£595.00
BARRINGER, Leslie. Gerfalcon. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1927. First edition. 8vo. Original cloth, with pictorial jacket.
The first volume of Leslie Barringer’s celebrated Neustrian Cycle, Gerfalcon introduces an imaginary medieval European realm whose elaborate political, social and chivalric culture gives the novel the character of a fully realised secondary world.
The story follows Raoul of Ger, warrior and poet, through a landscape of castles, tournaments, rival houses, warfare, romance and political intrigue. Barringer drew deeply upon medieval history and romance while creating a country and history of his own, placing Gerfalcon in the developing tradition of twentieth-century historical and secondary-world fantasy.
Published by William Heinemann in 1927, the novel was followed by Joris of the Rock in 1928 and, twenty years later, Shy Leopardess in 1948, completing Barringer’s three-volume Neustrian Cycle. Bibliographical sources identify the Heinemann edition as the original British publication.
Gerfalcon transports the reader to Neustria, Leslie Barringer’s richly imagined medieval realm of castles, rival lords, warfare, chivalry and courtly intrigue.
At its centre is Raoul of Ger, a young nobleman, warrior and poet whose adventures carry him through a turbulent feudal world shaped by competing loyalties, romance, honour and conflict. Barringer builds the story around the traditions of medieval chivalric romance, but rather than setting it in a recognisable historical kingdom, he creates a convincing country of his own, complete with its own geography, politics and culture.
The result is an unusually immersive fantasy for the 1920s: part medieval adventure, part romance and part early secondary-world fantasy. Gerfalcon opened the Neustrian sequence, continued in Joris of the Rock and ultimately completed by Shy Leopardess.
The remarkable pictorial jacket on this copy seems particularly appropriate to Barringer’s creation, presenting the reader with a visual world of castles, knights, heraldry, craftsmen, ships and medieval landscapes before the book is even opened.
Gerfalcon appeared at an important moment in the development of modern fantasy. Barringer created an invented medieval society with its own geography, history, politics and culture at a time when the modern secondary-world fantasy novel was still taking shape.
Its importance was recognised again nearly fifty years later when Gerfalcon was selected for the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library, appearing in March 1976 as the seventh title in a series devoted to recovering significant neglected works of fantasy. The series also included works by William Morris, Lord Dunsany and H. Rider Haggard.
Barringer’s world also draws upon the traditions of Arthurian romance. Bibliographical scholarship notes that Arthurian stories exist within the fictional culture of Neustria itself: Raoul is both poet and warrior, refers to Arthurian figures and even composes an Arthurian romance of his own
