Warner, ST;
(2025)
Three Unpublished Kingdoms of Elfin Stories: ‘Snipe’, ‘The Alien Element’ and ‘The Pursuit and the End’.
The Journal of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society
, 25
(1)
, Article 2. 10.14324/STW.25.1.02.
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Abstract
These three previously unpublished stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner are part of her Kingdoms of Elfin series. The first of the three, ‘Snipe’, is set in Elizabethan England in the fairy kingdom of Arden. A fairy called Snipe imprudently stands as godfather to a mortal village boy. In the fairy world, Snipe writes and acts for the theatre and wins an ‘Indian Boy’ as his pageboy from Queen Titania and her consort Oberon. His return to the mortal world with the pageboy leads to the violent outcome of the story. ‘The Alien Element’ is set in Edinburgh in the mid-seventeenth century. A witch who has been condemned to death is rescued by fairies and taken to live at the fairy court of Givenny. ‘The Pursuit and the End’ is set in the Elfin court of Brocéliande. Sir Verdigris, a court functionary, becomes obsessed by the deliciousness of a snail dish once prepared at Brocéliande by a cook who has left. He goes off in quest of the exquisitely cooked snails, accompanied by his valet, cat and groom.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Three Unpublished Kingdoms of Elfin Stories: ‘Snipe’, ‘The Alien Element’ and ‘The Pursuit and the End’ |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/STW.25.1.02 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/STW.25.1.02 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025, Tanya Stobbs. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/STW.25.1.02. |
| Keywords: | Elfin, fairies, Arden, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Ramon Llull, hermeticism, Elizabethan drama, witches, witch trials, outsiders, persecution, cookery, medieval France, Lutins, pastoral poetry |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10219786 |
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