The King of Elfland's Daughter
About this ebook
Before the fellowships and wardrobes and dire wolves . . .
. . . there was the village of Erl and the Kingdom of Elfland.
Considered formative to the development of the fairy tale and high fantasy subgenres, The King of Elfland's Daughter follows Alveric, who leaves home on a quest with a few basic instructions: locate the Princess Lirazel in Elfland, convince her to return to Erl and marry him, and together produce the first magical Lord of Erl.
But what happens when a village gets exactly what it asked for?
How does an elf learn to live as a human?
Is love lost once, lost forever?
The people of Erl are about to find out.
Take a walk through the fields we know and see if you can spot the pale-blue peaks of the Elfland Mountains. Fans of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Neil Gaiman will adore Lord Dunsany’s influential 1924 classic as much as those authors themselves did.
“No amount of mere description can convey more than a fraction of Lord Dunsany's pervasive charm.” —H. P. Lovecraft
“We find that he has but tranfigured with beauty the common sights of the world.” —William Butler Yeats
“No one can understand modern fantasy without understanding its roots, and Lord Dunsany's work is immediately significant as well as enjoyable even today.” —Katharine Kerr
“A fantasy novel in a class with the Tolkien books.”—L. Sprague de Camp
About the author
Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, was the eighteenth Baron of Dunsany as well as a writer and dramatist. Most notably known for his fantasy writing, Dunsany published over sixty works, including short stories, poetry, plays, novels, and essays. He became a prominent figure in the Irish Literary Revival in the early twentieth century, during which he worked with fellow writer W. B. Yeats. Dunsany is best known for his collections Fifty-One Tales and The Gods of Pegana, as well as his novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter, each of which continues to influence fantasy writers today. Dunsany died from appendicitis at the age of seventy-nine.
Paul Di Filippo is a prolific science fiction, fantasy, and horror short story writer with multiple collections to his credit, among them The Emperor of Gondwanaland and Other Stories, Fractal Paisleys, The Steampunk Trilogy, and many more. He has written a number of novels as well, including Joe’s Liver and Spondulix: A Romance of Hoboken. Di Filippo is also a highly regarded critic and reviewer, appearing regularly in Asimov’s Science Fiction and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. A recent publication, coedited with Damien Broderick, is Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985–2010.
