The King of Elfland's Daughter

The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) is Lord Dunsany's most celebrated novel and a foundational work of modern fantasy literature. The Parliament of the village of Erl, dissatisfied with merely mortal governance, demands that their lord procure a magic ruler. The old lord sends his son Alveric across the twilight border into Elfland to wed Lirazel, daughter of the immortal Elf King. Armed with a magical sword forged from thunderbolts by a witch, Alveric enters that timeless realm, wins Lirazel, and brings her back to the fields we know.

But Lirazel cannot comprehend mortal customs—its church bells, its fleeting seasons, its insistence on worshipping things she does not understand. When a quarrel over her attempts to learn human prayer drives her to unroll the rune her father gave her, the Elf King's magic sweeps her home across the border. Alveric, grief-stricken, spends years wandering the ever-retreating boundary of Elfland in a fruitless quest to reclaim her, while their half-elfin son Orion grows up in Erl, hunting unicorns that stray from the enchanted realm and drawing more and more magical creatures into the mortal world.

Meanwhile, the troll Lurulu and his companions bring wild elfin mischief into Erl, the will-o'-the-wisps haunt its marshes, and the villagers who once demanded magic now curse its presence. In Elfland, Lirazel pines for her son and the mortal world she left behind. At last, moved by his daughter's longing, the Elf King sends forth his greatest rune—one that sweeps Elfland's border over the village of Erl entirely, reuniting Lirazel with Alveric and Orion as the whole land passes out of mortal knowledge and into enchantment forever.

Written in Dunsany's luminous, incantatory prose, the novel explores the tension between the mundane and the magical, the cost of wishing for wonder, and the impossibility of merging two incompatible worlds. It profoundly influenced Tolkien, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Neil Gaiman, and remains one of the most beautiful fantasy novels ever written.