Blurbs by Evangeline Walton

Blurbs are the endorsements put on books, usually newly published ones, to help a book gain some sort of notice. They are usually contributed by friends of the author, or solicited by the publisher from recognizable names in the field. The question of blurbs by Evangeline Walton came up during my conversation at the youtube channel MaskedManta released on Tuesday September 29th. (You can view it here.) This inspired me to compile all the known instances where Evangeline Walton contributed a blurb to a book. So far, I have four in total. If anyone knows of any more, please post about them in the comments.

Walton gained acclaim in the fantasy genre in the early 1970s with the publication of her Mabinogion books in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and she began to attend conventions and attracted wider notice. The first book that has a blurb by Walton is The Lost Prince by Paul Edwin Zimmer. Walton certainly knew Zimmer's sister, Marion Zimmer Bradley, in the 1970s, and probably also knew Zimmer himself from conventions, like the Mythopoeic Society ones in California. 

Walton published the first of her Theseus novels, The Sword Is Forged, with Timescape Books, in 1983. David G. Hartwell was her editor, and it seems that he was responsible for soliciting from her the other three blurbs (though the one for Sword at Sunset might have been solicited by Betty Ballantine, Walton's editor at Ballantine Books from 1970-1974). Hartwell left Timescape Books soon after Walton's book was published, and in 1985 he joined Arbor House, which later merged with Avon/Morrow to be called Avonova. Hartwell also worked as a freelance consulting editor for Tor Books, from 1983 to 1995, when he became a full-time senior editor at Tor. 

Here are the four books, listed chronologically. 

Paul Edwin Zimmer

The Lost Prince (Playboy Paperbacks, September 1982) The Dark Border Vol. 1  

 Front cover: “A thrilling and tremendous adventure” Evangeline Walton

Rosemary Sutcliff

Sword at Sunset (Tor, [March] 1987)

[page ii]: “Exquisitely written—the real flesh and blood Arthur. Sutcliff gives his life new meaning and purpose.” Evangeline Walton

Sword at Sunset was first published in 1963. This new reprint was described as "part of the celebration of their upcoming fiftieth anniversary in publishing, Ian and Betty Ballantine will be sponsoring the release of many of their all-time favorite books and re-publishing authors of outstanding stature." This sounds like it would have been a very attractive series, but Sword at Sunset is the only known entry. Does anyone else know of any further titles so marketed? It could have been a wonderful successor to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which was edited by Betty Ballantine.  

Guy Gavriel Kay

The Summer Tree (Arbor House, 1985)

Rear dust-wrapper flap: “Powerful and fascinating, different even for fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay combines intense terror with passages of poignant loveliness. The Summer Tree is a fast moving story that still has time for subtlety and originality.”  Evangeline Walton

Rear dust-wrapper of The Wandering Fire (Arbor House, 1986), advertises The Summer Tree and includes more of Walton’s blurb (with slight changes):

“Intense terror yet also passages of poignant loveliness . . . there is a kind of touching glory when the moon gives birth and the boy finds what must bring him manhood. Yet if anybody wants monsters here they are. A fast-moving story that still has time for subtlety and originality.” Evangeline Walton, author of The Island of the Mighty 

Paul Hazel

The Wealdwife’s Tale (Avonova, March 1994) mass-market paperback

[p. i] “A grim and powerful re-rendering of the pretty, old fairy tale, yet it has a moving beauty of its own” Evangeline Walton, author of The Children of Llyr

The first edition (Avonova /William Morrow, March 1993) does not have any blurbs.

This blurb is one of the final publications by Walton before her death in 1996. 

New Corrected Edition of Evangeline Walton's MABINOGION TETRALOGY

A long time in the making, Abrams Press has released (on September 15th) a new special hardcover edition of Evangeline Walton's Mabinogion Tetralogy, which is made up of The Virgin and the Swine (1936; retitled The Island of the Mighty in 1970); The Children of Llyr (1971); The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and Prince of Annwn (1974). Composed in a different order from the Mabinogion's original four branches, when Walton's novels were first collected in 2002 by Overlook Press, they were presented to match the Mabinogion sequence, with the first book (Prince of Annwn) in the same position as the first branch, and the fourth book (The Island of the Mighty) positioned as the fourth branch. 

The new edition has a new Foreword by Christopher Paolini, a reprint of Betty Ballantine's Introduction from the Overlook Press edition. And it has an Editor's Note by me. As editor I compared line-by-line the copyedited typescripts of three of the books with the versions previously published by Ballantine Books, finding lots of dropped words, phrases, and sentences, and other mistakes. (For the fourth book, I used the 1936 published edition, as no manuscript or typescript survives.) Thus, for the first time, we have a clean, consistent, and corrected text of Walton's signature series. 

The Amazon listing is rather confused, as the  ISBN (978-1419792564) is tied in with the previous trade paperback edition. Thereby the older editions come up when you use the "Read sample" feature for the new hardcover and also for the Kindle edition.  You can see the Abrams edition front matter (by Paolini, Ballantine, and myself) at this link. 

The artist, Nim Ben-Reuven, who designed the casebound cover, posted about the cover at his website, available here.  

An audio book is supposed to be released on October 13th.  

 With the band at rear  

Icons of the Fantastic: Behind the Scenes

In the Spring 2026 issue of Mythlore, I reviewed the book Icons of the Fantastic: Illustrations of Imaginative Literature from the Korshak Collection (2025), edited by Amanda T. Zehnder and David M. Brinley. The review is available freely online here. 

The new Summer 2026 issue of The University of Chicago Magazine has a profile of the Korshak alums, father and son, who put together the collection of art. It's kind of a behind-the-scenes peek.  Read the whole article here. 

Here is one of the glorious illustrations from the Collection:

José Segrelles, War of the Worlds, c. 1930. (Unless noted, all images courtesy the Korshak Collection)

 

More on Josef Madlener

I've just posted a new piece at Tolkien Oddments substack. Here is the beginning.  You can read the entire piece freely at this link.

More on Madlener

Last summer, I published a piece in The Journal of Tolkien Research on “Josef Madlener’s ‘Der Berggiest’: Not the Origin of Gandalf.” It is freely available here. My point basically was that it was chronologically impossible for a postcard first printed in 1935 to have influenced The Hobbit, and specifically the character Gandalf, whose origin was in the late 1920s, while the manuscript of the bulk of the tale was in existence by early 1933 for C.S. Lewis to be reading it. After that piece was published I had some interesting correspondence with some people, notably Carl F. Hostetter, who suggested better matchings of Madlener’s titles for the six-postcard series “Gestalten aus Märchen und Sage” (Characters from Stories and Legends) with the illustrations themselves. (I had noted that a few of the titles had “questionable associations.”) ...  

 

Books Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien During His Lifetime

Okay, I'm experimenting. My post on "Books Dedicated to J.R.R. Tolkien During His Lifetime" is freely available at my (new) Tolkien Oddments substack  I think you can link to it here.  For now I have about five ideas for occasional Oddments posts, which should give me enough time to decide whether its a useful venue or whether I like blogging better. I'm not giving up on blogging. Non-Tolkien posts will remain here, as well as some Tolkien stuff. We'll see how it works out!