The people of the obscure village of Erl demand to be ruled by a magic lord, so their aging ruler sends his son Alveric on a quest into Elfland to wed the elfin princess Lirazel. Alveric wins her hand and brings her back to Erl, and the couple have a son, but Lirazel struggles to adapt to human society and its stranger customs, like time and change. When a scheme by her father, the King of Elfland, spirits her away and Elfland itself withdraws beyond the fields we know, Alveric sets out on a long and increasingly hopeless quest to find where it has gone.
The King of Elfland's Daughter is written in the ornate, pseudo-archaic prose style for which Lord Dunsany is best known. Some of his contemporaries doubted the style could sustain a novel-length work, but the Irish writer George Russell called it "the most purely beautiful thing Lord Dunsany has written." The novel moves through themes of longing for fantastical things lost, the strange perception of time in Elfland versus the human world, sanity and madness, the fear of the unknown, and the old warning to be careful what you wish for.
Widely regarded as one of the foundational works of modern fantasy, the novel would go on to influence writers including Neil Gaiman, who wrote an introduction to a later edition, and inspired a 1977 progressive rock album featuring Christopher Lee as a vocalist. Readers drawn to lyrical, dreamlike fantasy and doomed romance will find in The King of Elfland's Daughter one of the genre's enduring classics.
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