Cabbages and Thunderbolts; Trolls, Unicorns, Twilight
The Story. It all began because The Parliament of Erl was to some extent imaginative. In their ruddy jackets of leather, the twelve members appeared before their stately lord where he sat in a carven chair in his long red room. They desired to be ruled by a magic lord. And though he feared them foolish, he agreed, and sent forth Alvaric, who was his son, to find and wed the King of Elfland's Daughter.
Alvaric came to Witch Ziroonderel, his father's friend. Out of 17 thunderbolts which he dug up at her bidding from the soft earth under her cabbages, she fashioned him a sword and enchanted it with runes and bade him be off. So Alvaric set his face toward the Elfin Mountains, whose changeless peaks were the color of forget-me-nots, and in due time passed the frontier of twilight that bordered the fields men knew and was the rampart of Elfland.
Time was not in Elfland, nor dawn nor sunset nor any change at all. The deep 'blue of summer gloaming, the pale blue of Venus flooding the evening, the night-blue deeps of twilit lakes—these were hints of Elfland's color, as the rarest of earthly smells and shapes and sounds were hints of Elfland's other beauties.
Alvaric strode among them with his sword and was not welcomed, being an intruder. From great oaks the coiling ivy rushed down at him and, when he lopped the tendrils the trees themselves moved upon him in a foremost phalanx, forcing him to blaze his trail to the lawns of the palace of Elfland. There he slew the palace guard—four splendid knight whose thick and curious elfin blood was awesome to behold. And Lirazel, the Elf King's daughter, stood among the bluebells and gazed am wondered and loved and went away with Alvaric to the Vale of Erl in the fields men knew.
Their son was Orion. Lirazel had wanted to call him "an elvish name full of wonder and made of syllables like birds' cries at night." But Alvaric was ten years older when he returned from Elfland and took seriously the admonition of the Freer of 'Orion," Christom. He only compromised on "Orion," a name of the heathenesse and, with time, grew more set in his mind against all things elvish.
So Lirazel, who understood nothing of men and Earth, read a rune that had come to her by a troll from her father. And she was blown away by the northwest wind into Elfland again, leaving Orion with Witch Ziroonderel to nurse him. When Alvaric asked the witch, "Whither," she shook her head all mournfully, saying: "The way of the leaves. The way of all beauty."
A moonstruck man, a poet, a mad man, a lovesick lad and a shepherd boy well used to lonely spaces set out with Alvaric then on his second quest, which was a weary one. Elfland had ebbed away, its King being fearful of Alvaric's enchanted sword. But Alvaric could not rest for love of Lirazel, and through long years that crazed company wandered the world's ends.