44 pages • 1-hour read
How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories
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Themes
Transformation: Change Versus Stasis
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child abuse.
Transformation is a powerful theme in fairy tales. Where magic is involved, especially with the fey themselves, it often takes a literal form—leaves and dirt transformed temporarily into gold or a spurned lover cursed into the shape of a bird for seven years. However, transformation can also be a voluntary, metaphorical act of maturation or character development. Someone can grow and change or remain in a constant, stagnant stasis. These ideas are explored in How the King of Elfhame Learned to Hate Stories.
Literal transformation establishes the story as a fairy tale: Jude and Cardan ride horses made of transformed ragwort stalks when they travel to the mortal world, Cardan pays for his purchases at the gas station with glamoured faerie gold, and Aslog’s false welcome transforms into a pit trap when Cardan confronts her in the woods. These metamorphoses do not just happen superficially but reveal personality traits of each character. Magic-less, human Jude likes to take risks—if the ragwort spell fails in midair, she would plummet to her doom. Cardan, though more generous as an adult than he was as a child, still prefers clever trickery over direct interaction, and Aslog is determined to have her vengeance no matter what.
Transformation is also an active choice. Cardan and Aslog exchange stories several times throughout the novel, but each exchange is a little different. Though the bones of their tale remains the same, the details—and, thus, the lesson—change: The stone-hearted boy alternately is cursed because of his bad behavior or seeks out the spell due to ennui; the cursed monster girl is alternately a tragic victim or a freedom seeker; and the two either wed or separate, but neither necessarily guarantees a happy ending.
Similarly, Cardan and Aslog undergo their own personal transformations: Cardan, initially a boy with a heart of stone, fire, or glass, seeks to remain unchanged, embracing his reputation as a villainous prince. It is only after interacting with other humans, especially Jude, that he begins to change and mature. He adds heroic layers to his petty villainy until he comes into his own as High King, a more just—if still capricious—adult. He, in turn, urges Aslog to transform as well, to bargain and end her reign of terror in the woods. However, true to her stony nature, Aslog—despite initially hoping for transformation from miller to titled faerie gentry—ultimately chooses stasis, nursing her grudge rather than letting it go and thus transforming, quite literally, into stone. In this case, the stone is a metaphor as well as an actuality. Aslog does indeed turn into stone, but the stone also represents her unchanging nature.
The contrast between Aslog and Cardan demonstrates that even in magical worlds, transformation is a personal choice. Stasis can quite literally freeze one in place and halt personal growth. Cardan matured, but Aslog did not; like the tale of the stone-hearted boy, only transformation leads to a happy ending.
The Class and Race Divide
In the novel, the line between faerie and human is both clearly drawn and blurred. In Elfhame, faeries are considered superior. Though there are distinct social classes even among the fey, the lowliest faerie still outranks a human—usually. However, there are always exceptions that skew the strata and heighten conflict.
Cardan, his posse, and Balekin exemplify the clear dividing line between races. They are all faerie gentry, and Cardan and Balekin are princes, nearly the highest faerie rank there is. Balekin, especially, disdains humans, stealing them and enchanting them to be his serfs, a miserable existence. He has a human servant beat Cardan as an added humiliation, emphasizing the clear divide between races that he supports. Though it is Locke who jilts Nicasia, she tells Cardan to punish the human twins he abandons her for, reinforcing her perceived superiority as a faerie princess.
While Cardan initially supports hierarchical divides, he begins to question them as his understanding of the world grows nuanced. Faerie gentry—even the High King—are known to take human lovers, and human artisans are stolen away to entertain faerie Courts. The king’s seneschal is a human, and Cardan was banished as a child for the supposed murder of the human seneschal’s lover. Jude and Taryn, though human, are raised by faerie gentry as if they, too, were faerie children. Jude thus becomes an exceptional anomaly and Cardan’s obsession, forcing him to reconcile what he was taught about the divide between fey and humans.
Cardan’s questioning about the bigotry around him triggers his transformative character development. Jude’s liveliness forces Cardan to view Balekin’s human servants differently and leads to him freeing at least one of them in secret. Cardan is well aware that Jude can best him in many skills, especially warfare. Cardan even grows to prefer human stories to faerie ones, as he seeks out human books but resists stories told by Locke and Aslog. Ultimately, while Cardan can’t fully dispel faerie prejudice, he can level the playing field by marrying Jude. He raises her to the highest rank possible—High Queen of Elfhame, a ruler in her own right, and such an influential personage that he can’t imagine life without her. As Black explores the divisions of race and class, she portrays a solution and shows that even well-established norms are more porous than they first appear.
Truth, Lies, and Deceit
It is well-established faerie lore that the fey cannot lie but that humans can. At the same time, the fey are notorious tricksters and skilled at deception. This is true both in Black’s world and in other works depicting fey, such as Charlene Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries series.
Faeries, no matter how powerful, are physically unable to speak an untruth. This is clear when Cardan tries to lie to Balekin’s human servant Margaret during her secret rescue; the words physically will not come. Humans, however, have no such issue. The fey often do not trust humans because humans can lie to their face. For example, Jude takes advantage of her ability to lie when she lies to Cardan about her plan to hunt Aslog alone.
Although faeries can’t lie, they can deceive. Jude can’t hide her rounded human ears or footprints on the forest floor, but Cardan can glamor away his faerie features and hide his expressive tail, passing—at least on the surface—as a human. Cardan also deceives Aslog in their final confrontation, telling stories to buy time. He makes technically true statements—he is indeed waiting for both Jude and the sun—but he is also waiting to seize an opportunity for himself. By faerie logic, omission does not count as a lie, but it is still deceit.
At the same time, the novel suggests that lying, through storytelling, is a way of getting at the truth. Aslog asks Cardan at one point, “We, who can never tell a lie. How can we do it [tell stories]?” (159), to which Cardan responds that they can do so because “stories tell a truth, if not precisely the truth” (159). This implies that fiction and fantasy, two genres that delve in the unreal, can speak truth just as well as nonfiction can. Stories—while containing lies—also imply universal truths, if not the facts.
Locke, a master of both story and manipulation, is an expert at deceit. He flirts with Nicasia openly but plays it off as capricious faerie nature so that Cardan does not take it seriously. Even when Cardan discovers Locke and Nicasia’s betrayal, Locke tries to skew the situation to leave himself blameless, and he later abandons Nicasia for the human twins. While Locke, as a faerie, cannot lie directly, he still remains skilled in deceit.
Black uses a multitude of characters, both human and fey, to illustrate that truth and lies can blur. In the end, it all comes down to semantics and a very clear adage to be careful what one wishes for.
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