After long trials (and months after Magic's Pawn), I managed to finish The Last Herald Mage trilogy. And...

It was nice. Magic's Promise was maybe the most enjoyable of the trilogy. The murder mystery, Vanyel's many reality checks about how he is not the only person suffering, him questioning his homosexuality and realizing he was just that love starved that he started mistaking even friendship for attraction... And Mercedes knows how to combine slight humour("his eyes were about to make home on his forehead") with grief and doubt. Vanyel earns his place as a fascinating protagonist, despite being by every means overpowered. Side characters are well developed, too, with many members of the Ashkevron family being distinguishable enough. Magic's Price was a nice conclusion, but inferiour to the previous book. Overall, chief kiss to Mercedes. Nice prose, touching descriptions of character's feelings, beautiful landscapes and characters that feel human, with even most many unlikable characters still being humans and "understandable" in their flaws. Withen who grows out of his homophobic mindset and upbringing, Jervis who sorts out his anxious need to prove his worth and even becomes a friend of Vanyel... Just, it burns many books of those years where characters made to be unlikable were just unlikable. And it knows how to treat both homosexuality and homophoby.

Flaws: I confirm that the concept of Lifebinding is just... Wrong. It just shatters the surviving member's mind and sanity, once one of them dies. At least, i can leave this to the fantasy worldbuilding, but it feels awful to read of two people binding their sanity.

Its antagonists: the main villains of each book are quite... Nebulous. They rarely appear, and when the final battle begin they are defeated quickly (but NOT easily). As villains, they are out of place and unclear. Even the ultimate villain, who even calls himself Master Dark, makes a cameo in a dream in the first book and actually appears only in the last two chapters of Magic's Price.

Final complain: in the last book, Vanyel is ambushed by some bandits, who manage to capture him and confuse his mind, making him helpless. They then proceed to beat the hell out of him, and not only that (by using a euphemism). Those bandits, working for Master Dark, have to keep him alive, therefore they call a Healer to mantain him alive. Said Healer is just that, a normal and kind healer that is being blackmailed by master Dark. What does said Healer do with Vanyel? He finds out he is being held confused and defenseless by a spell, therefore he heals him AND frees him. Unfortunately, Vanyel is so full of pain and rage that he utterly annihilates the place, including the Healer. When he comes to his senses, he is horrified, while his boyfriend tries to console him by saying he was under shock. And i understand that. My beef was that the innocent victim is never brought up. THe villain could have used that as a hook to further seduce Vanyel (something like "we are the same"), but no.

The ending... Quite sweet, and it makes sense that Vanyel is remembered as a hero, because he was. And i tip my hat to the writer, who bothered to add in the appendix the songs so often quoted in the novels.

To sum Up: a good trilogy for its years, something that many mature teenagers should read to understand some themes or just enjoying romantic fantasy as a whole (and now i understand Blue Rose roots), a pity I am not a native speaker and I had to endure such a beautiful prose in another language. Take this Bradley.

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Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

I just got done reading this text and I am not quite sure what the “Chalk like substance” was does any body have an idea of what it was?

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Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

I just finished listening to this. I thought the production was quite decent and the narrator did a good job. Quick too, at only four 30 min episodes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/b00b9b0b

It's quite the fun fantasy/horror classic.

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Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

I'm wondering what anthologies those here would recommend? Whatever criteria you like is fine to use: maybe some books conveniently group a lot of the best stories together, while other books demonstrate the range of the genre well, and others give a signal boost to some worthwhile but lesser-known stories and authors.

As a starting point, I've enjoyed these ones:

• The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (edited by Michael Patrick Hearn)
• The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales (edited by Alison Lurie)
• Spells of Enchantment: The Wondrous Fairy Tales of Western Culture (edited by Jack Zipes) (still working my way through it actually)

(Edit: I might not be using the best terminology, but if it helps, currently I'm more interested in "literary" fairy tales which involve the author putting a lot of their own creativity into the process, by writing an original tale or very freely reinterpreting an existing tale. I'm less interested in the "straight" documentation or compilation of pre-existing tales, such as orally transmitted folktales. However I'm sure there's a lot of grey area in terms of which category many tales would fall into.)

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Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson is a 270-page book that took me about five months to finish. This is not because it is bad, but because it succeeded very well at its goals. It can be seen as a precursor of “grimdark”--all of the characters have great personal flaws, there are no Good Guys, there's all kinds of violence left and right (there's a strongly-implied rape in the first 10 or 15 pages which is part of the inciting incident of the whole story), and there are no happy endings in sight. I was really not in the right frame of mind to stick with such a story for much of the last several months, hence my slow pace. But my life has calmed down now, and I found that reading The Broken Sword went from adding to my stress to being a source of catharsis.

The book is set in Viking-age England: a time when not all pagans had converted to Christianity, and at least in this story, gods (both Norse and Celtic) and faeries (mainly elves and trolls) still roamed the earth. All have been diminished by the coming of what they call “the White Christ,” but all are still mighty and cunning. Against this backdrop, the central plot concerns the intertwined dooms of a boy and his changeling counterpart. Without going into too much detail, the story will bring to mind Tolkien's The Children of Hurin. Yet where Tolkien's vision is leavened, even at its darkest, by his Catholic faith and attendant belief that good will win out in the big picture, Anderson's tale does not have even that faint ray of hope. The world of The Broken Sword seems to be caught in an endless cycle of violence, trapped there by inscrutable gods. If “the White Christ” could offer a way out, none of the protagonists seem very interested in it.

This book was published the same year as The Fellowship of the Ring—1954—yet to say it isn't as well-known would be a serious understatement. It's known among writers and serious fans of the genre, but is otherwise extremely obscure. I think one reason is that it simply isn't as groundbreaking--while it ably blends the style of Norse sagas with some historical fiction sensibilities and and interesting All Myths Are True setting, it isn't the magnificent synthesis of styles and themes that Tolkien's work is. (That would be an impossible goal to live up to, especially for a first novel.) I think its overall bleak outlook is a bigger reason, especially because it's hard to root for any of the characters. There is little solace of any kind to be found in these pages, except catharsis for serious pain. Game of Thrones shares much of The Broken Sword's bleakness, but it has a whole cast of colorful characters for the audience to latch onto. This novel, written nearly as if it were a lost Nordic saga, has no such characters. That isn't necessarily a flaw, but it does make it hard to get really wrapped up in the tale. Its heart can feel as cold as the slopes of Jötunheim.

Yet it is not the numbing cold of indifference—it is the fiery cold of extinguished passion and utter despair that burns like an Arctic wind. This book's strength is its ability to tap into our most profound frustrations and offer catharsis for them. Reading about Skafloc, the hero, slaughtering his enemies by the dozen is a powerful way to vent one's pent-up rage, if one is so inclined. I do not find it ultimately satisfying—there is none of Tolkien's eucatastrophe to offer solace or redemptive meaning—but it can be a first step towards higher things, like a cleansing fire. Much as Tolkien saw Norse mythology as one of many myths pointing to (and in some ways preparing the way for) the True Myth, this book, with its bleak pagan-derived outlook, can provide powerful catharsis to a troubled soul, leaving it ready to begin anew.

I would be remiss not to mention the book's prose. Anderson adopts a flowery and intentionally-antiquated style. Some will feel that it is overdone: Anderson was no Tolkien—who used archaism sparingly—and he was no Dunsany—who mastered the art of constant poetic archaism with little concession to modern English. But I felt that he did a good-if-imperfect job of creating a poetic tone that elevated the tale into the realm of faerie.

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Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

Share what classic fantasy you've been reading lately here! Or tell us about related media. Or enlighten us with your profound insights. We're not too picky.

I don't know if anyone else here listens to the band Nightwish, but I was amazed to discover that they once quoted a poem from Phantastes! Their band leader has been very outspoken about being an atheist for some time, so I was pleasabtly surprised that MacDonald was even on his radar.

The verse in the song, Gethsemane (the premise of the songis to compare the poet's romantic suffering to Christ's suffering in the garden--a bit sacrilegious, but very capital-R Romantic), goes like this:

I knew you never before

I see you never more

But the love the pain the hope, o' beautiful one

Have made you mine 'til all my years are done

A very similar verse appears in chapter 4 of Phantastes (here it is with a bit of context):

"But now I must tie some of my hair about you, and then the Ash will not touch you. Here, cut some off. You men have strange cutting things about you."

;She shook her long hair loose over me, never moving her arms.

"I cannot cut your beautiful hair. It would be a shame."

"Not cut my hair! It will have grown long enough before any is wanted again in this wild forest. Perhaps it may never be of any use again--not till I am a woman." And she sighed.

As gently as I could, I cut with a knife a long tress of flowing, dark hair, she hanging her beautiful head over me. When I had finished, she shuddered and breathed deep, as one does when an acute pain, steadfastly endured without sign of suffering, is at length relaxed. She then took the hair and tied it round me, singing a strange, sweet song, which I could not understand, but which left in me a feeling like this--

"I saw thee ne'er before;

I see thee never more;

But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one,

Have made thee mine, till all my years are done."

And here's a link to the song, if anyone would like to listen: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GFpj8zgb8Fg&pp=ygUUbmlnaHR3aXNoIGdldGhzZW1hbmU%3D

Having unexpectedly come into the possession of an Amazon gift card, I decided I wanted to start working on a Dunsany collection. (I have The King of Elfland's Daughter, but that's it so far.) But everything I'm finding is from sketchy-looking independent publishers.

So, two questions:

1. Which are your must-own Dunsany titles?

and
2. Which specific editions and publishers do you recommend?