Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees – Classic Fantasy

Name: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees - Classic Fantasy
SKU: 38465
Availability: BackOrder

Price range: $18.00 through $30.00

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Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees – Hardcover and Paperback options available.

This is the complete and unabridged text of Hope Mirrlees’s novel, Lud-in-the-Mist. This beautiful edition features original cover art by Haleigh DeRocher and is sold exclusively in this shop.

The Classic Fantasy Collection was born out of my quest to discover the books that inspired and influenced modern fantasy greats like JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. What I have found has been absolutely delightful – classic fantasy is unmatched.

Read more about this book here.

Hope Mirrlees (1887-1978) was a British translator, poet, and novelist. Lud-in-the-Mist was her third and final novel, published in 1926. This book is proof that there were great fantasy novels before Tolkien came onto the scene – Mirrlees’s way of balancing the mundane and the miraculous, the serious and the comic, in this fantastical book, sets it down as one of the greatest fantasies of the early 1900s. It was written considerably before the existence of fantasy as a marketing genre; therefore, it was seen as unusual and has been rarely noticed and seldom reprinted. In 1970 an American reprint was published without the author’s permission (Ballantine attempted to find the author, but their attempt was unsuccessful). Mirrlees died in 1978, and the book passed into the public domain in 2021. Neil Gaiman was greatly inspired by the work, citing it as “the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century.”

Synopsis:

“And this is but another proof that the Written Word is a Fairy, as mocking and elusive as Willy Wisp, speaking lying words to us in a feigned voice. So let all readers of books take warning!”

Lud-in-the-Mist is a verdant country town cradled by two rivers, the Dapple and the Dawl. The Dapple begins beyond the hills, in Fairyland. Long, long ago, fairy things had been looked upon with reverence, and fairy fruit enjoyed by the citizens of the Lud-in-the-Mist. But it is now a crime to consume the fruit, and anything related to Fairyland is unspeakable. When the mayor’s son falls sick and is believed to have eaten the forbidden fruit, a mystery unfolds and an adventure ensues.

Published 30 years before Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Lud-in-the-Mist played a large role in the establishment of the modern fantasy genre. Neil Gaiman was greatly inspired by the work, citing it as “the single most beautiful, solid, unearthly, and unjustifiably forgotten novel of the twentieth century.”

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