The Corn King and the Spring Queen

Description

Introduced by Naomi Mitchison. Set over two thousand years ago on the calm and fertile shores of the Black Sea, Naomi Mitchison's The Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic. Erif Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen. Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break Tarrik's power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, an Hellenic philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so begins for Tarrik a Quest - a fabulous voyage of discovery which will bring him new knowledge and which will reunite him with his beautiful Spring Queen.

Naomi Mitchison was born in Edinburgh in 1897 and educated at the Dragon School and St Anne's College, Oxford. As a member of the Haldane family (her father was a noted physiologist and her brother the famous genetic scientist and essayist J.B.S. Haldane), Naomi Mitchison has been equally distinguished as one of the foremost historical novelists of her generation. In 1916 she married the Labour politician Dick Mitchison, later Baron Mitchison, QC, and during their years in London she took an active part in social and political affairs, including women's rights and the cause of birth control. Her career as a writer began with The Conquered (1923), a novel about the Celts whose approach anticipated similarly imaginative reconstructions from later writers of the Scottish Renaissance such as Neil Gunn, Grassic Gibbon and Eric Linklater. Further novels were set in ancient classical times, most notably The Corn King and the Spring Queen (1931) which drew on her interest in myth and ritual and the writings of J.G. Frazer. The Blood of the Martyrs (1939) brought her hatred of oppression and a perennial concern for human decency to a tale of the early Christian movement. She returned to Scotland in 1937 to live in Carradale in Kintyre, and her novel The Bull Calves (1947) deals with the years after the Jacobite '45 and the Haldane family history at that time. Involved with local politics, conservation and Highland affairs, she has also travelled widely, and her long association with an African tribe in Botswana led to her adoption as an honorary chief in the 1960s. In a life full of cultural and creative commitment Naomi Mitchison knew and corresponded with a host of fellow writers, including E.M. Forster, W.H. Auden, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Neil Gunn. There are over seventy books to her name, including biographies, essays, short stories and poetry. Her entertaining memoirs have been published as Small Talk (1973), All Change Here (1975) and You May Well Ask (1970). She died in 1999.

* The breathtaking recreation of life in the ancient world welds the power of myth and magic to a stirring plot. -- Ian Rankin