Elizabeth H. Boyer

Elizabeth Hall Boyer (born 1952) is an American fantasy author^[1][2][3] who produced a number of books in the 1980s and early 1990s.^[4] Her stories were deeply influenced by Norse mythology, and are set in a fantasy world whose climate and geography resembles that of the Scandinavia of Norse myths. While Norse mythology has been an influence on the fantasy genre, and many authors such as Tolkien and Lewis were influenced by these myths, Boyer's books followed them much more closely. Her stories are characterized by light and dark elves, dwarves, trolls, sorcerers, ley lines, burial mounds, wizards, and so forth. Boyer tended to follow the Norse versions of these story elements closely without much deviation. Boyer's early books are dominated by the theme of the heroic quest.

Boyer attended Brigham Young University where she studied English literature and Scandinavian mythology. She was last reported living near Atlanta on a farm, and no longer writing.

Her works have maintained a level of popularity through the years since their publication, however critics have described her later works to have been inferior efforts compared to the original Alfar series. The Skyla series in particular was noted as "less ambitious" and darker yet slow-paced, patchy, and tentative.^[4] Other critics attribute her lack of popular appeal (compared to contemporaries like Tolkien and Lewis) to a narrower thematic subtext. As an early contributor to the mass-market fantasy genre, Boyer's fate is described as similar to her contemporary Niel Hancock in that her books required the reader to be interested in a specialized area of study, in this case, Norse mythology, in order to fully appreciate the books, and thus she did not find the sort of wide acceptance which would have given her a more prominent place as a pioneer in the genre.

Bibliography

• World of the Alfar
  • The Sword and the Satchel (1980)
  • The Elves and the Otterskin (1981)
  • The Thrall and the Dragon's Heart (1982)
  • The Wizard and the Warlord (1983)
• Wizard's War
  • The Troll's Grindstone (1986)
  • The Curse of Slagfid (1989)
  • The Dragon's Carbuncle (1990)
  • The Lord of Chaos (1991)
• Skyla
  • The Clan of the Warlord (1992)
  • The Black Lynx (1993)
  • Keeper of Cats (1995)

Boyer also contributed a short story to the anthology Catfantastic II (1990) and penned the short story The Last Gift in 1990.

References

External links

• Elizabeth H. Boyer at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Boyer, Elizabeth H at the The Encyclopedia of Fantasy
• Review of Wizard's War series.