In this series of blog posts, I celebrate Midsummer fairy madness by reviewing tales and novels of fairy abduction. Those fairies aren’t the cute little Disney-fied winged things we think they are. Fairies are dangerous. Fairies are curious. They love to grab humans and spirit them off to fairyland. Two older novels base their magic on the fairy penchant for child-stealing: Lud-in-the-Mist, by Hope Mirrlees, and The Broken Sword, by Poul Anderson.
Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, 1926
Read the e-book free through Project Gutenberg. Click HERE.
When Mirrlees wrote this fantasy novel, she had already established herself as a modernist poet and associate of the influential Bloomsbury Group of avant-garde writers including Virginia Woolf. But other kinds of writing had captured the British imagination, including the fantasy stories of Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (Lord Dunsany), whom many consider the father of modern-day fantasy writing, and George MacDonald, a Scots writer with equal influence. After writing two historical novels, Mirrlees turned to fantasy, too, with Lud-in-the-Mist.
Her novel is set in a fictional quaint village governed by stodgy older politicians. Their main job is to maintain a state of absolute, boring normalcy. It’s of utmost importance, because the village borders a terrible threat, Fairyland. Fairy ways will disrupt their worthy lifestyle of shopkeeping and polite teas and every comfort of bourgeois life. The Lud-in-the-Mist establishment has created elaborate euphemisms to avoid even mentioning the fairy threat, especially the threat of fairy fruit, so enticing to human beings that it drives them mad. No polite and proper resident of the village will so much as utter the words “fairy fruit.” Underneath the normal facade of the town lurks a much more lurid and romantic past. The town’s establishment is intent on reining it in at all costs. But when the son and daughter of Lud-in-the-Mist’s mayor are both abducted into fairyland, the usually staid father sets out to rescue them.
If you read this novel, do not expect the pacing of a present-day fantasy tale. This is a long, slow read. Slow. Did I mention slow? The characters are often self-consciously cutsey, even Hobbit-like. There’s a ton of quaint “atmosphere.” I wonder if British readers take to this kind of thing better than us crass Americans? So why read it at all, you ask, unless as an historical curiosity. THIS: the language is simply gorgeous. Mirrlees was a poet, and her language in this novel is poetic in a good authentic way, not in some schlocky pseudo-archaic way. Your question, reader: do you have the patience for it? If yes, grab this book. If no, give it a miss.
Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword, 1954
Fast-forward to a different era, the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Interesting that The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction doesn’t even mention Poul Anderson in its article on that golden age. He was a seven-time Hugo Award winner, won the Nebula three times, was named a SFWA Grand Master, and on and on. Until now, when I thought of Anderson, I thought of SF. I hadn’t read any of his novels, though. I confess it. To my surprise, I found that Anderson wrote a great deal in the fantasy genre as well. The Broken Sword is one of his earliest published novels. I’m glad I discovered this novel, and glad I have finally started reading Anderson.
The Broken Sword, published the same year as Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, is a fantasy-Norse saga full of heroes, gods, trolls, giants, violence, swords, broken cursed swords (well, one), and all the rest. And fairies. Especially those, although the novel refers to them as elves. In this novel’s terms, I think it’s safe to say that elves and fairies are more or less the same–in the same way Edmund Spenser’s elves and fairies are two words for the same beings. More or less.
In this novel, the medieval English overlord Orm rides off leaving his new-born son unbaptized. Very unwise, because Orm has butchered an entire family of enemies, leaving only an old crone alive. Inconveniently for Orm, the crone is a witch and curses him. She sees a perfect instrument for her vengeance, Orm’s baby son. When she communicates her knowledge to Imric, an elven overlord in the overlapping parallel fairy realm, he leaps at the chance to snatch the infant and exchange it for a half-troll half-elven infant that he himself has engendered in order to have a changeling to leave in the human infant’s place. Imric raises Skafloc, the human boy, as his own in fairyland. Meanwhile, Skafloc’s mother unknowingly nurses her changeling baby, Valgard, thinking him human. Skafloc grows up the perfect elven warrior, violent but honorable. Valgard grows up the consummate human warrior, but hatred smoulders at the heart of his violent ways. We readers wait for the stand-off between these uncanny twins that will surely occur, and the cursed broken sword bides its time to unleash havoc on the world.
I think if I had encountered this novel in my younger years, I would have been enthralled. This novel of a fairy (elven) changeling turns on one of the most canonical and dangerous bits of fairy folklore–the abduction of a human child and the leaving of a fairy child in its place. The novel is also violent. The sexual parts are not graphic, but they may seem unsavory to many present-day readers. My biggest problem with the novel is its language, self-consciously archaic–so much so that in a later revision, Anderson removed a lot of that clumsy vocabulary. I read the original version, though, because I understand the revision also removes some of the sexual and violent underpinnings of the book. I wanted to read the real novel, not some whitewashed version. But the pseudo-medieval language is indeed annoying. That said–when I could clear that trashy language out of my consciousness, I found a great deal of Anderson’s description to be beautifully poetic. I really admire that aspect of the book. Then again, as the novel progresses, it is full of faux-Norse “poetry” that I could have really done without. I think of this book as a kind of flawed masterpiece. The annoying aspects kept intruding, though, so I had a tough time finishing the book.
To summarize: both novels are interesting examples of fantasy in their moment, and interesting examples of plots with fairy abduction at the center.
Next up: More recent novels with plots of fairy abduction.
Fantastes 
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