Evangeline Walton

Evangeline Walton (24 November 1907 – 11 March 1996) was the pen name of Evangeline Wilna Ensley, an American writer of fantasy fiction. She remains popular in North America and Europe because of her “ability to humanize historical and mythological subjects with eloquence, humor and compassion”.

Life Born in Indianapolis, Indiana to Marion Edmund Ensley and Wilna Eunice Ensley née Coyner, Walton came from a lively, educated, Quaker family. Walton suffered chronic respiratory illnesses as a child, and was privately or self-taught at home. Her parents separated and divorced in 1924. Growing up and living with her mother and her grandmother and witnessing her parents’ marital difficulties roused a natural feminism in Walton which appears throughout her writings. As a child, Walton enjoyed the works of L. Frank Baum, James Stephens, Lord Dunsany and Algernon Blackwood, which she would later cite as influences on her fiction. Walton and her mother traveled often to New York City, Chicago and San Francisco for opera, especially for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen; opera was a passion her entire life. In 1946 after the death of her grandmother, Walton and her mother moved to Tucson, Arizona. Wilna Ensley died in 1971 but not before she saw the dawn of public recognition for Walton and her works.

Most of Walton’s published and unpublished works were originally written in the 1920s through the early 1950s. She worked on her best known work, the Mabinogion tetralogy, during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and her Theseus trilogy during the late 1940s. Once success found her after 1970, she reworked many of her manuscripts for publication over the next twenty years. Walton said of her knack for writing fantasy: “My own method has always been to try to put flesh and blood on the bones of the original myth; I almost never contradict sources, I only add and interpret.” It was followed by The Song of Rhiannon (1972) and Prince of Annwn (1974). All four novels were published in a single volume as The Mabinogion Tetralogy (2002) by Overlook Press. The four novels are translated and available in several European languages. The rights to Walton’s Mabinogi work were purchased by Stevie Nicks in the hopes of bringing the epic to the big screen.

Walton's Witch House was written in the mid- to late-1930s and published in 1945 as the first volume in “The Library of Arkham House Novels of Fantasy and Terror”. It is an occult horror story set in New England. In 1956, she published The Cross and the Sword, a historical novel set during the Danish conquest of England and the destruction of its Celtic culture.

Walton published several short stories. The best-known of these are “Above Ker-Is” (1980), “The Judgement of St. Yves” (1981) and “The Mistress of Kaer-Mor” (1980). She also wrote seven unpublished novels, several volumes of unpublished short stories, poems, and a verse play. Some of these works have been published posthumously: See bibliography below.

Douglas A. Anderson is the agent for Walton's literary works.

Awards Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel nominee, 1972: The Children of Llyr. Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel winner, 1973: The Song of Rhiannon. Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, Best Novel nominee, 1975: Prince of Annwn. Locus Award, 1975: Prince of Annwn, 20th place. Fritz Leiber Fantasy Award, "Gray Mouser Award", Science Fiction/Fantasy's Fantasy Faire, 1979. World Fantasy Convention, Convention Award, 1985. Locus Award, 1984: The Sword Is Forged, 26th place. World Fantasy Convention, World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, 1989.