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Blaedud the Birdman
extremely rare,very good condition
- GenresFantasy
159 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
About the author
Vera Chapman
39 books40 followersVera Chapman, also known as Vera Ivy May Fogerty or, in The Tolkien Society, as Belladonna Took. She founded The Tolkien Society, and also wrote a number of psudeo-historical and Arthurian books.
She was born in Bournemouth, England on the 8 May 1898 and lived in South Africa until she went to Oxford where she was one of the first woman to matriculate as a full member of Oxford University. She founded the first Tolkien Society of which she was secretary. She persuaded J R R Tolkien to become the society's honorary president. She wrote her first novel in 1975 and continued writing until her death in 1996.
She was born in Bournemouth, England on the 8 May 1898 and lived in South Africa until she went to Oxford where she was one of the first woman to matriculate as a full member of Oxford University. She founded the first Tolkien Society of which she was secretary. She persuaded J R R Tolkien to become the society's honorary president. She wrote her first novel in 1975 and continued writing until her death in 1996.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 4, 2017
Rating: 3.25* of five
The Publisher Says: Long before mankind conquered the air, Blaedud the Birdman lived and loved in England...
Prince Blaedud was Lord of the Tribes of Britain, but the sky was his domain. Each night he dreamed a great dream -- of a splendid Bird-Woman who swooped down and spirited him up above the clouds. To achieve his dream he built suits of wax and feathers, magnificent gliders of wood and silk. Yet the love of his life, the white-blond Princess Elen, feared his perilous obsession with all her heart. Educated by Druids, granted wings by a beautiful naked sorceress, banished and rescued from a swineherd's mud-cursed realm, he risked his kingdom for the secret of flight, a secret that could dash him to pieces -- or change the destiny of man.
My Review: A rediscovery in my book-bins. This was one of the last fantasy novels I read in the early 1980s. It was actually, in my experience, superior to a lot of the other titles foisted on me by my fantasy-fan friends, but it was so severely ~meh~ that it was among the final twigs leading to the straw that broke my willingness to deal with magic, chimeric creatures, and adolescent exceptionalism.
Plus there's a hot shirtless guy on the cover. I'm elozable.
So here's what I think now, more than 35 years later:
~meh~
It's a pretty interesting take on the life of Richard I; the fairy king who goes in search of philosophical consolation in Jerusalem. Taught by Druids, Blaedud is seduced away from his wife by the pursuit of a dream, that of flight, the dream that's obsessed all of humankind for millennia. I am sure I can come up with a parallel suited to Richard II, probable homosexual when measured against the modern era's yardsticks, and his quest for forgiveness and enlightenment in Jerusalem, and Blaedud's quest for flight. I can probably even make it dirty. But I can't make myself get all that worked up over this slender volume.
Ms. Chapman was quite the renowned figure in fantasy circles back in the day. This makes the book three or four times more interesting to me as a read. Her prose style is indebted to Tolkien's, as were the prose styles of so very many fantasy writers of that era (I'm being strenuously polite and not adding "and right up to this very freaking minute, the unoriginal bores!" for which extreme exercise in manners I wish to be fawningly acknowledged now); it lends a certain familiarity, an ease of decoding, to the author's intentions.
It's blessedly short, though, compared to Tolkien's stuff. At 160pp it's barely a chapter in one of JRR's opuses. But it's dense and chewy! The betrayals and machinations of the story's malefactors are believable, since they're rooted in history, but they're also predictable and flat.
Anyway, I listed this on Bookmooch, so if anyone's still interested despite my passionless lukewarmness towards it, hie thee hence and mooch away.
The Publisher Says: Long before mankind conquered the air, Blaedud the Birdman lived and loved in England...
Prince Blaedud was Lord of the Tribes of Britain, but the sky was his domain. Each night he dreamed a great dream -- of a splendid Bird-Woman who swooped down and spirited him up above the clouds. To achieve his dream he built suits of wax and feathers, magnificent gliders of wood and silk. Yet the love of his life, the white-blond Princess Elen, feared his perilous obsession with all her heart. Educated by Druids, granted wings by a beautiful naked sorceress, banished and rescued from a swineherd's mud-cursed realm, he risked his kingdom for the secret of flight, a secret that could dash him to pieces -- or change the destiny of man.
My Review: A rediscovery in my book-bins. This was one of the last fantasy novels I read in the early 1980s. It was actually, in my experience, superior to a lot of the other titles foisted on me by my fantasy-fan friends, but it was so severely ~meh~ that it was among the final twigs leading to the straw that broke my willingness to deal with magic, chimeric creatures, and adolescent exceptionalism.
Plus there's a hot shirtless guy on the cover. I'm elozable.
So here's what I think now, more than 35 years later:
~meh~
It's a pretty interesting take on the life of Richard I; the fairy king who goes in search of philosophical consolation in Jerusalem. Taught by Druids, Blaedud is seduced away from his wife by the pursuit of a dream, that of flight, the dream that's obsessed all of humankind for millennia. I am sure I can come up with a parallel suited to Richard II, probable homosexual when measured against the modern era's yardsticks, and his quest for forgiveness and enlightenment in Jerusalem, and Blaedud's quest for flight. I can probably even make it dirty. But I can't make myself get all that worked up over this slender volume.
Ms. Chapman was quite the renowned figure in fantasy circles back in the day. This makes the book three or four times more interesting to me as a read. Her prose style is indebted to Tolkien's, as were the prose styles of so very many fantasy writers of that era (I'm being strenuously polite and not adding "and right up to this very freaking minute, the unoriginal bores!" for which extreme exercise in manners I wish to be fawningly acknowledged now); it lends a certain familiarity, an ease of decoding, to the author's intentions.
It's blessedly short, though, compared to Tolkien's stuff. At 160pp it's barely a chapter in one of JRR's opuses. But it's dense and chewy! The betrayals and machinations of the story's malefactors are believable, since they're rooted in history, but they're also predictable and flat.
Anyway, I listed this on Bookmooch, so if anyone's still interested despite my passionless lukewarmness towards it, hie thee hence and mooch away.
November 12, 2025
This is an older fantasy book (published 1978) and based on the title, I thought it would be about, well, a bird-man or an avian shifter or the like. Instead it’s a man who longs to fly like the birds (although there is a Bird Woman, who seems to be a sort of demigod and who calls him her son and is jealously in love with him?), and this obsession almost causes him to abandon his kingdom and his family. This could actually be a fun story, but the writing style was so dry and disinterested, it just seemed silly. And the ending…seriously, what was that?
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews