The King Of Elfland's Daughter
Thoughts The Wonderful Fantasy Book By Lord Dunsany And The Album Inspired By It
Introduction
I wrote an example story for my December challenge and found a beautiful song sung by Mary Hopkin to accompany it. When I looked a little further into its source it led me to an album and the book that inspired it. This is a critique of the book and the album with some of the music I can find. Here is the story that has nothing to do with the book or the album, but just so you can see how this started.
The King Of Elfland's Daughter
Lirazel is the King Of Elfland's Daughter and the thing that drew me in was the beautiful performance from Mary Hopkin on the album written by Bob Johnson and Pete Knight.
I couldn't find a digital copy and the ones on Amazon are very expensive but I managed to source a CD and vinyl copy from Discogs:
I am listening to the CD at the moment and they managed to get some big names on the album (remember this was the 1970s) including Frankie Miller, PP Arnold (The Witch) , Mary Hopkin (Lirazel, and she was part of a band called Oasis, not the one you know though), Alexis Korner (as a troll), Chris Falowe and Sir Christopher Lee as the narrator and The King Of Elfland.
It was Christopher Lee's narrated sections that got me to get Lord Dunsany's book, which contains some amazing beautiful descriptive language. It is now one of the four books that I am reading but an a mere two hundred pages I think I will be finished by Christmas.
It is a book and take I was aware of but until now I had not bothered myself with it, but given that it is in the realms of Celtic Mythology and Fae it should have been on my radar many years back.
The album is available to listen to on YouTube along with a lot of documentary pieces on the book.
Here is the list:
The Wikipedia entry is here:
It is a free download on Project Gutenberg:
This discovery has made me very happy and I hope that some of you will check out the book and the music. I will leave you with the closing song on the album which once more features Mary Hopkin and Sir Christopher Lee.
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Mike Singleton 💜 Mikeydred
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Comments (7)
So intriguing and rare!
This sounds like a wonderful book.
Lovely song and informative piece.
Good work and share on a classic Christmas book. I think If I can try to find it.
I've saved it to look for later.lol I think most of my saves in vocals are books or stories to add to reading lists.
It’s a very beautiful rhythm. Thank you for sharing!
When I read that PP Arnold was in this o have no choice but to find it now Amazing what you stumble onto Thanks for sharing this