Bought for $4.50 on April 22, 2022. Read in July and August 2023 for discussion at the Rivendell discussion group on August 19, 2023.
Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978), her third novel (1926) - redolent of faerie, and quite mysterious withal. “Lud” = dull, love, Luddite, King Lud was the founder of London per Geoffrey of Monmouth,
Echoes of The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) by Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) - the town is afraid if fairyland and wants nothing to do with it. Difficulty of even getting there or communicating with it.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61077
Echoes of The Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, where one sister eats, and becomes addicted to, fairy fruit, and the other sister refuses to eat it and gets slathered with it instead.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market
Reviews, by Philip Raines:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/ludinthemist.htm
“The book is a curio, meandering between broad comedy, suspense, murder mystery and adventure, veering from moments of slapstick to moving scenes of pathos…. Mirrlees gives us glimpses of that other world, but she's far more preoccupied with the more familiar secrets and plots of our world. Her attitude to Faerie remains ambiguous. She describes it as the source of art, song, all the wild impulses that are essential in making our lives sparkle. Yet Faerie is delusion. In one bravura passage, Mirrlees compares Faerie to human law as a kind of necessary lie we need to manipulate and keep at bay the world as it actually is.”
By Michael Swanwick:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/introduces/mirrlees.htm
“We have been conditioned by contemporary fantasy to know exactly where our sympathies lie: with the fairy smugglers and against the self-satisfied merchants. But the fairy fruit is not wholesome stuff, and its effects are alarming. Sexually, do I mean? Oh, yes, there is definitely a pleasant whiff of perversion here. But there is also the sick stench of cruelty. In its etiology, the eating of fairy fruit resembles the unpleasant course of drug addiction. And the inhabitants of Fairyland are the dead.
“Chanticleer is, for most of the novel, a bumbling fool, laughable, and easily gulled. But when he loses his son, he is stung to move beyond himself and to cross the boundaries of life and reason in a heroic attempt to regain young Ranulph. This is not your standard size 6, off-the-rack War between Good and Evil.”
Another lovely piece:
https://thecityoflostbooks.glasgow.ac.uk/hope-mirrleess-lud-in-the-mist-as-fantastic-history/
The Fairies' Farewell, by Richard Corbet (15682-1635):
https://poemsofthefantastic.com/the-fairies-farewell/ [stanza 2:]
Lament, lament, old Abbeys,
The fairies’ lost command;
They did but change priests’ babies,
But some have changed your land!
And all your children sprung from thence
Are now grown Puritans,
Who live as changelings ever since,
For love of your domains.
The creepy problem of TIME: when one feels the past while observing the present, pp. 8-9; time isn’t wild 37; as quiet as trees and pictures and the past 92, left behind 198,
FACTS: how malleable are they, really? 31, 37, 84, lose their solidity 69, 94, how fanciful? 117, when humans think they can create and control facts to their liking 128,
Watch for the narrator’s appearances, brief as they are.
The doctor’s humor: he would sometimes startle a polite company by exclaiming half to himself, “Life and death! Life and death! They are the dyes in which I work. Are my hands stained?” p. 31
SATIRE:
Government
Law, legal proceedings
Revolutions
Office holders
Children
Merchant class
Social life
Nobility
Domestic relations
A mock of law and the legal profession: jurisprudence, p. 13
Gender p. 69
Rusticity & pastoral
OATHS AND IMPRECATIONS:
Son of a fairy!
By the Harvest of Souls!
By the Golden Apples of the West!
By the Sun, Moon, and Stars!
[those two are particularly potent used together]
why, in the name of the Milky Way,…?
By the White Ladies of the Fields!
Toasted cheese!
Busty Bridget!
By my Great-aunt’s Rump!
you bantams
Gammon and spinnage!
> words not in my dictionary:
poncifs
scouted
as merry as a grig
tuftaffity tuftaffities
grograine grograines
fal-lals
apple-shies
> words that needed my dictionary:
pleached
hierophantic
plangent
vetches
tarn
spinney
Portunus
Aunt Sally
churchwarden
eldritch
carminative
sherd
byre
velleity
fly (adj.)
osiers
tatting
kittle
fustian
patibulary
negus
pipkin
vivider
perdurable
Cockchafer
cicerone
herm
doited
hartshorn
frangipane
sillabubs
obsequies
chivvied
sumpter
Nathaniel’s sudden feelings of affection - toward his son, his wife, the doctor - make him likable. Also his doggedness, mostly good humored, in ferreting out mysteries - murder (forensics and witnesses), identities, histories, faerie, missing children.
“A horror of impotent tenderness swept over him…. Aye, yonder, and beyond yonder, if need be … till I find my son.” 178, 180
Nathaniel has fun creating identities as a sleuth.
Farming vs. commerce p. 40
Who is the antiquary? 15, 24, 41
A Halloween disappearance 178
To mount Duke Aubrey’s wooden horse
The names are wonderful:
Nathaniel and Ranulph Chanticleer
Dame Marigold Chanticleer, née Vigil
Josiah Chanticleer
Duke Aubrey
Winckelmann
Prunella Chanticleer
Mistress Hempen (Hempie), Luke Hempen
Master Ambrose Honeysuckle
Moonlove Honeysuckle
Dame Jessamine Honeysuckle
Master Polydore Vigil (cf. Polydore Vergil of Urbino, note p. 24)
Dame Dreamsweet Vigil, daughter Viola
Mat Pyepowders and his preposterous, chattering dame Ambrosine
Dame Polly Pyepowders
the Peregrine Laquers
the Goceline Flacks
the Hyacinth Baldbreeches
Ralph Baldbreeches, father of Clementina
the anonymous antiquary (the narrator?)
Willy Wisp
Endymion Leer
Jeremiah Gibberty
granddaughter Hazel Gbberty
the widow Clementina Gibberty
Mistress Ivy Peppercorn of Mothgreen, née Gibberty
Mumchance
Portunus
Diggory Carp
Penstemmon Fliperarde
Miss Primrose Crabapple
the Crabapple Blossoms
Christopher Pugwalker
Peter Pease
Swan on Dapple
Mothgreen
Note many wonderful similes, e.g., the string of them illustrating the silencing of the town, pp.85-86.
Neither Nat, Hempie, or Leer are as concerned about Prunella as they are about Ranulph.
Hidden motives and ambiguous moral positions ….
Some nice phrases:
> the little cavalcade dived into the moonlit night.
> were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal of night and day?
> the parasite growth of sullen docility
> houses — not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures
>
