Yet there are whispers and mystery about the great red-bearded King; for it has been observed that when he takes a new love, whether from among the fays or the other people of Fairy, he tells her tales of how he spent some thirty years among the mortals. Some hold that these are merely things that he makes up; for who could believe in a world of such wild unreason that its people must blow each other to bits in order to command obedience to their wills? Some hold, on the other hand, that these tales are nothing but the disturbed dreams that Barbarossa dreamed while lying asleep under the ice, in the Wartburg castle with the ravens circling round. Yet it is observable that there is a certain wild consistency in the King’s dreams and his acts; for among his loves he has never taken one from the apple dryads.
Land of Unreason Page 19