“Yet in the blood of man there is a tide, an old sea-current rather, that is somehow akin to the twilight, which brings him rumours of beauty from however far away, as driftwood is found at sea from islands not yet discovered: and this spring-tide or current that visits the blood of man comes from the fabulous quarter of his lineage, from the legendary, the old; it takes him out to the woodlands, out to the hills; he listens to ancient song.” — Lord Dunsany

”No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried.”

— C. L. Moore, letter to H. P. Lovecraft dated January 30, 1936

October 25 marked the sixty-fifth anniversary of Lord Dunsany’s death. Proper respects should be paid to the man who spearheaded a new phase in the evolution of fantasy literature. Dunsany’s works sparked the imaginations of Tolkien and Lovecraft when first published and they inspire authors such as Neil Gaiman and George R.R. Martin to this very day.

Lord Dunsany was born Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett in 1878. Edward's background and early life does much to illuminate the very complex man he later became. On his father's side, Edward descended from the Norman-Irish barons of Dunsany, situated in what is now County Meath, Republic of Ireland. The Plunketts had ruled Meath--the ancient heartland of Ireland--since the 1400s from their stronghold of Dunsany Castle. The Plunkett holdings also included the mighty Trim Castle, the largest fortress in Ireland. Scanning through the biographies of the Plunketts of Dunsany, one quickly realizes that Edward sprang from a lineage prone to battle, rebellion and contrariness. Edward's father was William Plunkett, the seventeenth Lord Dunsany, a former military man and member of Parliament.

Edward's mother, the heiress Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor, came from the wealthy Burtons of England, She was a fairly close cousin of Sir Richard Francis Burton. The Burtons were known to be fairly eccentric and Ernle herself was said to be somewhat psychologically unstable. She spent much of her marriage estranged from her husband.

Due to that estrangement, Edward lived a fair amount of his childhood and youth at Ernle's family estate of Dunstall Priory in Kent. He seems to have been a somewhat solitary and dreamy child who spent a good deal of time reading. As the literary scholar, Dr. Patrick O'Donnell, notes:

"Through his childhood and adolescence his mother had disdained newspapers encouraging him to read the Bible [the King James Version] instead and he was particularly steeped in the Old Testament with the Book of Genesis a clear source for his direct and vivid archetypal prose. He absorbed a kind of slow-stepping, dignified and stately rhythm in his prose music from his constant attention to the Bible. In adolescence, he worked his way through the collected tales of Edgar Allan Poe deepening his style with Gothic dread.

He was educated at Eton beginning in 1891 where he absorbed both a conventional commitment to British imperialism and a classical curriculum becoming particularly enthusiastic about Homer’s Odyssey. Its celebration of the numinous mystery and magic of the intertwining rivers of myth and fable, of strange exotic lands, and an all- encompassing realm of the gods he acknowledged as a primary fountainhead to his inspiration. Horace (sections of whose Odes he learned by heart) was supplemented by reading of the British Romantic poets Blake (with his own strange and august pantheon of beings), Keats, Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. Their lyricism would add an inner luminosity and myriad colors to his Biblically-inflected prose poetry. Finally, the great Victorian Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls of the King with its enchantments, magic swords, and inevitable doom provided a model and influence."

One can see, indeed, the solid foundation upon which Edward later built his own pioneering fantasies.

After graduating from Eton, Edward entered the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst--the British Imperial equivalent of West Point. He soon got to put his training to practical use. As Patrick Maume puts it:

"In 1899 he became a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards and fought in the Boer War. He left the army in 1901, having inherited the title and estates on his father's death in 1899, and settled at the family seat in Dunsany, Co. Meath. (...) Dunsany became a conspicuous figure in London society; he stood six feet four and dressed untidily. On 15 September 1904 Dunsany married Beatrice Child-Villiers (1880–1970), daughter of Victor Villiers, 7th earl of Jersey; they had one son. Their relationship was fond though slightly formal; Beatrice admired, encouraged, and shared his literary interests..."

Apparently, Beatrice's support was a catalyst. Edward--now Lord Dunsany--wrote The Gods of Pegana and had it published in 1905. As I recall, L. Sprague de Camp once remarked that it was the first and last book that Dunsany ever had to pay to be printed. He very quickly followed up with more tales of Pegana in Time and the Gods (1906). Over the next decade or so, Dunsany would produce many of the fantasies for which he is noted today, with collections of short stories such as A Dreamer's Tales and The Last Book of Wonder. All of these tales and many other works of Dunsany were written with a quill pen in one of the hoary corner towers of Dunsany Castle.

The British Empire entered World War I in 1914. Dunsany supported the war and served in France--at nearly forty years old--in 1917. In 1918, Dunsany returned to Ireland, which was seething with revolutionary sentiment. The Partition of Ireland would leave Dunsany--a staunch Unionist--stranded in the Irish Free State, which later became the Irish Republic. These two massive upheavals quite possibly induced a gradual shift away from the more 'pure' fantasy of Dunsany's early years.

Dunsany would still craft some traditional fantasies after the War, mostly novels such as 1924's The King of Elfland's Daughter, but the majority of his fantastic short stories were 'club tales' recounted by his iconic bar-fly, raconteur and drink-cadger, Mr. Joseph Jorkens. The Jorkens tales would later inspire the likes of Henry Kuttner and Fletcher Pratt to scribe their own variations on the concept. Throughout this later period, Dunsany would also write a fair amount of science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke corresponded with him during that time.

So what are Dunsany's tales of Pegana, the Dreamlands and far corners of the world like? More than once, I've heard them referred to as 'fairy tales for adults". Padraic Colum, a friend of Dunsany, said Edward was "that rare creature in literature, the fabulist". Neil Gaiman has said--referring to The King of Elfland's Daughter--that Dunsany's fantasies are not comforting, comfortable or reassuring.

Lovecraft once wrote this in a paean to his literary idol:

Mountains of clouds, castles of crystal dreams,

Ethereal cities and Elysian streams;

Temples of blue, where myriad stars adore

Forgotten gods of aeons gone before!

Such are thine arts, Dunsany, such thy skill,

That scarce terrestrial seems thy moving quill;

Can man, and man alone, successful draw

Such scenes of wonder and domains of awe?

While perhaps hyperbolic, that does a good job of summing up the early tales of Pegana, HPL's favorites. It can certainly be said that at the center of many classic Dunsany stories lie "scenes of wonder and domains of awe". Two excellent examples of this can be found in the opening paragraphs of “The Sword of Welleran” and “The Fall of Babbulkund”:

“Where the great plain of Tarphet runs up, as the sea in estuaries, among the Cyresian mountains, there stood long since the city of Merimna well-nigh among the shadows of the crags. I have never seen a city in the world so beautiful as Merimna seemed to me when first I dreamed of it. It was a marvel of spires and figures of bronze, and marble fountains, and trophies of fabulous wars, and broad streets given over wholly to the Beautiful. Right through the centre of the city there went an avenue fifty strides in width, and along each side of it stood likenesses in bronze of the Kings of all the countries that the people of Merimna had ever known. At the end of that avenue was a colossal chariot with three bronze horses driven by the winged figure of Fame, and behind her in the chariot the huge form of Welleran, Merimna's ancient hero, standing with extended sword.”

“I said: 'I will arise now and see Babbulkund, City of Marvel. She is of one age with the earth; the stars are her sisters. Pharaohs of the old time coming conquering from Araby first saw her, a solitary mountain in the desert, and cut the mountain into towers and terraces. They destroyed one of the hills of God, but they made Babbulkund. She is carven, not built; her palaces are one with her terraces, there is neither join nor cleft. Hers is the beauty of the youth of the world. She deemeth herself to be the middle of Earth, and hath four gates facing outward to the Nations. There sits outside her eastern gate a colossal god of stone. His face flushes with the lights of dawn. When the morning sunlight warms his lips they part a little, and he giveth utterance to the words "Oon Oom," and the language is long since dead in which he speaks, and all his worshippers are gathered to their tombs, so that none knoweth what the words portend that he uttereth at dawn. Some say that he greets the sun as one god greets another in the language thereof, and others say that he proclaims the day, and others that he uttereth warning. And at every gate is a marvel not credible until beholden.'“

Therein, sword-brothers, lies awe and wonder. Mythic wonder. Wonder like unto ancient legends and tales out of the East, but taken one step further. Grander and more wondrous than the ancient tales, with the added dimension of the reader never having the chance to read of them in some other and lesser source. With his stories of Pegana and the Lands of Dream, Dunsany innovated, with a masterful hand, the concept of a fully-realized ‘secondary creation’, with worlds separate from our own. Worlds with their own gods and histories. Dunsany took us “beyond the fields we know”, as he put it, writing myths for lands that never were. With the publication of The Gods of Pegana, fantasy literature was forever changed.

Corollary to this is Dunsany's innate mysticism. To him, magic was in the air, something imbued throughout Nature. It was also something which was less and less in the modern world. He expresses it well in this quote:

 “And you who sought for magic in your youth but desire it not in your age, know that there is a blindness of spirit which comes from age, more black than the blindness of eye, making a darkness about you across which nothing may be seen, or felt, or known, or in any way apprehended.”

Another feature of the early stories by Dunsany is his depiction of the gods. They are, at best, capricious. At worst, malicious. Their ability to empathise with mortals is almost nonexistent. They are undying elites literally looking down upon deplorable dirt-grubbers whose lives mean little more than those of may-flies. It was no great leap, from that point, for Lovecraft to posit the existence of cosmic beings indifferent--if not inimical--to we humans on this third rock from the sun. 

 Those searching for scenes of tense, bloody combat in Dunsany's tales simply won't find them. Despite--or because of--experiencing war up close before ever writing any of his tales, Dunsany always maintained a certain authorial distance when writing scenes of combat and battles. Personally, I have little problem with this; I simply imagine the details. Your mileage may vary.

That brings us back to Dunsany's style and tone. O'Donnell says it possesses a "dignified and stately rhythm". I would agree. It is unhurried, neither slow nor frantic. In fact, Dunsany's “direct and vivid archetypal prose” style shares much with the Greek myths he loved as a youth. Padraic Colum dubbed his friend "a fabulist". I very much doubt he meant that Dunsany wrote stories of talking animals, but was instead referring to definitions of 'fable' like this one: A fable is a fictional narrative meant to teach a moral lesson. Make no mistake, Dunsany's tales contain moral lessons. Basically all stories with any staying power do. They endure because they speak to us in some way.

Dunsany's mythic tales endure and shall endure. Will they ever be as popular as they were a century ago? Perhaps or perhaps not. Nonetheless, they shall endure. Another quote from Dunsany speaks to that:

“And little he knew of the things that ink may do, how it can mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of happenings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on forgotten hills.”