Relevant to My Interests: The King of Elfland's Daughter

"No spell indeed!" she hissed. "No spell indeed! By broom and stars and night-riding! Would you rob Earth of her heirloom that has come from the olden time? Would you take her treasure and leave her bare to the scorn of her comrade planets? Poor indeed were we without magic, whereof we are well stored to the envy of darkness and space. ... I would sooner... give you a spell against water, that all the world should thirst, than give you a spell against the song of streams that evening hears faintly over the ridge of a hill, too dim for wakeful ears, a song threading through dreams, wehreby we learn of old wars and lost loves of the Spirits of rivers. I would sooner give you a spell against bread, that allthe world should starve, than give you a spell against the magic of wheat that haunts the golden hollows in moonlight in July, through which in the warm short nights wander how many of whom man knows nothing. I would make you spells against comfort and clothing, food, shelter and warmth, aye and will do it, sooner than tear from these poor fields of Earth that magic that is to them an ample cloak against the chill of Space, and a gay raiment against the sneers of nothingness."


So speaks the witch in Lord Dunsany's novel The King of Elfland's Daughter. I am a dreamer at heart. My favorite book, as I have attested time and again, is Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. Dunsany's novel touches on many of the same themes: the slow waning of wonder and magic from the world of humans, pushed back by rational thought and the gradual wearing down of time and worldly concerns. The description is wonderfully unbalanced: Dunsany spends paragraphs describing the way sunrise creeps over a forest, or goes into deep detail about the wonderous splendors of Elfland, of which no speech can tell, but gives us very little to characterize the major characters in the story. Often the vital actions of characters are glossed over in a few lines, while the folly of minor characters gets entire paragraphs. The reason for this is obvious: the theme, not the characters, is paramount. The story itself, the wonder and beauty of it, is much more than the sum of what the characters do. In fact, the characters are frequently at the whims of the setting; Elfland itself is as much a character as any of the elves, humans, or trolls.

In the modern world, it is almost not worth mentioning that we deride fables and fantasies and hold up dull, mundane things as what we should direct our lives to. This novel is fantastic perhaps primarily for what it manages to do with the richness of its language and story: mock the common world, with its short-sighted people and its daily toil, and extol the beauty of fantasy.

What more is there for me to say? Don't expect a fantasy adventure in the modern sense. There are no towering heroes or mighty deeds here. The only phsyical fight is over by page 24. The conflict in this novel isn't person to person, or even hero to monster, but the clash between two ideals: reality and the imagination.

As Padraic Colum explains perfectly in a quote on the back of my edition: "Lord Dunsany is that rare creature in literature, the fabulist. One can hardly detect a social idea in his work. There is one there, however. It is one of unrelenting hostility to everything that impoverishes man's imagination."

Why I will never play the Age of Conan MMO

Conan as he is meant to be: covered in blood, holding two gore-soaked swords, with a barely-dressed woman jonesing for a helping of his steely thews. (ironically, image taken from a video game)

Some people, particularly people who know about my fondness for both computer games and Conan, have suggested that I might look into the new Age of Conan Massively Multiplayer Online game. I've heard that the graphics are great and that the gameplay will be a lot of fun. To begin, let me say that I don't think I'll ever play any MMO again; at least, I hope I won't. To say I got burned playing World of Warcraft is an understatement: I got flame-charred. Games like that only give you the illusion that you're playing; you're just pushing the game through its paces, either succeeding in killing-this/going-there or going back to try again, like a glorified version of Chutes and Ladders.

So then, why does a Conan MMO offend me so much? When I was a lot younger, I used to look forward to the coming of the "Bookmobile" because the library in my little desert military base wasn't much for adventure stories, but the Bookmobile had so many fun books, not least of them books with a strong, brave man on the cover holding a sword! And so I was introduced to Conan, and I thrilled at the far-fetched tales of his wanderings and adventures, swept away to a heroic time and place. I must have read a dozen of those novels at least. Conan will always have a place in my heart assured for him just for that.

Now, I have rediscovered Conan in the stories by the man who created him: Robert E. Howard. Unlike the novels I read as a boy, these stories aren't just "doing Conan," expanding a world of adventure and fantasy. To Howard, Conan meant something: it was about the heroic struggle of a single man against the world, a real man, as Howard himself might have put it. Howard believed that civilization was a corrupting influence on what it really meant to be human, and he used Conan to strike back against a world he hated for its destruction of individuality and spirit. A Howard Conan story is more than just a remarkably visual and gripping read that I see reflected in the fantasy genre all over; it's a deeply-felt story of a time Howard longed for, when a man's worth truly mattered. And it's come to mean much the same for me: I, too, wish for a time I could be something more than just a nearsighted, skinny lad with no prospect of anything magical in his life. Sure, Conan would have bent me in half like a blade of grass, but at least I would have had that chance to stand up and be something.

And that is why I will not be trying the Age of Conan MMO.