A war between the lords of Demonland and Witchland, fought on a Mercury that has nothing to do with astronomy, in prose modelled on the Jacobeans. Eddison was a civil servant who wrote it for himself; Tolkien admired it and disagreed with its ethics, and it remains the strangest of the great fantasies - the ending is a circle. Sixty plates from Benjamin Haughton and Daniel Maclise and their contemporaries, ranging from slain dragons and woodland scenes to tournaments and halls of feasting, give this romance of Demonland and Witchland its proper heraldic weather.