christian values at her) and grew up babysat by Ziroonderel, who entertained him with magical charms and tales of strange things.
Papa Elf was not happy with this arragnement, because his beloved daughter was no longer warming his lap (I wish I was making this bit up), so he cast a magical rune to bring her back. Except it’s not that straightforward, so the rune was carried into the fields we know by some ADHD troll, who sponsors some of the trippiest chapters in the book, because he’s even more of a goldfish than Lirazel, and actually communes with pigeons and dogs and foxes instead of admiring them at a distance. The troll bypassed Ziroonderel’s magic, handed the rune over to Lirazel, and fucked right off. Lirazel contemplated the rune for a while, but eventually opened it on one of the nights when Christianity got especially annoying. Thus, she made a conscious choice to abandon her son and husband and their village and be back in her daddy's lap, where she could be sad and cry. (Lirazel is not my favourite character, can you tell?)
From here on, the tale of magical divorce continues -- what I said above is barely a half of it, and I haven’t yet recovered from the last radioscript summary to do it in full-- but it does so in the same manner. The book consistently mixes the magical and the mundane, and to me personally, it’s the mixture of registers that was most interesting, leading to more of those hilarious burocratic caveats and lyrical digressions. That, and Ziroonderel, of course.
adventurous
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This is a novel that was published in 1924 and can easily be called a classic of Pre-Tolkien fantasy fiction. The language is flowery and poetic in a way that makes the story feel even older than it is and increased my enjoyment of this faery tale.
adventurous
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Almost had a point but didn’t stick the landing
This is written in such a way that makes it hard to understand. You have to read things over more than once just to grasp a hint of a meaning. There is very little character development and in general, the whole thing sucks. Don’t waste your time!
Very unsure of what to make of it, as yet, which is an integral part of its charm. A love-letter to the beauty of life, in all its cyclical mundanity, told with all the bias of a sportsman and deftly disguised as a fairy-tale or fable. Started out in a straighforward manner, but split into several narrative strands after the initial fifty or so pages, which immediately added to its interest. Memorable narratorial interventions were made — the "historical fact" segment was hilarious, and I appreciate the Narrator's deference to Tennyson as a Poet. I am still pondering the ending, which is neither abrupt, exactly, nor undeserved by this text, but oddly wistful, which I imagine (upon reflection) is precisely what it is supposed to be.