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Kingdoms of Elfin

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 · rating details · 132 ratings · 20 reviews

Elfindom is an aristocratic society, jealous of its privileges. The ruling classes engage in such pursuits as patronizing the arts or hunting with the Royal Pack of Werewolves, while the lower orders take pleasure in conducting brutal raiding parties into the world to torment mortals.

The Kingdoms of Elfin are more diverse and widely scattered than is often thought; from th ...more

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Published 1978 by Delacorte Press (first published January 1st 1977)

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Nov 02, 2008 Terence rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf-fantasy, short-story-collections

I enjoyed Kingdoms of Elfin, a quirky, unusual collection of short stories recounting life among the various kingdoms (queendoms, actually) of Faerie.

Of the sixteen stories, my favorites were:

"The Revolt at Broceliande," which recounts the precarious position of mortal changelings in a fey court.

"The Search for an Ancestress," where a European fairy, Joost, learns how dangerous it can be to return to one's homeland.

"The Occupation," another tale of the dangers of mortal infatuation with Faerie, ...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Dylan rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a reread of a favorite book. Good lord, Warner's stylistic control is perfect, I am at her feet. Unfortunately the book is so much its own strange creature that there's very little it can offer to modern genre fiction -- its blood is a compound of dew, soot, and aconite, and it does not easily breed.

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Dec 16, 2011 Teresa Edgerton rated it 5 of 5 stars

KINGDOMS OF ELFIN, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Let us establish this at the very beginning: these are not Tolkien’s elves, neither the noble and aloof elves of The Lord of the Rings, not the passionate and reckless elves of the Silmarillion. Where they are passionate, it is of another type altogether. They are sophisticated, fashionable creatures, egotistical, and selfish, and even though capable of intense attachments, they are generally fickle: essentially a cold-hearted species. The stories in t KINGDOMS OF ELFIN, by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Let us establish this at the very beginning: these are not Tolkien’s elves, neither the noble and aloof elves of The Lord of the Rings, not the passionate and reckless elves of the Silmarillion. Where they are passionate, it is of another type altogether. They are sophisticated, fashionable creatures, egotistical, and selfish, and even though capable of intense attachments, they are generally fickle: essentially a cold-hearted species. The stories in this collection are full of whimsy and humor, but often of an uncomfortable kind.

Warner’s style is elegant, simple yet very detailed. As much of the story is in these details — beguiling if you love that sort of thing, tedious if you don’t — as it is in the actual events. If you don’t like her style you will not like these stories, and vice versa. There is no author behind the scenes winking at the audience as if to say, “do not take these stories seriously.” Very little is played for laughs. There is no need; the irony and the absurdity speak for themselves. If you are a fan of broad humor, it is likely that you will not enjoy these stories.

In the course of this collection, we visit a number of different realms, located in our own world but invisible to human eyes. Each of these realms is distinctive, both like and unlike the mortal realms in which they are located.

Into their own world they may occasionally admit mortals, but almost always in infancy as changelings, who live among the fairies only so long as they remain young enough to be comely. Then they are discarded during a sort of fairy house-cleaning, and sent back into a world they neither know nor understand. Of the fairy children who are exchanged for them — robbed of their immortality, knowing nothing of their true origins — there is only one story describing the fate of a single individual. Yet if Warner’s fairies are cruel, it is a heedless cruelty, rarely calculated; they simply don’t think beyond what they want. “Elfhame strikes cold,” says a fairy nursemaid, and that is no exaggeration at all.

Though all these stories have a decided charm of their own, there is (as you may have gathered by now) frequently a darkness behind the humor and the glittering façade, for Warner’s fairies seem to know nothing of morality, and only the rules of courtly behavior. For the most part, the elfin nobles are caught up in the idle pastimes and seasonal fads of the various courts, but they are also prone to sudden enthusiasms, sometimes for quite mundane hobbies like fishing or embroidery. This is but one of their many contradictions. Slightly smaller than humans, they are winged but do not fly. This is reserved for servant fairies, who must be agile and swift indeed to satisfy the whims of their betters. Flying, you see, is considered vulgar for the upper classes — though the temptation to take flight is sometimes over-mastering, and practiced in secret by those who can’t resist.

The title is a deceptive, for these realms of Faerie are ruled exclusively ruled by females. As a race, they are are often infertile, and succession to the crown is not hereditary, so infidelity is hardly an issue though they do marry. Queens take lovers, but their attention soon wanders elsewhere, and really, they are so autocratic and exacting, it seems to me that it must come as a relief to her husband or her lover when a queen decides to lavish her affection on another. Yet the title of Favorite, when it is bestowed, is envied by all. As in so much else, pride seems to take precedence over practicality.

If you are still reading, yet have never known the delights of these sophisticated little tales, if you have never experienced the transitory pleasures of a mortal in Elfin realms, then you would do well to seek them out, but the book is not easy to find, and the individual stories are scattered through numerous collections and anthologies.
...more

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Aug 10, 2015 Leah rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy

A glorious collection of stories, reminiscent of Susanna Clarke's The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, and of Mervyn Peake (my only experience with his writing being Gormenghast), and to some extent The King of Elfland's Daughter and Lud-in-the-Mist

Warner wrote matter-of-factly about fantastic things; her long-lived fairy courtiers are fickle, unpleasant, often stupid creatures, and yet she imbues them with a plain, tricky charm.

The collection is loosely linked, story by story. Kingdoms ...more

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Jul 10, 2010 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars

Deeply strange and often amazing but rarely enchanting: if there can be such a thing as a clear-headed, unsentimental study of a phenomenon that doesn't exist, then this 20th century English author and formidable fantasist (Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot) has accomplished exactly that.

Kingdoms of Elfin consists of sixteen stories most of which appeared in the New Yorker in the early to mid 1970's Warner's last work it was published posthumously in 1977.

The stories are loosely linked - an o ...more

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May 08, 2012 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy, humour, mythology-and-folklore

A collection of wickedly witty stories about an imagined world of Elfin kingdoms (though they are all ruled by rather fickle queens, and their kings tend to be in rather precarious positions).

Although mainly about the Elfin aristocracy, there is also a rag-tag collection of common elfins, changelings, werewolves and humans to add a little breadth and depth. The locales are mainly northern Europe, with the occasional excursion to eastern Europe and the Near East. The time is vaguely 13th to 17th ...more

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May 22, 2007 Kyle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, short-stories

Amazing book about faeries. Her writing is beautiful, quirky and intelligent. These faery communities are the most charming and strange I have ever read about. They abduct humans, play pranks, turn invisible at will, fly, keep cats and werewolves. They even knit. She has a great sense of humour and timing. Um, I really loved it, Read it.

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Jun 25, 2007 Brad rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: shortnarrative

Masterfully written literary fairy legends for adults in the best sense. Townsend Warner creates a compelling international world studded with mostly hidden and always mercurial, amoral fairy communities inhabited by beings who play with each others and with humans as cats play with rodents.

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Jun 03, 2015 Aaron Jansen rated it 5 of 5 stars

This collection of interrelated short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner surprised and delighted me continually. I felt very acutely, while reading, that I had stumbled upon something special, a literary territory unknown to most people. The last book to give me a similar feeling, not too long ago actually, was Robert Aickman’s The Wine-Dark Sea, and I consider Kingdoms of Elfin an equal, if wholly different, achievement in the art of the short story. It is probably the most fully-realized and or This collection of interrelated short stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner surprised and delighted me continually. I felt very acutely, while reading, that I had stumbled upon something special, a literary territory unknown to most people. The last book to give me a similar feeling, not too long ago actually, was Robert Aickman’s The Wine-Dark Sea, and I consider Kingdoms of Elfin an equal, if wholly different, achievement in the art of the short story. It is probably the most fully-realized and original work of fantasy I have encountered since Gormenghast. Being only a single slim volume, as opposed to a sequence of novels, Warner’s creation does inevitably seem a little less monumental than Peake’s, but the brevity of the book in no way diminishes its peculiar brilliance. If there is a better collection of fantasy stories out there, I’d like to hear about it.

The title is a conundrum: I don’t especially like it but I can’t think of a better one. It is accurate―the stories are largely concerned with various fairy (elfin) courts scattered across Europe―but will strike many contemporary readers, I suspect, as a bit generic. I know the phrase “Kingdoms of Elfin” doesn’t evoke much for me beyond standard Renaissance Fair and D&D imagery.

The content of the stories is anything but generic. I was a bit taken aback, at first, by the violence. I don’t know if the title of the collection had prepared me for something more whimsical or if Warner’s elegant style makes all the wanton cruelty more shocking. You know how fairies are always stealing human children, those mischievous little devils? Well, Warner’s fairies, after they kidnap the children, either keep them as sex slaves or else castrate them and force them to fight each other for entertainment.

So the stories are pretty dark. Fairy society is a a grotesque magnification of human folly and depravity, though the effect is never so straightforward as that of social commentary. But the gloom that permeates the book is never sensational or self-consciously edgy, as I can imagine a modern attempt to mix the fairy mythos with Martin-inspired grimness would be. (I’m not saying old ladies can’t be edgy, but the fact that Warner was, like, seventy years old when she wrote these stories probably helped with the lack of self-consciousness.) The tone is leavened throughout by a great deal of wit of the Oscar Wilde variety. Warner’s style is wry, succinct, and idiosyncratic. A sample paragraph:

“Queen Alionde had felt no call to go into retirement. She brandished her old age and insisted on having it acknowledged. No one knew how old she was. There had been confidential bowerwomen, Chancellors sworn to secrecy who knew, but they were long since dead. Her faculties remained in her like rats in a ruin. She never slept. She spoke the language of a forgotten epoch, mingling extreme salacity with lofty euphemisms and punctilios of grammar. She was long past being comical, and smelled like bad haddock. Some said she was phosphorescent in the dark. She found life highly entertaining.”

Perhaps one of the most notable features of the stories is their sheer unpredictability. Not one story here follows anything approximating a conventional arc. Upon completing a story, I was often compelled to turn back to the beginning to see exactly how Warner had arrived at the ending she had; how did "Visitors to a Castle," for example, begin with a satirical scene in which a mountain peak is moved “by faith” (Warner’s godless fairies are distrustful of faith, at first, and test out its power on pebbles) and end with a hallucinogenic vision of the apocalypse? Her plots are so capricious you could accuse her of being sloppy or arbitrary, except every once in a while she will pull off a stunning twist with very deliberate foreshadowing, all the more surprising because she has conditioned you not to expect that sort of thing. Overall these moments of traditional narrative pleasure are rare, which may be partially responsible for the book’s total obscurity. But personally I am willing to trade the satisfaction of a clockwork plot for an exhilarating absence of cliché.

So, if you are looking for the comforting or familiar, this collection probably isn’t for you. But I for one certainly don’t intend this to be the last book of Warner’s I read. ...more

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Mar 30, 2012 Richard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If there can be such a thing as a clear-headed, unsentimental study of a phenomenon that doesn't exist, then this 20th century English author and formidable fantasist (Lolly Willowes, Mr Fortune's Maggot) has accomplished exactly that.

Kingdoms of Elfin consists of sixteen stories most of which appeared in the New Yorker in the early to mid 1970's. Warner's last work, it was published posthumously in 1977.

The stories are loosely linked - an occasional character will appear in more than one story, ...more

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Oct 09, 2011 Dimity marked it as didn-t-finish · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, fantasy-sci-fi, reviewed

I so loved The Corner That Held Them and was hoping for another book like that gem. Unfortunately, I found these stories plain. Most of them were ok but they failed to hook me in during a recent reading slump. This book is now overdue and was an interlibrary loan so my chances of ever finishing it are not good. The copy I borrowed was an awesome old school library book with the loud cellophane plastic covering with the gold edges at the bottom and top. It also smelled just like I remember all my ...more

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Apr 07, 2013 Gena rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-with-my-sons

We read about 25% of the book. None of the three of us liked this book at all. None of the three of us finished this book. I knew it was not written for children--but I just got finished explaining what the Eunuch specialist was cutting off exactly and why. I read it in high school and didn't like it then either. I am wondering why I thought we'd give it a try--I guess I thought that whole Lord of the Rings vibe would be interesting to the boys, but I was wrong. STW does a wonderful job with the ...more

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Jan 09, 2015 Michael William rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fun ideas but poorly written.

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May 07, 2015 Jen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, social-commentary

You can see the influence of Heian writings from Japan in this collection of unapologetic, crisp short stories by Warner. Stories of the faeries who are not so different from humans in many of the ways that count, these tales often seemed to have a cutting social commentary to them. Although I don't know if that was intended by the author, their original publication in the New Yorker makes me highly suspicious. Interesting and often terrible tales that certainly entertain and are beautifully wri ...more

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Oct 08, 2014 Brianne rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book was fantastic! I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in the fey or folklore in general. Sylvia Townsend Warner is a master storyteller and in Kingdoms of Elfin she approaches the realm of fey from many different angles. This book is a compilation of short stories, each taking place in a different part of the world. The stories are beautifully told and the characters have all the mischief associated with the fey. I only wish that Warner had wrote more fantasy themed books.

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Oct 22, 2012 Ann Thomas rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a collection of stories about the fairy kingdoms, written by a member of the famous Bloomsbury set, which included Virginia Woolfe. Not knowing much about this group, I had great hopes of this book. I was very disappointed. The stories end abruptly, and usually badly. For example one story about two runaway lovers tells of their life and adventures together, and then has them freeze to death in the snow one night. Very unsatisfying. I couldn't finish the book.

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Apr 17, 2012 Justin Howe rated it 5 of 5 stars

A curious read: hard-edged, unsentimental stories dealing with the intersection between mortals and the world of fairies. That these stories were published in the 1970s in The New Yorker surprises me. Slightly reminiscent of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

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Dec 06, 2012 Jane rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The fairy universe is not what you thought it was in this series of short stories. A fascinating, well-done telling of an imaginary
culture with none of the twee, cutesy-ootsey dreck that infests bad fairy stories. Warner is a master.

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Feb 26, 2010 Kate rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, short-stories, published-1970s

A book about fairies that you don't have to be embarrassed about reading. Looking-glass versions of monarchies/aristocracy/courts. Their amorality is interesting and sometimes funny. (Oh... did not quite finish this.)

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Feb 10, 2010 MB (What she read) rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-urban-fantasy-paranormals, read-in-2010

A re-read. I was so happy to get my hands on a copy for my own library! Literary short-stories set in fictional elfin kingdoms. Full of wit and poignancy. Readers of Saki should like this.

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About Sylvia Townsend Warner

Sylvia Townsend Warner was born at Harrow on the Hill, the only child of George Townsend Warner and his wife Eleanora (Nora) Hudleston. Her father was a house-master at Harrow School and was, for many years, associated with the prestigious Harrow History Prize which was renamed the Townsend Warner History Prize in his honor, after his death in 1916. As a child, Sylvia seemingly enjoyed an idyllic ...more

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“Young people are careless of their virginity; one day they may have it and the next not.” — 14 likes

“She was heavier than he expected - women always are.” — 12 likes

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