King of Elfland's Daughter » (Reprint)

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.

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."

Gale Research

The Chronicles of Rodriguez, published in 1922, was his first novel, but some critics term his 1924 volume The King of Elfland's Daughter his most successful foray into the genre. AE, the pseudonym under which George Russell wrote, said in the Living Age that the work is "the most purely beautiful thing Lord Dunsany has written." AE praised the lyrical descriptions of the fantasy kingdom and the characters, declaring that "his people loom before us like a dance of animated and lovely shadows and grotesques, but we follow their adventures with excitement, and that means in some way they are symbolic of our own spiritual adventures."