Amal El-Mohtar’s first solo novella is a work of fantasy, a fairy tale with supernatural beings and magic in it. But it’s also set in a world that overlaps with our own, where English is spoken, old ballads are sung, and geographical references are made to places that really exist: London, Exeter, Wales, the West Country, the Levant. Impossible metamorphoses take place, but there are also strict rules governing certain aspects of life, such as the formal grammar taught in schools or the number of pennies and shillings that make up a pound. The book is full of beauty and pleasure, from the playful wooing of lovers to the melodies and harmonies of sweet music and fine prose, but it also features a random act of violence which replicates other acts of violence past and present, from the killing of women as witches to the persecution of queer desire. Most strikingly of all, this fantasy ends with a political afterword that draws attention to El-Mohtar’s Lebanese-Canadian heritage, and to the horrors of the war that is devastating Lebanon and slaughtering people in Gaza as she writes. The book, then, is constructed from binaries, opposites and paradoxes, and this dualistic structural principle has crucial things to tell us about the processes of reading and writing fantasy in the troubled twenty-first century.
Every aspect of El-Mohtar’s story looks two ways. Two sisters grow up in a family that faces in two directions; I’ll call them east and west, for reasons that will emerge later, though this orientation is not made explicit in the story. Eastwards they face towards the town of Thistleford, a place of ‘wholesome, settled tameness’ (p. 16), and beyond Thistleford towards the merchants, scholars and monarch who live in and around the metropolis, where regulations govern everything from speech to conditions of trade.[1] Westwards they face towards Faerie, a place so shifty and ambiguous that it has many names (‘Arcadia, the Beautiful Country, the Land Beyond, Antiquity’, p. 5), where people may be lost or ‘marred’ – that is, subjected to unwelcome processes of magical transformation (p. 7). The Hawthorn sisters live in the space between these compass bearings, cleaving to their immemorial duty of tending two ancient willows known as the Professors, which grow on either bank of the magical river Liss. The willows supply their family with materials for trade, ‘the leaves for tea, the bark for medicines and baskets and cordage, the wood for furniture and instruments’ (p. 6), all of which are as much in demand in the east as in the west. The trees are linked to Faerie, both in the magic they filter from the river – which infuses their wood, bark and leaves – and in the many narratives they have engendered. But the Professors also have mortal origins, having once been human lovers who openly ‘professed’ their love, transformed into trees under circumstances that differ depending on who tells the story. Upstream from these ancient willows lie the ever-shifting borderlands of Faerie, the enchanted country where the river has its source. Downstream things become increasingly controlled, so that even the younger willows that line its banks are carefully coppiced to improve their commercial yield. The two sisters who tend the Professors share their tendency to look both ways; the younger, Ysabel Hawthorn, directs her thoughts towards the commonplace east, while the older, Esther, is haunted by dreams of the exotic west; but their love for one another, expressed through song, ensures that their different preferences exist in a state of perfect balance.
Inevitably, however, imbalance threatens their closeness. Esther is courted by two suitors, one of whom hails from the conventional lands downstream of the willows, the other from the mysterious world of Faerie. The man from the east is a prosperous neighbour who wants to marry her for financial reasons – joining her family’s land to his will enhance his commercial prospects – while the suitor from the west is a nonbinary musician who loves Esther for herself and for her art, the art of singing with which she nurtures the ancient trees. Ysabel has some sympathy for the man from the east, whose name is Pollard – a confirmation of his tendency to cut things for his own advantage; in Ysabel’s eyes he deserves some credit for writing Esther some (very bad) poems, giving her unsolicited gifts, and observing at all times the rules of gentlemanly good manners. Esther is disgusted by Pollard (he is a ‘crumb’), and gives her heart instead to the suitor from Faerie, whose name is Rin. Rin operates according to Faerie conventions, not human ones, which means they do not always show up when their lover asks them to, and resist meeting Esther’s family until some unspecified point in the courtship ritual has been passed. Rin, then, could be accused of rudeness by those who do not understand those conventions, Ysabel included. Esther and Ysabel’s different perceptions of the two suitors threatens for a while to open a gulf between them, but the threat is never a serious one. Far more drastic is Samuel Pollard’s reaction to Esther’s rejection of him, which severs the girls from one another through a sudden act of misogynistic aggression.
Pollard murders Esther in a fit of cold rage on the day she betroths herself to Rin, using his gloved hands to drown the young woman in the enchanted waters of the river Liss. The murder splits El-Mohtar’s narrative into two halves, before and after Esther’s death. Before the murder there are many possibilities for the way the narrative might unfold; afterwards there would seem to be markedly fewer. But this is only if you’re not familiar with ballad lore, which very frequently treats murder as merely the midpoint of a life story rather than its termination. As a ruthless pragmatist Pollard is of course ignorant of ballad lore; Ysabel and Esther, on the other hand, know it well, and are thoroughly versed in the ways a ballad can reverse the flow of a narrative with the lightest of touches. (Please pardon the puns in this essay so far – tend/tendency, versed/reverse – since puns and other double meanings are some of the many techniques by which a ballad can accomplish this reversal.) In an imagined world where ghosts are legion, and where a daytrip in one country can take a hundred years in the time zone of another, the past always has the potential to invade the here-and-now, and the dead to gain strange new life.
Which brings us to the binary that lies at the core of El-Mohtar’s novella: the binary of past and future, which are held in constant balance by the fulcrum of the present. In El-Mohtar’s world, magic is a matter of grammar, a word that shares its roots with gramarye, a Middle English term for the theory and practice of enchantment in all its forms (p. 10). The roots of that word live on in its modern form, El-Mohtar suggests – an idea Rebecca Kuang also draws on in her novel Babel (2022) – and can be exploited by academic grammarians based in universities, who have strict ideas of how the magic of grammar should be properly used and studied, or by rogue grammarians such as witches or faeries, who resist institutional attempts to restrict the possibilities of magic and meaning. So the past and the present can affect the future thanks to the individual words we use in everyday speech, which are loaded with etymology: that is, the evidence of changes past, which confirms that words are involved in continuing processes of transformation. Another of these processes is the conjugation of tenses: ‘What is magic but a change in the world?’, El-Mohtar asks, and ‘What is conjugation but a transformation, one thing into another? She runs; she ran; she will run again’ (p. 1). The grammatical transformation of verbs through tenses embodies the possibility of transcending certain rules – such as the rule that when we die our life story comes to an end. In the first half of the novella Esther runs, delighting in the land and loves she is blessed with. At the point of her death she’s consigned to the past: she ran, because she runs no more. For Rin and Esther, though, grammar promises a future for her: she will run again. El-Mohtar’s story fulfils that promise, drawing on stories past to construct a new story that offers a semblance of hope to its readers, albeit a hope that seems to transgress the laws of physics or history.[2]
The two halves of the novella can be seen as analogous to the grammatical process of conjugation. The first half centres on the present, proceeding for the most part in chronological order; the second half jumps around in time, beginning with a flashback to the time when the sisters strayed into Arcadia as small children and ending with a promise for the sisters’ future happiness. The sisters’ lovers, too, could be seen as aligning themselves with certain tenses. Rin is aligned with the past, since they come from Arcadia, which is also known as Antiquity, while Samuel Pollard is aligned with the future, since he is interested only in the profits that will follow if he joins his lands, through marriage, with those of the Hawthorns. The sisters, meanwhile, embrace both past and future. As lovers of old ballads they embrace the past, while as lovers of riddles, murder stories and promises they embrace the future, since the pleasure of these three forms lies in the expectation of a resolution not yet reached: the solution to the riddle, the revelation of the murderer’s identity, the keeping (or breaking) of a binding oath. The key problem faced by the sisters is how to reconcile the binaries they embrace: a delight in the past and the future, an attraction to our world and to Arcadia, Esther’s competing love for Ysabel and Rin, Ysabel’s love for Esther and her desire that Esther should make herself happy by marrying Rin. Arcadia turns out to be the place where such reconciliations can happen, and where binaries can be dispensed with, as the nonbinary being Rin would seem to confirm.
Let’s go back to grammar, though, for a while. The ancient willows tended by the sisters are associated with grammar-as-magic, in that they filter it out of the river with their roots, ensuring that magic suffuses their being from stem to crown. They are also associated with grammar-as-narrative through the stories that are told about them, composed of grammatical sentences but varying widely from teller to teller, each variation being infused with different meanings and implications. These stories arise from the sense the Professors exude of possibilities past, present and to come, as El-Mohtar tells us near the beginning:
If you were to stand and behold those […] two trees – if you were a stranger to the land, unaccustomed to the sight – you might hear a kind of hum in the air, or feel it as a thickness in your chest. You might think that something about the shape of those trunks, the sweep of their twisted crowns, reminds you of something, or someone, you’ve lost – something, or someone, you would break the world to have again. Something, you might think, happened here, long, long ago; something, you might think, is on the cusp of happening again. (p. 3)
The language of these trees, their grammar and magic, is an international matter, transcending spatial and cultural borders; a ‘stranger to the land’ can read it, though the long-lost thing or person it invokes will differ, depending on who does the reading. The Professors’ embodied language transcends time, too, in that it speaks of the past and promises that what happened once will happen again. In this it resembles the stretch of the river Luss that runs from the gates of Faerie to the roots of the ancient pair of willows, through the so-called ‘Modal Lands’. The vegetation that grows along that stretch of river transcends time by violating the rules that govern the seasons, so that ‘spring bluebells mix with autumn asters, and towering cattails [i.e. bulrushes] scatter frosted seeds over beds of blooming marigolds’ (p. 2). By dedicating their lives to the service of the Professors, the two sisters commit themselves to the trees’ capacity to overthrow the rules of space, time and the natural order, as fairy tales, fantasies and ballads do whenever the mood takes them.
Murder, you might think, is not like this. It can only be read in one way, since it’s a savage and irreversible fact, whose brutality consists not just in the violence by which it is perpetrated but in the absolute nature of its consequences: murder once committed can never be undone. That, at least, is Samuel Pollard’s understanding. But the Professors deny this absolutism, in that they memorialise in their shapes the place where loss occurred, keeping its memory alive in those who can read them, native or strangers. They also deny this absolutism if you believe the story that they were once lovers who were murdered: somehow the lovers remain stubbornly present in the form of trees. They deny this absolutism in a third way, too: murders may be terminal, but they can occur again and again through generations. Violence against women, young people and queer lovers has taken place again and again in the course of history. At the same time, that violence has never succeeded in ending what it seeks to end. The Professors are still there, bearing silent witness, like words inscribed on the bark of a living tree.
So too is love, in all its manifestations. In their childhood the sisters, Esther and Ysabel, seem inseparable, like the willows; they love each other more passionately than anyone or anything else. They are, however, separated by time. Not only are they of different ages, with Esther the elder by two years, but as time goes by their tastes incline in different directions: ‘Ysabel loved pickles where Esther couldn’t abide the smell of vinegar; Esther took to foraging while Ysabel preferred gardening; Ysabel was fascinated by boys and their company while Esther found them tedious and enjoyed being alone’ (p. 10). Both sisters love ballads, such as Tam Lin or Childe Owlet, but Ysabel prefers murder ballads – accounts of shocking acts of violence committed in the past – while Esther likes ballads with riddles in them, which challenge their listeners to solve the verbal puzzles they contain in the here and now, as the ballad is sung. These preferences are not so very different, of course: murder ballads may include riddles inviting their hearers to decipher the killer’s identity (a well-known example is the ballad of John Barleycorn, which seems to describe the murder of a human being but also describes the everyday process of brewing beer; Esther sings this ballad at one point to express her negative feelings about Samuel Pollard). The sisters, then, remain compatible, despite their differences. But Esther’s delight in riddles confirms her greater attraction to grammar as practised by ‘wild’ grammarians – witches and other practitioners who repudiate the rigid rules favoured by institutions – an attraction that manifests itself in her love for the nonbinary faerie, Rin; while Ysabel’s delight in murder ballads means that she finds herself drawn instead to Esther’s murderer (though at this point she has no idea that a murder has been committed), seeking comfort from Samuel Pollard after her sister’s disappearance and getting engaged to him in a bid to fill the void it left in her life. Fortunately, the day of Ysabel’s betrothal is also the day when Esther returns from the dead, against all odds, to denounce her killer; and she does so through a riddle-ballad and a murder-ballad, the first being a secret song composed by the sisters to bring them together whenever they are separated, the second being a versified account of her own murder. At this crucial point in the narrative, then, the sisters’ different tastes converge to expose Pollard, as riddle ballads and murder ballads combine to frustrate his attempt to leave Esther behind him for ever. By mysterious means love overcomes divergent tastes, just as it overcomes the divergent cultures of Esther and Rin.
When Esther composes riddle ballads of her own, they sometimes depend on time; that is, on the fact that past, present and future may radically alter the nature of a person or a thing. She explains this principle to Rin on the day of their betrothal, as she parses a riddle she sang on the way to their meeting-place. The riddle begins ‘I gave my love a cherry that has no stone / I gave my love a chicken that has no bone’ (p. 44); and as Esther points out,
There are two ways to answer these riddles […] With the past, or with the future. We think of the cherry or the chicken as unchangeable things, and the song pokes at those assumptions. How is a cherry not a cherry? Well, when it’s a flower. How is a chicken not a chicken? Well, when it’s an egg. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a past, and that past is part of it; what the cherry was before the cherry is part of the cherry. […] But there’s another version of the song, with different answers – the answers to the question, what is the cherry after the cherry? […] The cherry that’s baked in a pie, for instance, has no stone. The chicken that’s stewed in a pot, it has no bone. The song says, this thing you are used to, it has a future, and the future is part of it, too. (pp. 46-7)
The gift Esther gives her love – the gift of herself – is therefore a changeable object; she was once a baby, and will one day be a cadaver. Rin, too, is changeable: they first manifest themself to Esther as a storm, then as an owl, and only on the third occasion as a being in human form, though even in that form their appearance can vary greatly. Love, then, may endure, but its endurance is premised on change, and this pair of lovers, like the sisters, are separated by time; Esther is mortal, while Rin is not; Esther’s life will come to an end, while Rin’s will run on indefinitely. Esther can also sing, while Rin, like all the inhabitants of Faerie, has no singing voice – whence their attraction to Esther’s singing. At the same time, Rin’s musicianship means they can complement Esther’s songs by playing the harp; and the constant movement of music through time provides El-Mohtar’s story with the perfect analogy for the constant movement of love between two people. Esther and Ysabel sing together even as they grow older and change their tastes, and their differences prove complementary, as the chords of Rin’s harp prove complementary to Esther’s voice. Without constant change there would be no music, and no story either, whether that story is told in verse (like a ballad) or in prose (like a novella).
A musical performance and the performance of a story are also determined by time in the sense that no two performances are identical; El-Mohtar reminds us of this as the sisters play variations on the songs they sing to the willows.[3] Pollard, by contrast, thinks the magic of the ancient willows can be reproduced – that is, copied exactly, without variation. After Esther’s murder he turns his romantic attentions to Ysabel as if she were Esther’s double, and in courting her he seeks to persuade both Ysabel and her father that the magical pair of willows on the Hawthorn lands are no different from commonplace willows of the kind that grow on his property – that they are effectively doubles of each other, indistinguishable even by the most discerning of tastes. He illustrates his point by presenting Ysabel with one of his many unsolicited gifts, ‘a beautiful lap desk […] enchanted in Exeter just for her’ (p. 88); and he proceeds to use two seemingly identical willow wands to animate a feather quill, which writes at the desk without the aid of human hands in response to the wands and a spell he speaks in Latin. One wand is made of wood from a tree near London, the other of wood from the Professors. The first produces a piece of doggerel verse full of horrible clichés, addressing Ysabel as ‘My little love, my willow’, while the second pens an urgent message to her: ‘Demand better’ (p. 89).[4] The poem penned by the wand from a commonplace tree is crudely reductive, metaphorically reducing Ysabel to a voiceless plant suitable for commercial exploitation, while the message penned by the Professors’ wand has a riddling double meaning: demand better verbal art, it implies, but also, ask better questions, or demand a morally better man, one not tainted with your sister’s blood. The timing of the message, however, is off. Ysabel responds to Pollard’s performance by running to the ancient willows and singing the secret song she composed with Esther – the song intended to reunite the sisters whenever they are separated; but nothing happens, and afterwards in disappointment she accepts Pollard’s gifts and marriage proposal numbly, demanding from him ‘nothing at all’ (p. 89). The rhythms of a well-told narrative can’t be rushed, any more than a well-sung melody can be hastened to its resolution. It is not yet time for the truth about Pollard to emerge, and time tries truth, as the old proverb tells us.
The timing of El-Mohtar’s narrative deserves attention too, for the manner in which it swerves back and forth through the history of the Hawthorn sisters, as if mimicking a river’s winding course through hilly country. The story of Esther and Ysabel is not told in chronological order, even in the first half of the novella. On p. 10, for instance, we learn that only one grammarian/magician has ever passed through Thistleford on the way to Arcadia, and that this one ‘never came out again’; it is not until the second half of the narrative that we learn more about this person. On p. 17, we’re told that ‘People sometimes fell into or out of Arcadia by accident’ and that ‘Esther and Ysabel had as children’, but again we don’t learn more until the second half of the narrative. The parts of the story told out of time, so to speak, always relate to Arcadia; for instance, we first hear about Esther’s Arcadian lover Rin on p. 11, but only hear about their first meeting ten pages later; and we only get the full details about Esther and Ysabel ‘falling into […] Arcadia […] as children’ – and meeting there the grammarian who travelled through Thistleford to Faerie – after Esther’s murder, on p. 59. Everything about Pollard, by contrast, is told in strictly chronological order, as if in conformity with his narrowly pragmatic outlook.
The Arcadian rejection of rigid chronologies is confirmed for us at the beginning of the section in which Esther gets engaged to Rin; and it quickly emerges from this passage that we humans are already familiar with the phenomenon of temporal relativity, even before beginning to consider the customs of Faerie. ‘There are lands that are near to us geographically,’ El-Mohtar points out in the second paragraph of this section,
but far from us temporally: London is not Londinium, though it’s built from its bones. There are lands that are near to us temporally but far from us geographically: we can be certain that at this moment, in Italy, someone is sitting down to breakfast with a newspaper dated roughly the same as ours, though we cannot expect to reach them in time to join them for the meal. (p. 43)
Arcadia combines both these properties, being ‘always both at a remove and always immediate; always near to hand and very far away’ (pp. 44-5). Its inhabitants are ‘a people to whom time [is] a kind of instrument, distance a kind of music’ (p. 45), and El-Mohtar explains how this works by giving us Esther’s time-dependent riddles about the cherry and the chicken, in which the cherry is always also the blossom which gave birth to it and the pie in which it will be baked, the chicken always also the past egg from which it hatched and the future stew or broth in which it will be cooked. Relative time in Arcadia is demonstrated elsewhere by a real live chicken – the hen which the Hawthorn children accidentally chase into Arcadia, and which goes on to live a preternaturally extended life in that country, either because time works differently there or because the chicken is simply happy.[5] In the story of Esther and Ysabel’s childhood visit we learn that time works differently for children and adults: children are not encumbered by strict schedules, which means they ‘can trip in and out of all manner of places whether you’re careful or carefree’ (p. 64), so that there is little difference, for them, between the time that passes in our world and the time that passes in Arcadia. Human adults, on the other hand, are ‘differently burdened’ (p. 64), with appointments to keep and responsibilities to uphold, which means that for them a short interval spent in the place without schedules – Arcadia/Faerie – can take up much more time in their native country, where an Arcadian day may last a century or more. Once again, however, this variation in time is familiar to the reader. Everyone remembers how differently time seems to pass in childhood than in maturity. El-Mohtar, in other words, is keen to point up the differences between our familiar everyday world and the world of Faerie, but also the many ways in which both places overlap. Both children and Arcadians, for instance, find it hard to read a person’s age (p. 62), and this affinity between mortals and immortals helps to ensure that Arcadia is never othered in the novella; it is merely rendered strange, as things in our world can be rendered strange by a trick of the light or the operation of the changing seasons.
It’s to this end, I think, that El-Mohtar shows us Arcadia from the perspective of the human grammarian who settles there, a woman called Agnes, rather than from the perspective of a native Arcadian. Agnes is the person who meets the young sisters when they ‘fall into’ Arcadia, and who helps them get home safely. She is also the person who finds Esther after her murder, again in Arcadia, and shows her how to return to her family a second time. Agnes travels to Arcadia by invitation, not as a colonial explorer or would-be tradeswoman; she first set out on her journey to that country, she tells the children, at the behest of an old Arcadian mill on the Liss, which she heard in a dream ‘call[ing] out in a sorrowful voice for someone to bring work again to its empty body, to fill its hollow silences with the sound of water and wheels’ (p. 63) (the mill ran, it no longer runs, but it hopes to run again). The mill embodies the magical changes or ‘complex translations’ that take place in our world, as in Faerie (p. 69): the changes that turn wheat into bread or barley into beer.[6] It also embodies a certain economic outlook. It seeks ‘work’, as an artist or craftsperson might, to satisfy the needs of its ‘body’, and we later learn that while something must always be exchanged for the products of its labour, an empty sign like a coin will not suffice. Instead, Arcadian economics demands that one thing be exchanged for another of equal value; or to be precise, by another thing which is deemed to be of equal value at the time the exchange is made. Such exchanges take place quite frequently between our world and Arcadia, El-Mohtar suggests. For example, the children stray into Arcadia while chasing one of the Hawthorn family’s hens, and Agnes takes in the hen by its own request (‘I think she might like to keep me company a while’, p. 65) and as partial recompense for her action in showing the children how to get home. Later, Agnes sends three dozen eggs to the Hawthorn family by way of Rin, as part of the ongoing system of exchanges between the two families which her rescue of the children set in motion. A hen in exchange for the lives of two little girls is not much to ask for; so Agnes has the right to go on sending eggs to the family from the hen, and also to make requests of her own, such as that the sisters sing a new song to the ancient willows in support of what she calls her ‘research’. Exchange is as important as change in Arcadian culture, and the objects of exchange are always changing, as music changes when played at different times on different instruments or in different arrangements.
The importance of exchange in the novella is as an alternative to the power-games encouraged by capitalistic commerce. Capitalism considers everything to have a value in coin, which means that those who possess a great deal of coin have power over those who do not. The gift exchange system considers instead that everyone has the wherewithal to offer something in exchange for something given, so that even the penniless child who is lost in a foreign country has something to offer in exchange for much-needed assistance. Pollard’s commitment to capitalism is demonstrated by his plying of Esther with expensive unwanted gifts and refusing to accept anything in exchange except her hand in marriage. Each gift he presses on her brings with it an obligation to recompense the giver in the kind of coin he will accept, and it’s implied that no amount of negotiation can alter the nature of that coinage; gold is always more valuable than silver, and a compliant woman more valuable than a defiant one. In addition, the gifts of capital must always be paid for in material objects – even when these take the form of a woman, who implicitly becomes an object when dispensed like a gold or silver piece. The gift exchanges of Faerie, by contrast, are a matter of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Rin deems Esther’s songs, when they first hear them, to be a gift, which means that Rin feels obliged to Esther until such time as both can agree what Rin might offer her in exchange. The first two gifts Rin offers to Esther are unacceptable to the mortal woman, since Esther has not yet spoken to Rin and does not yet know the terms under which they are offered; but the third gift – a series of lessons in playing the harp (Rin is an accomplished harpist and Esther wants to learn) – ensures that the meetings between the two will continue for a while, by mutual consent, and so too will the artistic, emotional, and erotic exchanges between them. When the lessons come to an end, something new must be found to keep up the trade of love between them. The Arcadian gift exchange economy, then, is predicated on the ever-shifting nature of relationships and people, and assumes those people to be equal, despite all their differences – or because of them. The gifts of capitalism, on the other hand, are predicated on monetary value alone, and give an unequal share of power to those who have amassed large quantities of capital, narrowly defined. The effects of this presumption of inequality between people can be murderous.
Pollard’s murder of Esther confirms the violence that sustains the capitalist economy. It takes place after Rin and Esther have exchanged rings in token of their love – the final stage in their series of mutual Arcadian exchanges, which culminates in an exchange of their selves, whereby Rin agrees to become part of Esther’s world by joining her family, and Esther promises to sing to them for the rest of her mortal existence (Rin, after all, is immortal, so that the time they spend with Esther will pass in the blink of an eye).[7] The exchange having been confirmed, Rin returns to Arcadia to put their affairs in order; after which Pollard emerges from the shadows, compliments Esther on her new ring, and points out that it belongs to a value system he does not acknowledge: ‘I’d have given you gold’, he tells her (p. 50). Esther rejects him one last time: ‘I don’t want you, I never wanted you, I could never want you’; the phrase conjugates her present, past and future, expunging Pollard from all three (p. 51). In exchange, Pollard proceeds to drown her in the river Liss. He does so both to banish her from his own future and because he believes she can be readily exchanged for her sister: ‘you’re not the only Hawthorn girl,’ he sneers (p. 51). For Pollard, murdering Esther is a simple solution to the economic problem he has set himself: how to join his lands with the more valuable lands of his neighbours. But for Esther, lover of riddles, a murder can never be simple. It’s a riddle (‘When is a woman not a woman? When she’s dead’, p. 78), and the best riddles have more than one answer.
The best riddles also encompass more than one problem. Esther’s courtship of Rin, and Rin’s of Esther (it’s always a two-way process driven by mutual desire) is complicated by Esther’s equal love for her sister; Esther cannot agree to live with Rin in Arcadia because that would involve the betrayal of a promise she made to Ysabel when they were children, that she would never leave her (p. 67). Rin, on the other hand, cannot easily consent to live in our world because it is too full of grief (as Yeats pointed out in his poem ‘The Stolen Child’) and of rules Rin does not understand (p. 48).[8] The negotiations about their love need to take account of both of their wishes, but also of the wishes of Esther and Ysabel. Ysabel’s grief when Esther vanishes arises from the mistaken belief that Esther has made a hard-and-fast choice to live with Rin at the expense of the promise she made to Ysabel. Such a choice is the kind Pollard might be expected to make, one-sided and non-negotiable. Hence Ysabel’s eventual resignation to the idea of marrying Pollard; she believes Esther has wholly committed herself to Arcadia, so she wholly commits herself to the culture and economics of the mortal world. But Esther’s commitment to the riddling Arcadian economics of desire and consent means she would never settle for such a singular solution to her emotional dilemma. And ironically, Pollard’s attempt to impose the capitalist solution on Esther by killing her – a solution achieved against one party’s consent, and to the profit of the other – generates a new set of problems yet more complex than the ones Esther faced before her death. Esther’s competing loves for her faerie lover and her mortal sister, reconciled by the terms of her engagement to Rin (which allowed both Esther and Rin to remain with Ysabel at Hawthorn House), are set at odds once again, and compounded by the competing rules that govern death in our world – where it is terminal – and in Arcadia – where it is not. The riddle set for Esther has been rendered more elaborate, and nothing delights Esther, even when dead, than an elaborate riddle.
The biggest riddle of all, of course, is how desire can overcome the challenge posed by violent death in the mortal world. The scholar Rosemary Jackson famously described fantasy itself as a kind of engine driven by desire, which aims to compensate for deep dissatisfaction with the world we live in by inventing impossible alternatives to it – alternatives which often involve expressing certain hidden desires, in the sense of articulating them, and also expressing those desires, in the sense of getting rid of them, pushing them away.[9] Esther’s murder, if it had come at the end of El-Mohtar’s novella, would have made it a tragedy, an expression of desire which pushes it away by erasing it. Coming in the middle as it does allows the narrative to stress the impossible desires that are triggered by a sudden, fatal act of violence, since the narrative continues after these desires have been set in motion. The first such desire is that the person who dies might continue to have desires, as those who survive her do; imagining those desires, like imagining the moment of death, is common practice among people who have lost loved ones under such circumstances, a fact that motivates many ghost stories. The second desire is that the violent act had never been committed – that the act itself should have been impossible. The third desire is to reverse the act. All these desires will seem absurd, especially to someone who does not believe in life after death, yet even non-believers may cleave to them at times of grief, if only in their dreams. In El-Mohtar’s novella, however, all three desires can be fulfilled by an artist with a way with words. And each of us can be such an artist if we are willing to adopt the riddling perspective on the world which words make available.
As soon as Esther drowns, El-Mohtar reminds us of this riddling perspective and how it works. The section of the book immediately after the murder opens with the riddling sentence, ‘The River Liss is always changing’ (p. 55), and immediately draws attention to its doubleness; grammatically speaking, the sentence can mean either that the river is always changing itself or that it is always changing the things and people that come in contact with it. The sentence also marks a change in the narrative, in two senses: first, that the narrative itself changes form, and secondly, that a change occurs in the narrative. After Esther’s drowning, we’re told, the river changes direction, taking her body back to Arcadia, whereas Arcadia was previously the place from which it flowed. It also changes Esther, taking advantage of the fact that Rin gave her a signet ring to mark their betrothal to transform her into a cygnet – a young swan (the pun makes that form available, we’re told, p. 72). The swan, one imagines, is a mute swan, the most common kind in England, whose name implies (quite wrongly) that it is voiceless. One legend about the mute swan tells us that it can only sing when dying, and the legend, if we remember it, might give us hope that Esther will somehow retain a voice in spite of death – and perhaps be able to sing again, despite the fact that she is going to Arcadia, where all singing is eventually silenced. The river’s two changes – its change of direction and its transformation of Esther – give additional hope of these further changes to the rules that have governed the narrative so far. Its new course, along which the protagonist is carried, takes the narrative for the first time into Arcadia itself, a place that has so far been only a promise, a game, a mystery, a dream; so the narrative changes direction as the river does. As a result, the riddling rules that govern Arcadia get foregrounded, where in the first half of the novella the rules of the mortal world were foremost. In Arcadia the impossible becomes possible, lost desire can be recovered thanks to the strength of a person’s yearning, and the magic implicit in grammar – which enables a single sentence or verse to mean many things – becomes a practical proposition, a guiding principle of life and death. This is not to say that the magic of grammar is absent from the mortal world – El-Mohtar has already told us that there are grammarians in her version of that world, mostly based in schools, who use that magic in strictly regulated ways. Rather, magic is the everyday stuff of Arcadia, not limited by the rules set by academic professors but professed instead by all and sundry, even birds and mills and trees. It is woven into the fabric of that country, as it is into the fabric of the Professors, and this remakes the narrative into something more fantastic than it was before.
This change is expressed in another sentence from the section immediately after the murder: ‘The River Liss swallowed Esther like a cherry pit or a chicken bone, and poured her down its throat towards Arcadia’ (p. 55). The riddle Esther sang to Rin asked when a cherry is not a cherry, when a chicken is not a chicken, and answered by telling us that both cherry and chicken can trace their being to a time before they were either, and to a time after their cherry and chicken identity has mutated into something else: a cherry pie, a stew. Pies and stews are useful in the mortal world: they sustain its human inhabitants. Cherry pits and chicken bones are not (though one can make a healthy broth out of the bones before discarding them). So El-Mohtar’s sentence both extends Esther’s riddle, developing it in a new direction, and suggests that Arcadia is a place where things that have been ejected by the mortal world may find a home, given new life by being digested and absorbed by a healthy body – that is, by Arcadia itself. Digestion, of course, can mean understanding something and in that way making it one’s own. The second half of El-Mohtar’s narrative, then, involves a process of mentally and emotionally digesting something: that violent death can be defied, but only if one adheres to a set of rules every bit as challenging as the rule that says death puts an end to a person’s life.
In Arcadia, riddles have an urgency they do not possess in the mortal world, because inventing them can save lives and working them out can work a person out of a bind. Between them, the grammarian and naturalised Arcadian, Agnes, the native Arcadian, Rin, and the newly dead mortal, Esther – restored to her original form by Rin under Agnes’s guidance – invent a series of riddles that will enable Esther to inform her sister of her fate. The riddles will also expose Pollard as a murderer, and reunite Esther, Ysabel and Rin at the end of the second half – impossibly, wonderfully. For the series of riddles to accomplish this impossibility, Ysabel must learn to read them, and to take the actions they encourage her to take by denouncing Pollard, punishing him, and making her way into Arcadia, which is now the only place where her sister can live on in human form. I don’t want to go into detail here about how this impossibility is accomplished; what matters here is that El-Mohtar’s Arcadia makes it possible. The old adage says that death can be found in Arcadia, too (et in Arcadia ego), but El-Mohtar insists that death there can be made into life, and that the way to accomplish this is to understand or digest the infinite possibilities made available by language or grammar – to understand them and to act on them. And this brings us to perhaps the strangest moment in the novella: the Acknowledgments which serve as its epilogue.
Everything else in El-Mohtar’s novella can be described as in some way familiar, despite its strangeness (and ‘familiar’ holds connotations of ‘family’, which makes this familiarity appropriate in a book devoted to the love between sisters). The novella plays variations on multitudes of pre-existing narratives, just as a piece of music must necessarily play both deliberate and accidental variations on pre-existing pieces of music, making something new and beautiful out of them. El-Mohtar mentions one of these narratives in her Acknowledgements: Hope Mirrlees’s funny, haunting, melancholic fairy novel Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), in which a river has its source in Fairyland and carries the influence of the fairies into the world of mortals, spawning an ungovernable outbreak of art, music and dancing among its staidest inhabitants. Lud-in-the-Mist is partly inspired by Christina Rossetti’s great ballad Goblin Market (1862), in which one sister rescues another from the titular goblins by finding a way to circumvent the rules that govern trade between humans and fairies; the same could be said of The River Has Roots, whose plot revolves around the love between sisters. The Border ballad Tam Lin is another influence on the novella; in order to restore Esther to human form, Rin is forced to cling to her as she changes shape, just as Janet in the ballad must cling to her lover Tam Lin as he undergoes many terrifying transformations before she can rescue him from the clutches of the fairies. Another Border ballad, Childe Owlet, is both referenced in the text (p. 22) and invoked by Pollard’s murder of Esther when she rejects him (Childe Owlet is similarly murdered by the woman he spurns). A third ballad, The Bonny Swans by the Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt, has been acknowledged by El-Mohtar as a major source, although it tells of an elder sister who murders her younger sibling out of jealousy; El-Mohtar has changed the narrative to reflect her own love for her younger sister. There are echoes in the novella, too, of Lord Dunsany’s foundational fantasy The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), both in the fact that the borders of El-Mohtar’s Faerie are always changing – as they do in Dunsany’s novel – and in the phrase ‘the lands we know’ (p. 43), which recalls the famous phrase ‘beyond the fields we know’ that appears more than a hundred times in that narrative. Elsewhere, El-Mohtar modifies the phrase; near the beginning of the novella she refers instead to ‘the lands we think we know’ (p. 1, my emphasis), suffusing the everyday with the epistemological uncertainty which is the stuff of Faerie. One last literary reference is made with appropriate lightness by El-Mohtar’s Faerie character, Rin. When Rin tells their lover Esther ‘I’ve travelled light, I’ve travelled dark, and I’m still on my way’ (p. 34), they invoke Naomi Mitchison’s great fairy tale Travel Light (1952), about which El-Mohtar has composed an influential online essay.[10] Mitchison’s book is written from an international perspective with a powerful female enchanter as its protagonist, and in her essay El-Mohtar wonders what would have happened if she had encountered such a book at the age of seven, instead of another book that shaped her love of literature, Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937). With the exception of McKennitt’s ballad, all the literary allusions listed here come from the Western Archipelago made up of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and El-Mohtar’s three English degrees, her delight in Mitchison and her abiding love of The Hobbit establish her as thoroughly rooted in the traditions of reimagining or re-enchanting the archipelagic landscape within which she sets her own novella.[11]
But El-Mohtar is Lebanese-Canadian, and her essay on Travel Light begins by invoking her first reading of The Hobbit at the age of seven ‘in a flat overlooking Hamra street in Ras Beirut’. The River Has Roots is set in an alternative England, but it is everywhere haunted by El-Mohtar’s Lebanese heritage, which peeps out of the text at unexpected moments, some of which can be recognised by the reader, others of which are autobiographical and must therefore be glossed by El-Mohtar herself. One such autobiographical detail is the chicken chased by Esther and Ysabel as children into Arcadia. As the Acknowledgements explain:
When I was seven and my sister was five, we were living in Lebanon, and our mother took us to visit friends in a village called Kfarmishki. We chased a chicken past the boundaries of our friends’ neighbours’ yard, and soon found ourselves lost; a village is a small place, but we were smaller, and we’d never been there before. All of a sudden nothing looked familiar, and we had no idea how to get back to the lands and people we knew. (p. 132)
This reminiscence, which briefly aligns Esther and Ysabel with Amal and her younger sister Dounya (who shares the book’s dedication), suddenly launches the writer into thoughts of Lebanon and ‘the children there now; the children murdered, displaced, orphaned, trapped’ (p. 132). Those children might have been El-Mohtar herself, or her parents, or her grandparents, she tells us, since ‘every generation of my family has been shaped or defined by imperial war’ (p. 133). In Lebanon, time can repeat itself on a loop as suffering inflicts itself on successive generations, with few hints of resolution; time, then, works differently there, as it does in Faerie. It has also been claimed in ‘Right-wing talk’ that Lebanon isn’t a country at all, just as ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian’, so that the millions of people in the region who have been slaughtered and displaced do not really exist – much like the fairies. Further parallels emerge on a rereading of the novella. Arcadia is at one point compared to the Levant, the area in which Lebanon and Palestine are located, as being a place to which one can travel, though not ‘regularly, reliably or particularly safely’ (p. 44). Immediately afterwards comes the paragraph in which El-Mohtar reminds us that some countries seem to be for ever distant from others, either because of the passage of time (which separates London from Londinium) or because of geography (which separates England from Italy). The Levant might be one of these, since it’s a term that predates the countries of which it is now composed (indeed, it’s identified as ‘archaic’ in certain dictionaries, just as Faerie is sometimes known as ‘Antiquity’, p. 5), and many of those who talk about it have never set foot inside its boundaries. Palestine might be another, since a land called Palestine once existed, may exist in the future, but does not exist in the present (Arcadia too is ‘always in the past, or always in the future’, p. 47). Boundaries themselves are problematic in the Levant; the border between Lebanon and Israel, for instance, has long been contested, while Palestine, in the minds of many, doesn’t have borders at all. Faerie shares, then, its fluctuating borders with Lebanon and Palestine, though Faerie’s borders seem to change of their own volition, in response to the land’s changing moods or climate, while Lebanon’s and Palestine’s have been a source of constant strife with neighbouring countries and populations.
Another reference to El-Mohtar’s Lebanese identity peeps out in the song sung by the sisters to the Professors at the change of every season. The lyrics of the ‘Professors’ Hymn’ are in a language the sisters do not speak: ‘they could not say what language it was, only that the shape of the words fit so differently into their mouths that they felt their voices shift in deference to it’ (p. 9). But a visiting woodworker from the Levant tells their mother that it sounds like Arabic, though ‘a dialect she’d never heard’, and goes on to explain its meaning: ‘it was […] a song about the North Wind opening doors and carrying messages to and from a beloved in exile’. The lyrics, then, invoke the problem of sustaining love in the face of separation and distance, the problem Esther must address when she is violently separated from her sister and robbed of a voice capable of denouncing her murderer. Art, it seems, finds a way to speak across time and space, conveying the deepest of emotions to those who need to hear them articulated, and Esther owes her awareness of this fact to the only song she knows in the Arabic language.
In fact, the Professor’s Hymn and its Arabic origins are woven into El-Mohtar’s narrative throughout its length. At a promotional event in Glasgow, El-Mohtar explained that the ‘nonsense la words’ in the long refrain of the Professors’ Hymn invoke a kind of song – the mlolah – that used to be sung by women during the British Mandate in Palestine, as a means of conveying subversive messages in code to relations or lovers involved in the resistance movement.[12] On the audiobook of The River Has Roots, El-Mohtar and her sister sing a mlolah called Tarweedeh Shmaali – the Lovers’ Hymn – as a stand-in for the Professors’ Hymn, thereby rooting the Hawthorn family’s musical tradition in the turbulent history of El-Mohtar’s own family (the music has Levantine roots, in other words, as well as the river). In the novella, Ysabel and Esther compose a similarly coded song in the form of a riddle ballad as a means of communicating with one another in time of need. On returning from the dead in the shape of a magic singing harp – the only shape in which she can communicate with mortal listeners – Esther uses this riddle ballad to identify that harp as Ysabel’s sister, thereby giving credence to its earlier account of her murder, which it sang as a murder ballad. The riddle ballad, then, serves as a kind of signature validating the murder ballad; and in confirming Esther’s identity it succeeds in overthrowing Pollard’s assertion, as a wealthy and respected male member of the local community, that the account of the murder was a lie put about by the nefarious foreigner, Rin. In response, the assembled listeners assent to Pollard’s punishment as proposed by Ysabel: to be transformed through the grammar of the Liss into a willow tree, whose branches bleed whenever they’re cut. By this means, the Professors whose love was honoured by the sisters in song are joined on the banks of the Liss by a murderer whose crime was exposed by those same sisters in song. There could hardly be a more convincing affirmation that one willow is not the same as another, or a more satisfying reversal of the usual process whereby women are silenced and spoken for by powerful, articulate men.
This is, of course, wishful thinking, that is, a fairy tale or fantasy – terms that have often been used with a sneer. So too is the link between Palestine or Lebanon, as countries that have been said not to exist, and Faerie or Arcadia, imagined places that lead a charmed existence blissfully untroubled by the sorts of politics that deny a country’s existence. This is not quite true, of course – the pastoral has been used as a vehicle for political satire by writers from Virgil to Sir Philip Sidney, and the politics and economics of fairyland have been carefully detailed in old folklore, as Mirrlees reminds us in Lud-in-the-Mist. But the fact remains that both genres are often deemed to be the lightest of light reading, and that the genre in which El-Mohtar is writing – fantasy fiction – is frequently dismissed as childish fare, like The Hobbit or Travel Light. Texts of this kind are invisible to professedly ‘serious’ readers, just as the fairies are invisible to ordinary mortals except on the rare occasions when they choose to show themselves.
Invisibility itself is, of course, political. In Ibtisam Azem’s 2014 novel The Book of Disappearance, translated into English by Sinan Atoon in 2019, all the Palestinian Arabs in Israel spontaneously vanish, without warning and without explanation.[13] The episode seems to wipe out at one blow all the problems associated with Palestine, from the question of the two-state solution to the necessity of justifying the occupation of Palestinian land by Israeli settlers. But Palestinian voices continue to haunt the world after the disappearance, whispering from the corners of rooms, the shadows in the streets and the pages of books about the Palestinian past and the possibility of a Palestinian future, should the Palestinians reappear as suddenly as they vanished. Palestine, the novel suggests, does not exist in the present, but only in the past and perhaps the future; yet this means it exists in the present, too, since memory and hope are finally ineradicable. As I mentioned earlier, El-Mohtar’s Arcadia is said to exist only in the past and in the future, never in the present, like ‘a country in surrender’ whose inhabitants dream of self-determination (p. 47). These dreams preserve their country from obliteration, as Rin points out to Esther; ‘that is how it defends itself’, they gently suggest. Time treated lightly, as Arcadia treats it – not as a set of rules but as endlessly malleable raw material, like the tune of a traditional song – resists the tyranny of changeless, monotonous repetition. Travelling lightly, remembering the past but unencumbered by it, is itself a form of self-determination, whether or not one finds a permanent fixed location to end one’s travels in.
El-Mohtar’s novella does enter Arcadia, but only after Esther’s violent death, and then only briefly. Once there, we see only one location: Agnes’s mill, where she lives with her daughter Rowan and a long-lived hen. It’s at the mill that the narrative ends, with Esther and Rin preparing to share a meal with Agnes and Rowan, only to be interrupted by the sudden, triumphant arrival of Ysabel, carrying a child on her shoulders. Ysabel has found her way to Esther – just as Esther found her way to Ysabel – in fulfilment of a promise: at the beginning of the novella, when Esther swore she would never leave her sister, Ysabel swore in her turn that if Esther ever migrated to Arcadia she would come and visit her every two weeks to remind her of the words to the ballad Tam Lin. In El-Mohtar’s world a promise is binding, and these promises fulfil themselves in a place where women, children and nonbinary lovers can live in peace, untroubled by politics, economics, or violence, though by no means ignorant of them.
It’s a fairy tale ending, of course – an impossible dream; but it pays homage, I think, to the Arcadias found by exiles in unexpected places. At the Glasgow event, El-Mohtar suggested that the town of Thistleford in The River Has Roots was partly modelled on Chagford in Devon. Chagford is an English village where an artistic community has long established itself, a community dedicated to multiple arts (music, painting, performance, crafts, and literature), like El-Mohtar’s novella, and to the study of folklore in the context of radical politics. For those who live outside Chagford it exists in the mind as a kind of Arcadia, a haven, a dreamland; but it does exist, and creative people have gathered there to work, discuss, and sustain each other, El-Mohtar sometimes among them. It’s with Chagford in mind that I suggested that the orientation of the novel lies on the East-West axis, with Arcadia coming and going on nearby Dartmoor, whose ‘granite outcroppings’ litter the Modal Lands between the gates of Faerie and the entrance to mortal lands marked by the Professors (p. 21). Chagford and Dartmoor lie in the West Country of England, about as far from West Asia as Londinium is from London; but both can prove welcoming to strangers, like the ancient willows whose shape can be read by any traveller with seeing eyes. One such stranger is the American writer-artist Terri Windling, who lives and works in Chagford. Another is the American writer-performer Ellen Kushner, a frequent visitor to Terri’s house, whose novel Thomas the Rhymer (1990) represents Faerie as a land full of riddles and besotted with music, especially ballads. Kushner’s Faerie has in it a seeming bird which is in fact a murdered lover, who must find a way to communicate the manner of his death to his living sweetheart; he does so through a murder ballad, just as Esther does. Kushner’s bird is male, while El-Mohtar’s metamorphosed swan is female; as with all the stories she invokes, El-Mohtar subjects Kushner’s fairy tale to a transformation; but the roots of her novella can be traced to their sources by those who know them, just as the landscape of her alternative England can be traced to that of Devon.
El-Mohtar’s Arcadia is coded as English or Celtic, with its lichen-draped Tolkienian woods and its water mill, which recalls the mill in McKennitt’s ballad The Bonny Swans. The mill would seem to be the polar opposite of ruined Gaza at the time of writing. In it, women and nonbinary people can safely gather whenever they please, to talk about whatever they like. They have plenty of food to eat, and find themselves in a workplace dedicated to labour which is pleasant as well as necessary, labour of the mind as well as the body (Agnes is a researcher as well as a miller, a grammarian as well as a tradeswoman). They can make music there; with Ysabel’s help, they can remember how to sing. Young people such as Agnes’ daughter Rowan and Ysabel’s unnamed child have a future in which they can play and grow in peace, far from the threat of violence. Is it frivolous to bring such a utopian dream-setting into dialogue with the real-life setting of atrocities too frightful to imagine, many of them perpetrated against children? Is it irresponsible to conjure up a story that combines elements of archipelagic culture with a culture that has suffered so much at the hands of British and other imperialisms?
In the novella, the scene at the mill can be read as an act of wish-fulfilment, achieved in defiance of all the laws of reason and physics. To create it, El-Mohtar has a river reverse its course. More radically still, she brings a young woman back from the dead to tell her own story. The narrative, in other words, accommodates the desires invoked by the Professors, whose twisted shapes remind you of ‘something, or someone, you’ve lost – something, or someone, you would break the world to have again’ (p. 3). Fantastic fiction allows us to break the world and remake it in the shape of our desires and dreams. In the process it enriches those desires and dreams, giving them a kind of substance, allowing us to imagine that they might become embodied in some way we could never have envisaged without its help, and by that means bringing them closer to embodiment. Creating a safe and prosperous Palestine requires that the world be broken apart and reassembled in a better shape. With her book, which breaks apart so many narratives and reconstructs them in the form of a small utopia, El-Mohtar offers us a glimpse of what such a world might look like.
NOTES
[1] All references are to Amal El-Mohtar, The River Has Roots (London: Arcadia, 2025).
[2] Running, of course, does not always have positive connotations. El-Mohtar’s novella is as concerned with the tendency of violence and misogyny to rear their heads in successive eras as it is with the irrepressible nature of resistance. ‘She runs, she ran, she will run again’ could as easily refer to running in fear as running for the sheer joy of it.
[3] ‘As Esther and Ysabel grew, as singing became their favourite pastime, they began to play with adding new material to their repertoire’ (p. 9).
[4] The same phrase is used earlier by Esther to describe Pollard, urging Ysabel to ‘demand better’ than this ‘crumb’ (p. 32).
[5] ‘I don’t think it’s grammar,’ Rin says of the chicken’s longevity, ‘I think she’s just happy there’ (p. 34).
[6] Pollard’s resistance to understanding the world in terms of these transformations is signalled by Esther’s comparison of him to a ‘crumb’ (p. 32): what is left over after the bread has undergone all the rest of its changes, without enough substance to satisfy the needs of the bread’s makers.
[7] In addition, the rings are literally made from parts of themselves, having been crafted by Rin from strands of the lovers’ hair.
[8] The refrain of the poem goes:
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
[9] See Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, f.p. 1981, reprinted 2003), pp. 3-4.
[10] ‘Crossroads and Coins: Naomi Mitchison’s Travel Light’, NPR, January 1, 2014.
[11] El-Mohtar’s delight in riddles perhaps reflects her love of The Hobbit, which famously contains a chapter called ‘Riddles in the Dark’. As I wrote this essay I kept thinking of Adam Roberts’s fine discussion of Tolkien’s work, The Riddles of The Hobbit (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), which identifies fantasy in general, not just the histories of Arda, as a genre obsessed with riddling.
[12] See Christina Hazboun, ‘Don’t Leave: Reviving the folk songs of Palestinian Women’, Middle East Eye, 21 December, 2021.
[13] My edition was published in 2024 by And Other Stories.