The Black Cauldron is not a war novel properly speaking, but a work of magic realism which traces a serious of boisterous, tragic-comic events in one of the more unusual western European societies. Spanning the tragedy of war, the clash of sectarian interests, the interplay of religion and sex, The Black Cauldron develops into a presentation in mythical form of the conflict between life and death, good and evil.

William Heinesen (1900-1991) was born in Torshavn in the Faroe Islands, the son of a Danish mother and Faroese father, and was equally at home in both languages. Although he spent most of his life in the Faroe Islands he chose to write in Danish as he felt it offered him greater inventive freedom. Although internationally known as a poet and a novelist he made his living as an artist. His paintings range from large-scale murals in public buildings, through oil to pen sketches, caricatures and collages.It is Dedalus's intention to make available all of William Heinesen's novels in new translations by W. Glyn Jones. So far published are The Black Cauldron, The Lost Musicians, Windswept Dawn, The Good Hope, which won The Nordic Prize for Literature in 1964, and Mother Pleiades. In 2018 Dedalus will publish William Heinesen's last novel, The Tower at the Edge of the World and in 2019 Noatun.William Heinesen is generally considered to be one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Scandinavian novelists of the twentieth century.