Download Kingdoms of Elfin (A Delta book) eBook

Just started reading this book and find it most extrordinarly enjoyable. Wondered about my purchase but must say it comes up to my expectations so far. Thank you.

This was an engaging read, which made me happy as I bought if for the cover art!

If there can be such a thing as a clear-headed, unsentimental study of a phenomenon that doesn't exist, then this 20th century English author and formidable fantasist (Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot) has accomplished exactly that.

Kingdoms of Elfin consists of sixteen stories most of which appeared in the New Yorker in the early to mid 1970's. Warner's last work, it was published posthumously in 1977.

The stories are loosely linked - an occasional character will appear in more than one story, a couple of Elvin courts are the settings for multiple stories. With the exception of one set partly in Persia, they take place in various Elvin Kingdoms located in Western Europe from the late middle ages to just before the end of the 19th century.

These small separate realms remind me of the jigsaw puzzle of tiny states that made up so much of Central Europe before the late 19th century. Each has its own customs and traditions. For instance the kingdom that considers itself the most sophisticated and has the most elaborate etiquette is famous for its hunting pack of werewolves.

The fairies are not immortal; they live for centuries and have no souls. They have wings but using them is distinctly déclassé. Only servants are supposed to fly. Fairy magic is rudimentary and they are feckless, easily distracted, casually cruel to the humans they encounter (and occasionally abduct).

An adventurous fairy in the 17th century travels from the mortal land of Holland to Persia the place where their race originated. There he encounters and barely escapes astounding magic and savage cruelty. The inhabitants of the Elvin Kingdoms by contrast are more like mortals than they are like their ancestors.

This is Sylvia Townsend Warner at her best - a lean, spare, evocative collection of fairy tales, but for adults, not children. These fairies are tough, cold, selfish beings, yet all the more glamorous and fascinating for that. Seeing them struggle with everyday problems, made all the more difficult sometimes for being fairies, dealing with age, death, birth, and all-too human conditions makes for an involving narrative. The Kingdom of Broceliande that Warner creates is an enduring creation - this book has been a font of inspiration for many authors, and you can trace the development of Warner's style throughout the stories. Never condescending, always brilliant, this collection is a taut narrative of different characters living in the same world as we do, but with a twist. Sometimes dispassionate, sometimes all too human in their reactions to disaster, stress, love, death, anger, Warner's fairies are not for the faint at heart, or those imagining pink and gold gossamer beings to be found at the bottom of the garden. They pack a punch - worth reading at any age. I discovered these in grade school, and am still reading them in my forties. A must-read for any fan of speculative literature, or for any Warner devotee. They translate the human experience in quite a unique way, and I cannot recommend them enough.

I have been spellbound by these stories for years. Warner's fairies are not exactly human - they would be much blander if they were warm and cuddly. Instead, reading about them is like letting a pile of multifaceted, multicolored jewels run through your fingers, sparkling and glittering. Truly something rare and strange.

(I don't own this book, alas. I've read it many times as a library book, and how I wish it would come back into print so I could buy a copy.)

I have an unusual history with this book-- for the last 20 years I have acquired it in secondhand stores and then, usually after reading it again, I sell it. I have just finished rereading it again and have decided that this time, since it has no resale value to speak of, I will tear out the only stories of true narrative merit and gleefully throw the rest of the damn thing away. And also, since there are far too many people giving this thing glowing reviews on both Amazon and Goodreads, to add my critique.

What keeps me buying this collection is those 2 stories of unblemished merit-- the first being "The One and the Other," which concerns the lives and fortunes of a mortal changeling in Elphame and the fairy child left in his place. Their lives intersect at the end of the story (and the end of their lives) in a way that is both literary and masterful storytelling in a more classic tradition. The second story, "Five Black Swans," depicts the death of Queen Tiphaine of Elphame.

Queen Tiphaine, ruler of Elphame (one of the numerous "kingdoms of Elfin" that provide environments for this book), fascinated me enough to make a very detailed drawing of her a long time ago, as she is presented as the very same "Queen of Faerie" in the ballad of "True Thomas." No other of the Elfin Queens matches her portrayal, in fact many of them are presented as distressing banal and neurotic in spite of their rank.

Once upon a time I heard someone describe the failure to sustain interest in the later works of a talented author (in whom we had both had an avid interest when this author's career began) by saying rather than firstly desiring to tell a good story, she went wrong by wanting to "commit literature." I see this as exactly what has happened in Warner's "Elfin" book; the wellspring of the banal tediousness that pervades most of the rest of the stories, which is mistaken by the "urbane" for satisfying literature.

A mistaken view that is perpetuated in the favorable reviews of this book is that the opposite of the romantic moonlight and gossamer notion of fairies is a relentless harping on their cruelty, banality, whimsicalness, etc. presented in the form of cynical, tongue in cheek narratives. In the former instance, fairies become a projective device for saccharine romance, in this instance, its obverse, a disenchanted "knowingness" that cynically pretends to be wiser than the romantic about human nature.

There is no denying that Warner had genuine craft, education and worldliness. The literary syntax with which she had written her stories was so skillful that it obscured how boring and cynical her take on "human" nature ultimately is. So many of the stories have fragments of description or concepts that are genuinely inspired-- strange notions about fairy customs, elfin longevity, rarely bits of magic, dealings with mortals in various guises, character sketches (the appearance of the Persian Peri Queen Pehlevi, the apparition of a female spirit at a wellspring, etc.). It makes these stories worth at least one read. And yet these jewels of description are assembled into artifacts that feel largely fraudulent to me-- by the time I am halfway through the book I start skimming through the boring parts faster and faster.

One of my pet peeves in "literature" is to introduce a female character in detail whose sole purpose is to give birth (and usually die right afterwards) to the putative character/s of narrative interest, which is what happens in one of the later stories, "Castor and Pollux" in which much detail is wasted on the exceptional beauty of Nel, who is "compromised" by a mortal and dies giving birth to twins, who grow up to have ultimately pointless lives like most of the characters in most of the stories. This is but one example of a subtheme endlessly repeated in these novels-- that people's doings don't really matter. It doesn't signify whether they are fairies or not.

In the old lineages of storytelling, what characters do-- MATTERS. This modernist/postmodernist attraction to nihilistic, allegedly "slice of life" forms of narrative turns me off in general.* I especially dislike it when it is applied to realms of lore, myth and archetype. In the final analysis, this is probably why Warner's book, despite her multiple gifts as a writer, ultimately repels me.

(*I dislike Del Toro's movie PAN'S LABYRINTH for much the same reason, co-opting the traditional narrative in order to present a "pomo" revision that is "adult," "mature," and "realistic" in its bleakness and unredeemed ending. But that's a subject for another review...."

I tried and tried to finish these awful stories but they dragged on and on-

Was there ever an END ? If you want to read a good Fairy/Elf story check out the author Jodie Forrest.....