Synopses & Reviews
The poetic style and sweeping grandeur of The King of Elfland's Daughter has made it one of the most beloved fantasy novels of our time, a masterpiece that influenced some of the greatest contemporary fantasists. The heartbreaking story of a marriage between a mortal man and an elf princess is a masterful tapestry of the fairy tale following the "happily ever after."
Review
"To begin with, the writing is beautiful. [Dunsany's] words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible....Perhaps this book should come with a warning: it is not a reassuring, by-the-numbers fantasy novel....It's a rich red wine, which may come as a shock if all one has had so far has been cola....Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly." Neil Gaiman, bestselling author of American Gods, from his Introduction
Review
"Inventor of a new mythology and weaver of surprising folklore, Lord Dunsany stands dedicated to a strange world of fantastic beauty...unexcelled in the sorcery of crystalline singing prose, and supreme in the creation of a gorgeous and languorous world of incandescently exotic vision. No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm." H. P. Lovecraft
Review
"[Lord Dunsany] who has imagined colors, ceremonies and incredible processions...has yet never wearied of the most universal of emotions and the one most constantly associated with the sense of beauty; and when we come to examine these astonishments that seemed so alien we find that he has but transfigured with beauty the commons sights of the world." William Butler Yeats
Review
"I shall indeed be happy if this volume contributes to the rediscovery of one of the greatest writers of this century." Arthur C. Clarke
Review
"A fantasy novel in a class with the Tolkien books." L. Sprague de Camp
Review
"Del Rey is to be thanked for bringing these works back into print. No one can understand modern fantasy without understanding its roots, and Lord Dunsany's work is immensely significant as well as enjoyable even today." Katharine Kerr
Review
"Lord Dunsany is the great grandfather of us all." Jane Yolen, winner of the National Book and World Fantasy Awards
About the Author
Lord Dunsany was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth baron of an ancient line. He hunted lions in Africa, taught English in Athens, fought in the Boer and Kaiserian wars, and was wounded in the service of his country. As senior peer of Ireland, he saw three sovereigns crowned at Westminster; part of the renaissance of Irish drama, he hobnobbed with Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory during the great days of Dublin's Abbey Theatre. He was peer, sportsman, soldier, playwright, globe-trotter, and once chess champion of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. He wrote more than sixty books before his death in 1957 and influenced some of the greatest writers of our time including H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Fritz Leiber.