The Kingdoms of Elfin

The Kingdoms of Elfin are more numerous than is often thought, more diverse and more widely scattered. In Brocéliande, stateliest and proudest of Elfin Courts, the inhabitants engage in pursuits such as table-turning, cat-racing, outings to observe shipwrecks, bear-baiting and purifying the language. On days of ill-omen they abstain from love and from broad beans (which in fact they never eat), and they boast a Royal Pack of Werewolves. Here, as elsewhere, it is considered infra dig. for the aristocratic to use their wings, serviceable though these are in the labouring classes. Contact with mortals (an inferior race) is also infra dig., though the Kingdom of Zuy, in the Low Countries, drives a brisk trade with the Indies, exporting firearms, musical boxes, suppositories and religious pictures.
Readers of this fascinating book will meet such characters as Elphenor, who fell in love with a rustic green fairy from under a hill in Suffolk; the Welsh Elfins who, though constitutionally incapable of faith, learned to remove mountains; Joost, who found the fabulous lost race of the Peris whose queen lives on a rotating island; Queen Aigle of Dreiviertelstein, who discovered the clandestine pleasures of flying; and the twins Castor and Pollux, half fairy and half mortal, who rose to the very heights of the Anglican hierarchy.
In this first authoritative account of Elfin life and manners to appear in mortal language, Sylvia Townsend Warner remarks that, though a race apart, Elfins are in some ways akin to mortals, and her findings are often disconcerting. Miss Warner knows what she is talking about. The stories she tells are by turn gay and poignant, luminous and sinister, comic and alarming – but always engagingly unforeseeable and wholly convincing.
For many years Miss Townsend Warner’s ironic, witty stories have been published in the New Yorker as well as in book form. Ronald Bryden, commenting in the Spectator on a collection of her stories, said: ‘more people should know how good she is … a marvellous nose for character.’ Two recent collections include The Innocent and the Guilty (1971) and A Stranger with a Bag (1966). Amongst her best-known novels are Lolly Willowes and The Corner That Held Them. In the latter she was able to use her knowledge of early church music on which she is an authority. Her biography of T. H. White, published in association with Jonathan Cape, appeared in 1967.