But the troll in the mouldering loft sat long on his bundle of hay observing the ways of time. And they, in turn, not having first hand knowledge of anything having to do with aging could not easily come to terms with the potential for losing their strength or their beauty to the “harshness of material things and all the turmoil of Time.” Indeed, even its most mundane consequences are liable to overwhelm them: Were a mortal to lose a decade of their life somehow, an elf wouldn’t even begin to know how to sympathize. Something like the Game of Thrones series lacks these sorts of time-related elements altogether.īut Lord Dunsany’s “Elfland” combines these ideas into even broader, more fantastic strokes. In the book Three Hearts and Three Lions, Holger Carlsen’s quest would have ended in disaster if he had gone in to Elf Hill, where “time is strange.” Fantasy since then has gradually developed into something that tends to be much more naturalistic– as if “realism” were now somehow integral to the genre. Take for example the way that time is treated as a recurring theme up to about midway through the twentieth century. It seems to behave in rather a strange fashion in Lothlórien where the fellowship of the ring “could not count the days and nights that they had passed there.” And children returning to Narnia could never tell for sure just how much time would have passed there while they were away. It’s breathtaking in its own right, but being exposed to it somehow makes later, more well known literature snap suddenly into focus due to their shared connection to forgotten lore. Here we have an undiluted synthesis of the fantasy elements that echoed on into the stories we read growing up. Here we have a take on elves, trolls, and witches far different from anything on the shelves today. Here we find the forgotten themes that set up the cadence of twentieth century fantasy literature. It was an excellent choice for that project, too. First published in 1924, Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter was rescued from obscurity by Lin Carter’s work with the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.
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