Lud-in-the-Mist

by Hope Mirrlees

the impulses in life as yet immoralized, imperious longings, ecstasies,

magical voices calling to a man from his “Land of Heart’s Desire,”

“The Note”? the siren’s call that will derail one from their goal with promises of beauty, wisdom, or ecstasy is still going strong, even if we can’t hear it or choose to ignore it.

Jane Harrison

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 >

Dorimare

distinctly exotic.

beyond the Debatable Hills (the boundary of Dorimare in the west) lay Fairyland.

Lud-in-the-Mist,

Elfin Hills.

Haha simile

houses — not the mere carapace of human beings, but ancient living creatures,

little open squares where comic baroque statues of dead citizens held levees attended by birds and lovers and insects and children.

Statues of excess, e.g., https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10100685895506749&id=4809235&set=a.10100685895451859&eav=AfZSHRndc-mJo-xkBeQpnLG_pjSAI5xKcCHH9tWzZvuMIaYCAp0rj4U0Tm7VKXgu8vI&paipv=0 And subsequent

it had two rivers.

Pittsburgh has three, plus various tributary runs and creeks. E.g., Saw Mill, Chartiers, Nine Mile,

the family of Chanticleer.

Haha - Chanticleer in Chaucer’s Nun ‘s Priest’s Tale is a proud rooster who is caught by the fox but manages to turn the table on the equally proud fox and escape. The tale is characterised by the way that the Nun’s Priest elaborates his slender tale with epic parallels drawn from ancient history and chivalry, giving a display of learning which, in the context of the story and its cast, can only be comic and ironic. But in contrast, the description of the poor widow and the chicken yard of her country cottage with which the tale opens is true to life and has been quoted as authentic in discussions of the living conditions of the mediaeval peasant. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nun%27s_Priest%27s_Tale

the river Dapple.

walled kitchen-garden,

Simile extended

red and yellow leaves which may have fallen on it from the trees of Fairyland,

a pleached alley of hornbeams.

To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley.

Haha

Nathaniel Chanticleer,

appearance;

Simile. Burn, noun (Scottish) (N. English) a small stream.

Spiritually,

it is never safe to classify the souls of one’s neighbors;

Haha

Simile extended then doubled

the painters are apt to end pessimists.

simile within the simile

His life was poisoned at its springs by a small, nameless fear;

He knew the exact date of its genesis.

the lumber of the past:

hierophantic robes

Who has not wondered in what mysterious forests our ancestors discovered the models for the beasts and birds upon their tapestries;

crafty cozeners of posterity

These are not the normal activities of mortal men.

In the Nun’s priest’s tale, Chaucer gives us a portrait of peasant life in the late 14th century

Our ancestors keep their secret well.

Simile

the moral of the ephemeral things with which they were decorated

“Why is Melancholy like Honey?

Simile

Chaucer’s Chanticleer has dreams of his death by fox that he worries about - the occasion for dismissive poo-poo-ing by Pertelote, and for self-important pontificating by Chanticleer. Also cf. The Lost Chord, by Adelaide Anne Proctor (1860) and music by Arthur Sullivan (1877). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Chord#Text_of_Sullivan's_setting

Smile weird

IT, the hidden menace, sprang out at him?

he would gaze on the present with the agonizing tenderness of one who gazes on the past:

his wife,

his little son,