Obscene, Grotesque, and Carnivalesque

Hope Mirrlees’s 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist, about the scandalous banishment of the Faerie folk by law-abiding conventional inhabitants of the town Lud-in-the-Mist, is sometimes characterized as “high fantasy” in the manner of J.R.R. Tolkein’s later, but more celebrated, work, The Hobbit (1937), for its “hobbit-ish” sounding names and settings. ¹ Perhaps, too, it is often assumed to lean that way because Mirrlees also coincidentally penned another obscure-but-brilliant text, Paris: A Poem (1919), published by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, written in what scholars consider a “high Modernist” style. ² But, “high” can sometimes be too easy a critical reach, and, in the case of Lud-in-the-Mist, it’s decidedly misleading.