Book Review - Heather Fawcett's Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries
Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett
Published by: Del Rey Books
Publication Date: January 10th, 2023
Format: Hardcover, 336 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
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Cambridge professor, Emily Wilde, PhD, MPhil, BSc, Dde, untenured, is hoping to change this status with her research trip to Hrafnsvik, Ljosland, the most isolated of Scandinavian countries, an island situated off the Norwegian coastline brushing the arctic circle. Emily is the foremost dryadologist in her field, but being a prickly woman inept at small talk has limited her advancement within the remorseless academic hierarchy. She knows better than most, she's been ensconced there since she was fifteen. When Emily's Grandfather, an amateur folklorist, died when she was a child his library became her best friend. Most children love faeries for their magic, but not Emily. To her the Folk were another world with their own rules and customs, and to a child who felt ill-suited to the human realm the lure was irresistible. And it's in the stories you unlock the secrets of the Folk. There are held the deepest truths. Because the Folk cannot be understood, living in accordance to whims and fancies that are little more than a series of contradictions with jealously guarded traditions that are erratically followed. They can be cataloged but true understanding is impossible. And that is exactly what Emily plans to do to achieve tenure. She is writing an encyclopedia. Her encyclopedia with be a pinnacle of faerie scholarship, though it is still incomplete and in manuscript form. A heavy thing presently totally some five hundred pages not including the appendices. It will be extensive, alphabetized, cross-referenced, and paired with illustrations as well as a phonetic guide. She is in Ljosland to learn about their Hidden Ones. They will be the feather in her cap and form the final entry to her life's work. She arrives with her dog Shadow and soon turns the village against her. Luckily, or not, depending on your point of view, her colleague Wendell Bambleby has decided to follow her in her hunt with his servants, commonly referred to as students, in tow. He has a reason for being there. He's been under a cloud of suspicion since it turned out his Schwarzwald study was faked. The incident has tarnished his reputation and therefore his ability to get funding and someone as unassailable as Emily could launder his reputation. They could coauthor a paper and do a joint presentation at the upcoming International Conference of Dryadology and Experimental Folklore in Paris. This would limit her time in Hrafnsvik and cede some of the credit to Bambleby. But it is acceptable. The only problem is Bambleby embeds himself into the lives of these villagers. They are suffering at the hands of the Folk. Five people have been taken in the last four years and a rather horrific changeling is in residence. And Emily feels the need to help. Though it might be far more dangerous to herself than she ever could have imagined and reveals Bambleby's secret to the world.
For quite some time now, in other words, the two years since this book has been in print, people have been telling me how much I needed to read it. And, I have to begrudgingly admit, that they were right. I don't like to admit I'm ever wrong if you were wondering, which I think is something Emily and I might agree on. Emily might be a bit too prickly for me at times and her empathy can wax and wane depending on her scholarly goals, but the book is a delicious blend of Amelia Peabody and The Mummy, obviously the 1999 classic staring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz, with a huge helping of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. Yet at the same time wonderfully unique while capturing a bygone era were academic research and journaling were in high regard. Sigh, for the academic life of a bygone era. Though it's the concept of home and homeland that weaves through this book that connected to me and made my heart ache. Homeland both ancestral and personal. On my mother's side I am fully Norwegian. You get all my family together and not only is it obvious we're related, but we're all blonde hair and blue eyes and about as tall as you can make us. The Scandinavian ideal. So I really connected with the people of Hrafnsvik. Yes, Ljosland doesn't exist and is an amalgam of Norway and Iceland, but it felt like my ancestral home. Here though I have to drop a note in for those people who say that this book insults Norwegians by being more Icelandic than Norwegian by saying that firstly, this is fictional, and secondly, the cross-pollination of myths, legends, and even names plays into Emily's theory that the Folk are far more in contact with each other than most academics think and just because this island is off the coast of Norway it is not Norwegian. Though you can't help thinking of Scandinavian cultures and Norway in particular with their fairy tales, folk tales, and fables. Oh, and the trolls. There are A LOT of trolls according to Norwegians. But when it comes time for a book to be written about fairies they're almost always set in England. It was wonderfully refreshing to see the less represented cultural creations takes center stage. And one of those creations has a big secret I'm about to spill, so if you don't want to know what Bambleby's secret is, turn away now. So Bambleby is Folk. In fact he's a dispossessed king. While he puts on a show of a lackadaisical cad he's really just someone horribly homesick. And I know exactly how he feels, mourning for a home you may never return to. I felt his pain because it is mine. While home is where your family is and he and Emily find a home in Hrafnsvik, it's also the homes that they can't return to, that I can't return to or have never been to that made this book resonate with me.
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