The King of Elfland's Daughter

BALLANTINE BOOKS NEW YORK
First Ballantine Books edition: June, 1969
Printed in Canada
BALLANTINE BOOKS, INC. 101 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10003
TO LADY DUNSANY
I hope that no suggestion of any strange land that may be conveyed by the title will scare readers away from this book; for, though some chapters do indeed tell of Elfland, in the greater part of them there is no more to be shown than the face of the fields we know, and ordinary English woods and a common village and valley, a good twenty or twenty-five miles from the border of Elfland.
Lord Dunsany
In their ruddy jackets of leather that reached to their knees the men of Erl appeared before their lord, the stately white-haired man in his long red room. He leaned in his carven chair and heard their spokesman.
And thus their spokesman said.
For seven hundred years the chiefs of your race have ruled us well; and their deeds are remembered by the minor minstrels, living on yet in their little tinkling songs. And yet the generations stream away, and there is no new thing.
What would you? said the lord.
We would be ruled by a magic lord, they said.