First published over on Green Man Review.
“We would be ruled by a magic lord.” Be careful what you ask for.
On hiatus from Steeleye Span, Johnson and Knight tackled a musical project that seems mostly to have been ignored. Adapting Lord Dunsany’s classic parable on marriage, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, has a lot of things going for it. It also suffers from some severe weak spots, but it’s well worth a listen.
How can you go wrong with Christopher Lee as the King of Elfland? Well, to begin with, Lee needs a bucket to carry a tune. But he’s still marvellous in the role of an angry, powerful father whose only child has married against his wishes –has, in fact, wedded a Prince from across the border, from beyond the fields he knows.
Some of the songs in this folk opera are pretty much rock, which has always seemed to me like a mistake. Casting the seminal English blues icon Alexis Korner as a troll may sound good in theory – bearing in mind that Dunsany’s troll is more like a hobgoblin, i.e. mischievous and quick but far from malicious; but the actual song “The Coming of the Troll” seems dramatically out of place here.
“Witch”, featuring P.P. Arnold, wastes so much of Dunsany’s character that I once wrote a whole alternate set of lyrics to the piece, trying to capture the intriguing and ambiguous character of the original Lirazel — a crone who walks by twilight in the guise of a lovely maiden, but has the uncommon grace to reveal her true self to the young Prince when he looks on her with desire.
When, in Dunsany’s masterpiece, Prince Alveric is still gentleman enough to let his gaze linger on the witch’s true form, he has made a friend for life. All this is lost in the song; and the carefully mundane magic with which Lirazel crafts a sword to permit Alveric to penetrate the magics of Elfland and return, imbuing meteoric steel with the evocative non-magical power of the fields we know on Earth — in a sword-forging scene that is a tour-de-force in itself — is reduced to a chorus of:
Earth and fire and wind and water,
Dew of morning, miles of may,
Scent of thyme and sight of lilac,
Thunderbolt iron will win the day.
Which is true as far as it goes, but a lot more could have been done with the scene.
Some of the tracks are classic pieces of folk rock. “Alveric’s Journey Through Elfland” is one of the finest swordsman’s songs ever recorded (it’s not, granted, a huge category) – and it’s a rare martial artist who can stay seated with a sheathed blade as the verse builds to the chorus, with Frankie Miller singing, “Draw the sword, wield it well; Now is not the time to fail […] Runesinger, doombringer, be my light through the night […]”
As the villagers of Erl find their lives overwhelmed by the magic they had asked for, “Too Much Magic” is a splendid bit of whimsy — “goblins hiding under the bed while we hide under the table”. And if you find yourself humming the tune for the next fifteen years or so, and snickering at odd moments, don’t say I didn’t warn you. You won’t be the first or the last.
Closing the album, “Beyond the Fields We Know” is more of an anthem to Dunsany’s classic phrase than it is anything much to do with the novel itself. But it too is liable to linger in memory, and it could be argued that in itself it’s worth the album that leads up to it.
All in all, The King of Elfland’s Daughter is a flawed masterpiece. The whole concept could be done much better, I think. But the fact remains that no one else has done it at all. And between Lee’s rumbling wrath as the King and some truly excellent songs, the album is well worth the attention of Steeleye fans — or fans of Lord Dunsany.
(Chrysalis, 1977)
