Episode 4: The King of Elfland’s Worm or The Fields We Know
- James Hedrick
- May 12
- 12 min read
Today at Something About Dragons, we’ll be discussing the history of the fantasy genre in reference to two highly influential early genre stories: The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany, and The Worm Ouroboros, by E.R. Eddison. While influential – Tolkien in particular liked The Worm Ouroboros – these two books were fairly obscure after their initial publication but were brought back to prominence in the late 60’s and early ‘70’s by the famous Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edited by Lin Carter. Technically, The Worm Ouroboros was published as a Ballantine Adult Fantasy prior to the beginning of the series proper, when Lin Carter was installed as the editor. As were A Voyage to Arcturus and the Lord of The Rings, for that matter.
But Dunsany’s The King of Elfland's Daughter was the second “official” publication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series proper. Several of the authors we’ll be discussing over the next several weeks – including Hope Mirrlees, Clark Ashton Smith, Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp, Poul Anderson – more or less owe their place in the fantasy "cannon” to the Ballantine series and Carter’s editorial decisions. To be sure, some of the pulp material got more of a boost from Gary Gygax’s Appendix N from the 1979 AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide, which we'll discuss later. Today, we’ll introduce the Ballantine series and cover it more in coming weeks, along with the effect of both Ballantine and Appendix N on the history of fantasy literature.
Instead of looking at each book more-or-less individually today, I want to talk about the books together and tease out two particular threads in the history of fantasy literature and how the books interact with them:
The state of fantasy as a genre at the time of the publication of these books; and,
The nature of developing the secondary world where the fantastic lives.
First, let’s get the summaries out of the way. The Worm Ouroboros was published in 1922. E.R. Eddison’s story is straightforward enough high fantasy. The Lords of Demonland are fighting against King Gorice and the Witchlanders. Lesser lands like Impland, Pixieland, etc. exist, but the monikers are basically just country/nationality names. There are sadly no actual demons or witches. The Demolanders are briefly mentioned to have horns, but everyone is basically an uber-epic hero who just stepped out of a Beowulf B-side. The themes are cyclical, the influences are obviously Norse and Medieval sagas, and the whole thing is written in a faux Jacobean English – lots of thees and thous and flowery language – though some sources better able to analyze the language than I am say it’s pretty accurate Shakespearean-era English. I’ll leave that for better equipped academics to judge.
The Worm Orobouros is also a very pro-war, hero-centered story. To the extent that the one chapter featuring a non-heroic POV character – a Demonland soldier – feels really out of place, and the solider spends the entire chapter telling his father how awesome the main characters like Lord Juss are, how many gallons of blood they must have spilled, etc. Honestly, language aside, the utter lack of nuance – or even care – for anyone not a heroic leader can be really jarring for a modern reader 100+ years after publication.
Notwithstanding that, there are some fantastic scenes. The first and last scenes of the book featuring the Witchland emissary’s visit that kickstarts the whole plot are particularly memorable. But to call the book fawning is an understatement, and its unabashedly pro-war stance is odd for a book published just a couple of years after the horrors of WWI trench warfare. The book is obviously an attempt to reclaim some of the martial glory of past ages. I’ll leave it to you to determine how well Eddison succeeded.
Conversely, The King of Elfland's Daughter, published in 1924, involves the love story between Alveric, the heir to the land of Erl, and Lirazel, the titular King of Elfland’s daughter. It’s much more of a fairy-tale style story. The Parliament of Erl tells Alveric’s dad, the lord of Erl, that they want to be ruled by a magic aristocrat, because that has always worked out so well in the past. Alveric, heir of Erl, quests to Elfland for a bride. He wins the hand of Lirazel after viciously murdering all her bodyguards (one gets better). Lirazel comes to Erl, they have a son, she misses her fairy folks and returns to Elfland. Alveric abandons Erl, and hopelessly wanders the Earth looking for Lirazel, Kung Fu-style, while leaving his half-elven son Orion to be raised by the local witch. Orion then recruits some Elfland trolls so he can hunt unicorns. Lirazel also misses her son and husband back in Elfland. A lot of stuff happens, but, eventually, the King of Elfland uses powerful magic to…annex Erl and bring it into Elfland, and everyone lives happily ever after. But not really.
The language is full of Dunsany’s slightly archaic, high-fantasy style, but not nearly to the extent of The Worm Ouroboros. The overall theme is wistfulness and at times futility – Alveric’s arc is basically: what’s the point of a magic sword if you can’t find anyone to swing it at? – with an additional helping of “be careful what you wish for.”
Honestly, I’m really selling both books awfully short with one paragraph summaries. The Worm Ouroboros is basically a Norse/Germanic-style epic, lots of monster slaying, boasts, etc. It’s fun once you can get through the language. While I eventually decided that I personally detest the book’s message and themes, there was a point at which The Worm Ouroboros’s language clicked, and my enjoyment of reading the story, as a heroic tale, really took off. Sort of like how bilingual folks often describe flipping a switch to think in a different language, this book really benefits from achieving the kind of mental approach that lets the language resonate and be appreciated aesthetically instead of a barrier. The King of Elfland's Daughter is also just a fantastic read, filled with depth, though I was getting a little tired of the phrase “the fields we know” before the final sentence turned it around. I’m leaving out a LOT, so go check them out.
But what we have here in the 1920’s, as the fantasy genre begins to coalesce, is several books that didn’t only influence later writers, but formed the foundation of the genre as a genre. For example, L. Sprague de Camp – a fantasy author from the pulps in the 40’s – called The King of Elfland's Daughter, “A fantasy novel in a class with the Tolkien books.” The New York Review of Science Fiction from 2017 called it, “Unquestionably the best work of fantasy ever written, a stunning tour-de-force of enormous dimensions that has never been equaled.” A bit hyperbolic perhaps, but not uncalled for.
In technical terms, speculative fiction is all discombobulated for the first couple decades of the 20th century. You can see this in several of the books that we have covered arguably being more influential on non-fantasy genre fiction (A Voyage to Arcturus in science fiction, House on the Borderland in horror, Oz, Tarzan, etc.) than on the fantasy genre. But now we’re going to really dig into some of the stories that formed the basis for the fantasy genre as a genre and not interesting, influential outliers or beloved children’s books. Both of this weeks’ books, The Worm Ouroboros and The King of Elfland’s Daughter, are obviously, inarguably fantasy books.
Importantly, these books and this genre aren’t called “fantasy” yet. Eddison specifically calls The Worm Ouroboros a “romance”, a term that Tolkien and Lewis and earlier fantasy authors used as well. These authors viewed themselves as modern expressions of a long tradition of medieval or renaissance “romances”. These are essentially adventure stories, in the tradition of medieval reinterpretation by 19th century writers like George MacDonald, William Morris, and Sarah Coleridge. So “romance” would have likely been the preferred term for most authors of this kind of adult, high fantasy at the time, particularly English authors. Describing this genre as “fantasy” is something that really doesn’t become de rigueur until after the publication of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the late 60’s and 70’s.[1]
But many of the standard tropes of the fantasy genre are here, in all their quasi-medieval glory. Conquest-loving, evil wizards. Secondary worlds, medieval-ish settings, quests, etc. The Worm Ouroboros does have a Voyage to Arcturus-style beginning and technically takes place on the planet Mercury. However, that brief sop to Modernism lasts barely a chapter before the narrator is gone, the framing device is dropped, and neither ever seen again nor has any effect on the plot. It’s pure heroic fantasy saga for the next…several hundred pages. I don’t know. I read it as an eBook.
Suffice it to say, these are still early fantasy genre novels, but they are undoubtedly within the core of the genre, not influential outliers. Even if the genre doesn’t have a name yet.
And if you’ll permit me a brief sidenote, The Worm Ouroboros offers us another interesting fantasy “what if” scenario. While last week we talked about A Voyage to Arcturus being a plausible alternative Lord of the Rings-sized influence on the genre, I’ll admit that contemplating an alternate history where A Voyage to Arcturus takes flappers by storm the way the hippie generation grokked Tolkien does seem a bit unlikely. However, contemplating a situation where The Worm Ouroboros becomes fantasy’s urtext is much more reasonable. It really is a fantastic read, once you embrace the language, and it includes many of the same saga-esque trappings that Tolkien mined for inspiration. Honestly, it’s probably the Second World War in a generation that puts the kibosh on Eddison’s vision of the fantasy genre as much as the language barrier.
Now, let’s take stock of where the burgeoning fantasy genre is in the early-mid 1920’s. The Worm Ouroboros was published in 1922, The King of Elfland's Daughter was published in 1924, and Lud-in-the-Mist, which we’ll cover in the next episode, was published in 1926. This is right before the pulps really takeover and meld with other strains of fantasy. Weird Tales starts publishing in 1923, really gets going in 1924 with the editor Farnsworth Wright, we’ll talk about it.
The pulps aren’t non-existent throughout the 20’s, however. We’ve already discussed Burroughs and his influence, and A. Merritt is publishing in one of the first true all-story pulps, Argosy, in the 1910s & 1920s. Lovecraft’s first stories are published in the late 19-teens, and Francis Stevens is publishing dark fantasy in the early 1910s as well. However, pulps truly really become the dominant strain of fantasy in the 30’s and 40’s with authors like CL Moore, Robert Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, and later Fritz Lieber’s Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories and de Camp and Pratt’s Harold Shea stories.[2]
At this time, I can detect four major strains of literature that will eventually merge and combine and diverge again, like a giant river delta, to give you the modern genre of fantasy:
Children’s Literature,
Romances,
Weird Fiction, and
The Pulps.
We’ve covered aspects of all of them already. At this point in the 20th century, I’d suggest that the Dunsany and Eddison-style Romances are dominant. Or, at least at the risk of indulging in a bit of teleology, their later influence makes these high romances the most interesting and important early fantasy literature from the turn of the century until the mid-1920's. Children’s literature – which was highly fantastic through the 1800’s and into the early 1900’s – is still chugging along its own little tributary. Well, more like a White Nile-sized tributary, but the fantastic children’s literature remains largely separated from the other strains of early fantasy, until Lewis merges it with Dunsany and Christianity to create the Narnia books (and, to a lesser extent Tolkien, with “The Hobbit”) and basically birth Young Adult (YA) Fantasy.
Weird Fiction is picking up pace at this time, too. Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895 and authors like Ambrose Bierce and Poe were making contributions throughout 19th century. Lovecraft, Merritt, and Long are publishing, if to little fanfare, and we’ve covered A House on the Borderland and A Voyage to Arcturus, both of which can be considered works of weird fiction.
The closely related fantasy pulp fiction strain begins in earnest when Weird Tales and Amazing Stories start publishing (in 1923 and 1926 respectively) and this strain of “sword and sorcery” fantasy at the time was always closely entwined with Weird Fiction. So closely entwined, in fact, that the Venn diagram of “weird fiction” and “fantasy pulp” is almost a circle. But I think that the sword and sorcery pulp, while it borrows heavily from weird fiction writers – Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Howard, August Derleth, and Lovecraft all contributed to the now famous “Cthulu Mythos” – is still, I think, a separate stream. It becomes a heavy influence on D&D-style role-playing games and, through that, a major influence on the doorstopper fantasy that becomes so popular in the late 70’s and 80’s, in a way that purely "weird fiction" did not.
But anyway, at this time, I can detect four major strains of literature that will eventually merge and combine and diverge again, like a giant river delta, to give you the modern genre of fantasy: Children’s Literature, Romances, Weird Fiction, and the Pulps. We’ve covered aspects of all of them. At this point in the 20th century, I’d suggest that the Dunsany and Eddison-style Romances are dominant. Or, at least at the risk of indulging in a bit of teleology, their later influence makes these high romances the most interesting and important early fantasy literature from this time. Children’s literature – which was highly fantastic through the 1800’s and into the early 1900’s – is still chugging along its own little tributary. Well, more like a White Nile-sized tributary, but anyway the fantastic children’s literature remains largely separated from the other strains of early fantasy, until Lewis (and, to a lesser extent Tolkien, with “The Hobbit”) merges it with Dunsany and Christianity to create the Narnia books and basically birth YA Fantasy.
Weird Fiction is picking up pace at this time, too. Chambers published The King in Yellow in 1895 and authors like Ambrose Bierce and Poe were making contributions throughout 19th century. Lovecraft, Merritt, and Long are publishing, if to little fanfare, and we’ve covered “A House on the Borderlands” and “A Voyage to Arcturus”.
The very closely related fantasy pulp fiction strain begins in earnest when Weird Tales and Amazing Stories start publishing (in 1923 and 1926 respectively) and this strain of “sword and sorcery” fantasy at the time was always closely entwined with Weird Fiction. So closely entwined, in fact, that the Venn diagram of “weird fiction” and “fantasy pulp” is almost a circle. But I think that the sword and sorcery pulp, while it heavily borrows from weird fiction writers – CAS, Robert Howard, August Derleth, and Lovecraft all contributed to the now famous “Cthulu Mythos” – is still, I think, a separate if related stream. It becomes a heavy influence on D&D-style role-playing games and, through that, a major influence on the doorstopper fantasy that becomes so popular in the late 70’s and 80’s.
So, at this time in our story – the mid-to-late 1920’s for those keeping track – Robert Howard, Clark Aston Smith, and CL Moore are a couple years away from really bringing pulp fantasy and weird fiction to the forefront of fantasy literature. This emergence of pulp stories more or less pushes the romance/high-fantasy stuff to the side for a while, something I would attribute to the Great Depression, as much as anything else. Pulp magazines are cheap, and you can trade them, while books are expensive. Fusty academic romances also have considerably fewer half-naked women on the covers. Which we’ll talk about more in a future episode.
That’s sort of where we are, early in the story of the genre. A lot of “romances”, sort of a holdover from the 1800’s. Pulp and weird fiction happily bubbly away together in their melting pot, about to really take over the genre. And Victorian-influenced children’s literature sort of off on its own, happily spawning secondary worlds and Winnie the Pooh’s and Peter Rabbit’s until its ransacked by an Oxford Classics Professor. No, the other one.
I'm going to stop there for this installment and pick up with a discussion of the two specific books we've discussed in my next post. That will cover a discussion of the nature of "secondary worlds" and move us to the verge of talking about the pulps. Thanks for reading!
[1] If you use Google’s NGRAM viewer, you’ll see the phrase “fantasy literature” start to pick up in the 60’s – that’s the publication of LOTR – and really take off as a genre descriptor in the mid-late 1970’s
[2] Probably my greatest oversight in this series so far is not including something by Abraham Merritt. He wasn’t especially prolific, but he was pulping it up before more well-known authors like Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. And I could have easily included something like the lost-world story “Moon Pool” or 1924's Ship of Ishtar or several other stories right around here. My personal favorite, “Burn Witch Burn!” is a little late in his career (1932) and a lot of his other material I find to be derivative of authors like Burroughs or Robert Chambers. In the end, I convinced myself that each potential inclusion was better exemplified by another piece – Burroughs for the early/all-story pulp stuff, Eddison/Dunsany for Merritt’s prose style, quote-unquote “weightier” tomes for the time period. Suffice to say, that this is just a history of the fantasy genre. There are authors and stories that you should look into that I haven’t included here – Frank Belknap Long is another oversight – I still might sneak in “The Hounds of Tindalos” – but don’t assume because I don’t include someone that they aren’t or important or vital to the genre. Just assume that I want to eventually finish this project. Take this as my personal encouragement to you approach this podcast as an entry point for the genre, not a canonized list of any kind.
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