The Novel That Inspired a Generation of Fantasy Fiction
One of the great things about fiction—and about genre fiction in particular—is that it creates a sort of spiritual family tree. Each story draws inspiration from an assortment of other existing stories, each of which drew their own inspiration from those that came before. All the way back to the myths and legends told by our forefathers and mothers around the cave fire.
Some of these stories become immortalized in continuous re-releases and film adaptations (like The Odyssey), while are forgotten, relegated to a citation in an author’s note at the back of a bestseller. One such forgotten tome is the 1924 fantasy novel The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter was written by the Irish author commonly known as Lord Dunsany (which was in fact a noble title, not a name; his real name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett. You can see why he chose “Dunsany” for the front cover instead of “Ed Plunkett”).
The story begins with an honorable lord being outed from his position as ruler (an interesting narrative choice by a writer who was himself an honorable lord), because the parliament is getting restless and wants a magical being to lead them. Like any good fairy tale king, the lord sends his son off on a quest to woo—wait for it—the King of Elfland’s Daughter, in order to birth a magical son. If that sounds a little Handmaid’s Tale, don’t worry; it’s all very consensual.
To truly understand where Dunsany’s novel came from and how it became so influential, it’s helpful to know a little bit about his cultural background. The Elfland of Dunsany’s work isn’t extensively built up the way worldbuilding is often done in fantasy and science fiction today. Apart from some beautiful imagery and the haunting sense of otherness on every page, he doesn’t spend a whole lot of time setting the scene. He goes into it with the expectation that the reader will already have some contextual background with this kind of environment.
Although Dunsany was born in England to Irish parents, he spent much of his adult years in his family’s castle in County Meath, Ireland. Fairy folklore was deeply integrated into rural Irish living at this time, and people would often call faeries “the Good Neighbors” (for it was bad luck to refer to them by name). Every family had stories about the sidhe, or fairy kind, who ranged from kind tricksters to malevolent entities and everything in between.
This folkloric pantheon is a unique conglomerate of foundational Irish mythology and animistic folk tales. The Irish mythological saga tells of a group of magical beings, the Tuatha Dé Danann—very similar to the inhabitants of Dunsany’s Elfland, as well as Tolkien’s elves decades later—who were ultimately conquered by the Milesians, a group that evolved into what we now know as humankind. According to the myth, the Tuatha retreated to a world under the hills and became fairies.
The setting of Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter is deeply informed by this saga, as well as earlier stories and ballads written and sung about the heroes of these myths. But, not all folklore is mythic in nature; the Irish at this time were also deeply animist, meaning they believed the natural world around them was alive and had its own stories to tell. The folkloric landscape of their country is filled with creatures of sky, sea, and stone, and heaven help you if you cross them!
“Elfland,” then, became a world parallel to our own where all these influences converged. Additionally, Dunsany added his own characters and constraints to the world of his story, as modern storytellers have done ever since. Like fairy kind themselves, Elfland is ever shifting, ever evolving. With each storyteller it grows and adapts to a new generation.
Dunsany was a contemporary of Irish literati like W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Oscar Wilde—all of whom had one foot firmly in twentieth-century Dublin and another in Elfland.
Perhaps Yeats’s most famous work is his narrative poem The Stolen Child, which tells the story of a human child—or possibly a fairy changeling—who is taken to Elfland by otherworldly beings. The poem shares certain elements with Dunsany’s novel, particularly the idea that a creature of the otherworld can never truly be happy in banal human society. You’ll also see this theme in “beastly bride” type stories, such as the folkloric films The Secret of Roan Inish and Song of the Sea.
Like Yeats and Dunsany, playwright and literary philanthropist Lady Gregory was a collector of traditional folklore. She is credited with gathering and preserving some of Ireland’s oldest myths, which would go on to influence The King of Elfland’s Daughter and those that followed. Gregory felt passionate about preserving the declining culture of her people. Little did she know that this particular mythic pantheon would become one of the most beloved frameworks for future storytellers.
Within the work of these varied writers, an important law was established: the ordinary and magical worlds sit side by side. They can blur, connect, exchange, even procreate, but they will always be pulled in different directions. Like the sun and the moon, like the human man and his fairy bride.
Dunsany, therefore, was drawing from a background in which fairy kind wasn’t a motif regulated to the land of Once Upon a Time. It was a simple fact of living, like storms or tides or the waxing and waning of the moon; something to be treated with companionable reverence, but also a certain degree of caution.
These formative influences merge in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but also in more of Dunsany’s work like The Gods of Pegāna and The Charwoman’s Shadow. Although you’ll find echoes of older folk and fairy tales, these stories follow living, breathing people navigating the intersection of magic and survival in a familiar world. If The King of Elfland’s Daughter was published today, it might fall under the umbrella of “cozy fantasy.”
You’d be hard pressed to find a major speculative fiction writer of this century or the last that wasn’t in some way—directly or indirectly—influenced by this seminal fantasy novel. Tolkien is probably the most famous of these torchbearers. His work, though more epic in scale, uses similar archetypes and storytelling patterns.
J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit was published seven years following The King of Elfland’s Daughter, and his magnum opus Lord of the Rings trilogy appeared thirty years later. It’s easier to see the influence of Dunsany’s work in the later volumes, although by this point—bridging a twenty-three year gap which is not often discussed when Tolkien’s two most famous works are spoken of together—a variety of writers were already exploring this new fantastical tradition.
Tolkien drew from Norse mythology in much the same way as Dunsany’s work was informed by Celtic mythology. Both were humanized and embellished, the world populated by fictional avatars through which the reader could experience that world for themselves. But perhaps the biggest credit given to Lord Dunsany is that, at a time when “fairy stories” were largely understood to be for children, he showed adult readers a way in. A narrow literary niche was suddenly broadened and given new possibilities.
And if it weren’t for Tolkien, Dunsany would likely be forgotten today. The popularity of Tolkien’s work from the ’50s onward encouraged Ballantine Books to reprint The King of Elfland’s Daughter in 1969 as part of its Adult Fantasy series, introducing it to a new generation. Then, of course, both Dunsany and Tolkien went on to influence those that came after them—and now, those emerging writers who are crafting new stories today. Thus the family tree keeps growing.
Dunsany, and his descendants in the spiritual family tree, used the term “beyond the fields we know” to refer to a magical realm just outside our own. If the line sounds familiar, it’s because you may have read it in the works of Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint, Lin Carter, Terri Windling, or Terry Pratchett. But it originated in the pages of The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
Terry Pratchett in his novel Lords and Ladies used Dunsany’s line alongside other famous quotes (such as “East of the Wind, West of the Moon” from the traditional Chinese fairy tale, or “Behind the North Wind” from the Scottish novel by George MacDonald) to allude to places unknown. In doing so, he connected all of these worlds into one larger tapestry of story.
The line comes up again in Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel Stardust, in which he says “And, too ignorant to be scared, too young to be awed, Tristran Thorn passed beyond the fields we know … … and into Faerie.” The quotation is used both literally and metaphorically, representing the threshold between the claustrophobic everyday and the wonder of what lies beyond.
What this shorthand does is creates something like a shared universe between storytellers—a torch that is passed from writer to writer to light the way through the dark woods. After all, isn’t that the magic of any good story?
So when you’re looking for something to read next, think about the invisible threads that connect these creators across time. Motifs occur again and again; settings are revisited and refined and reimagined with each artistic generation. Which, in an age riddled with so much detachment and isolation, is a very comforting thing.
