This collection of tales [Kingdoms of Elfin] by Sylvia Townsend Warner is, to say the least, cause for celebration. Issued on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of her novel Lolly Willowes, the first book ever chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club, it has all the freshness, wit, originality of perception and clarity of insight that have won for her rhythmical prose so many admirers over so long a time. It offers us an unforgettable journey through time and space, a cast of truly fantastic characters and an impressive and seemingly unending display of verbal fireworks.

Sylvia Townsend Warner's fairyland kingdoms will no doubt be likened to the imaginary realms of J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings. They may attract many of the same readers and even inspire a similar cult, but they are essentially different. It is Tolkien's contention that good fairy tales are concerned with "the adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches. Naturally so; for if elves are true, and really exist independently of our tales about them, then this also is certainly true: elves are not primarily concerned with us, nor we with them. Our fates are sundered, and our paths seldom meet. Even upon the borders of Faërie we encounter them only at some chance crossing of the ways."

Genuine fairy tales must be presented as absolutely true. Because they deal with marvels, they cannot tolerate "any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole story in which they occur is a figment or illusion." The magic in the tales, Tolkien insists, can never be made fun of. Yet Sylvia Townsend Warner appears to do just that: She wishes her reader to enjoy her enjoyment of the enchantment, and irony in her work is omnipresent.

The stories in Kingdoms of Elfin are not genuine fairy tales, in the sense that the author chooses not to move through the looking-glass, but rather to hold that glass up over a long period of history to an imaginary world and to the real world beside it. She maneuvers the glass with such dexterity that the effect is at times dizzying. But the sharpness of detail offered is so great that the reader at the same time feels that he knows exactly where he is and where he will be going next.

Not everything is languorous and lovely in these elfin kingdoms; ugliness and cruelty exist "like dirt in the crevices of an artichoke," presented in the completely matter-of-fact manner of folk tales. The climax of "The Revolt at Brocéliande" is a fight between the two court eunuchs, who enter the ring spurred like roosters, egged on by the Master of the Werewolves. In all the bizarre detail, it is the exquisite verbal invention throughout that holds our attention. Since she is dealing with winged creatures, Sylvia Townsend Warner enjoys playing with the notion of flight: Elfins of good breeding do not fly, but assert their hereditary claim to go about on foot as though they were mortals. She plays also with the elfin rejection of the immortality of the soul. But behind all the occult learning that these stories demonstrate, the reader senses the author's fundamental skepticism.

In their intermingling of myth and everyday reality and their playful creation of imaginary worlds, these stories call to mind the moral tales of Jules Laforgue. And as with Laforgue, the moral is in the telling, in the music of language itself and in the perceptions of the human condition that are delivered in passing as from a flashing mirror. They will not be to everyone's liking. Their hothouse atmosphere, their lapidary sheen and their supreme artifice may be too much for those accustomed only to the rough tall tales of the American past or to the confessional alphabet-adventure soup of the moment. Some will find, as did Edwin Muir many years ago, that no matter how well Sylvia Townsend Warner does what she sets out to do, the finished work has a note of falsity to it. Others will delight in every aspect of her aphoristic style—beside which Tolkien seems the clumsiest of writers—and find her superbly wrought tales, however indirect their approach, the achievement of a fine writer and a wise woman.