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cimoreneThis is a classic work of high fantasy set in a Celtic (Irish and Welsh) and Anglo-Saxon Britain, about the last of the great elves and the Faerie forest she guards. It's a compilation of two books featuring an Old and Tired female elf named Arafel; their original titles are The Dreamstone and The Tree of Swords and Jewels, from the 1970s-80s. Lots of people on GoodReads found it boring and slow, which is a simple statement of preference; or episodic and unevenly paced, which is a fair criticism but also I think a feature inherent to the story, because the elf in question has only intermittent contact with the mortal world.
The writing style is very historical, emulating the era of the folklore it draws on, and reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings and earlier mediæval romance-influenced fantasy like the works of William Morris. The story is correspondingly slow-moving and distant, which really upset some other readers on GoodReads. There are a good mixture of rave reviews which seem largely driven by the style and people who are violently turned off by the style there, which I guess makes sense because it's very different from even most of the high fantasy people will have read (although, obviously, there is plenty of high fantasy which at least attempts to sprinkle in some degree of historesquishness with a very limited selection of the same techniques - Cherryh's very much better at it than that). Tolkien is one of the best references for comparison, but it is, I think, somewhat less familiar-feeling than that.
I enjoy Morris's early protofantasy ~mediæval romances and I found this pleasantly reminiscent, and the ideas Cherryh played with intrigued me. The lone last elf guardian echoes a bit of The Dark is Rising; the magical homestead in a little pocket of Faerie that rehabilitates people and animals who wander into it is a charming idea I've seen elsewhere too, though I still can't remember where. The Wild Hunt and the elf's conversations with Death, whose forest overlaps her own and the mortal one, were also really interesting to me, and reminded me of essays about the overlap of Death and Faerie, the Otherwhere, which I've read in relation to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and to Hannibal. The Huntsman himself got more lines than I've seen Death have as The Huntsman in any fantasy I remember reading - mostly quite opaque lines, but I kind of wanted her to keep going in that directon a little more. Also, the Celtic name spellings provided a lot of interest and chuckles.
The writing style is very historical, emulating the era of the folklore it draws on, and reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings and earlier mediæval romance-influenced fantasy like the works of William Morris. The story is correspondingly slow-moving and distant, which really upset some other readers on GoodReads. There are a good mixture of rave reviews which seem largely driven by the style and people who are violently turned off by the style there, which I guess makes sense because it's very different from even most of the high fantasy people will have read (although, obviously, there is plenty of high fantasy which at least attempts to sprinkle in some degree of historesquishness with a very limited selection of the same techniques - Cherryh's very much better at it than that). Tolkien is one of the best references for comparison, but it is, I think, somewhat less familiar-feeling than that.
I enjoy Morris's early protofantasy ~mediæval romances and I found this pleasantly reminiscent, and the ideas Cherryh played with intrigued me. The lone last elf guardian echoes a bit of The Dark is Rising; the magical homestead in a little pocket of Faerie that rehabilitates people and animals who wander into it is a charming idea I've seen elsewhere too, though I still can't remember where. The Wild Hunt and the elf's conversations with Death, whose forest overlaps her own and the mortal one, were also really interesting to me, and reminded me of essays about the overlap of Death and Faerie, the Otherwhere, which I've read in relation to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and to Hannibal. The Huntsman himself got more lines than I've seen Death have as The Huntsman in any fantasy I remember reading - mostly quite opaque lines, but I kind of wanted her to keep going in that directon a little more. Also, the Celtic name spellings provided a lot of interest and chuckles.
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Date: 4 Feb 2022 07:13 pm (UTC)I loved this book and found it very haunting.
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Date: 5 Feb 2022 02:28 pm (UTC)