Title Page Content

Kingdoms of Elfin

Also published by Handheld Press

HANDHELD CLASSICS

1 What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War by Ernest Bramah

2 The Runagates Club by John Buchan

3 Desire by Una L Silberrad

4 Vocations by Gerald O’Donovan

HANDHELD MODERN

1 After the Death of Ellen Keldberg, by Eddie Thomas Petersen,
translated by Toby Bainton

HANDHELD RESEARCH

1 The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner,
Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White by Peter Haring Judd

2 The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and
Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919, edited by Kate Macdonald

Kingdoms of Elfin

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Foreword by Greer Gilman
with an Introduction by Ingrid Hotz-Davies

First published in the UK in 1977 by Chatto and Windus.
This edition published in 2018 by Handheld Press Ltd.
72 Warminster Road, Bath BA2 6RU, United Kingdom
www.handheldpress.co.uk

Copyright of the Stories © the Estate of Sylvia Townsend Warner
Copyright of the Foreword © Greer Gilman
Copyright of the Introduction © Ingrid Hotz-Davies
Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

ISBN 978-1-9999448-2-7 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-9999448-3-4 (MOBI)

Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.

Acknowledgements to the first edition

Except for ‘The Climate of Exile’ and ‘The Late Sir Glamie’, these stories first appeared in The New Yorker.

Acknowledgements to the 2018 edition

The text of the stories reproduced here was taken from the 1978 Penguin paperback edition. The punctuation has been restyled, and some proof-reading errors have been silently corrected.

Cover image: ‘Oberon and Titania’ by Arthur Rackham, Mary Evans Picture Library/Arthur Rackham

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

1 The One and the Other

2 The Five Black Swans

3 Elphenor and Weasel

4 The Blameless Triangle

5 The Revolt at Brocéliande

6 The Mortal Milk

7 Beliard

8 Visitors to a Castle

9 The Power of Cookery

10 Winged Creatures

11 The Search for an Ancestress

12 The Climate of Exile

13 The Late Sir Glamie

14 Castor and Pollux

15 The Occupation

16 Foxcastle

Greer Gilman is the author of Moonwise and Cloud & Ashes, and two critically-acclaimed novellas about the poet Ben Jonson, as well as poetry and criticism. Her fantasy fiction, rooted in British myth and ritual, has won the Tiptree, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson Awards. Her essay ‘The Languages of the Fantastic’ appears in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature.

Foreword