Great Science-Fiction
& Fantasy Works
science-fiction & fantasy literature:
a critical list with discussions
Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Lord Dunsany
Standard Disclaimer:
This is a brief discussion of Lord Dunsany
and, of course, of some books by Lord Dunsany
This discussion and list does not necessarily include every book by Dunsany: it includes only those books that I both know and like. Just as with the author list
itself, omission of a particular item may mean I didn't think highly enough of the omitted item, or it may simply mean that I have not yet sufficient familiarity
with it. (In a very few cases, I have listed some books merely on the strength of my opinion of the author: all such books are clearly marked below, as throughout
these lists, with a hash mark (#) before the title so you know what's what.)
I don't pretend that this discussion is a deep analysis. My intent is no more than to give you a rough idea of what kinds of tales Dunsany tells, how those
tales are usually told, and what makes them and Dunsany worthy; in sum, to help you rank Dunsany (and the works by Dunsany listed here) on your
personal literary "to do" list.
|
A Few Words About Lord Dunsany
The books by Lord Dunsany must be the foundation of any good library of fantasy and
science fiction. His many works--most in our fields--are various: poetry, plays, short
stories, and novels; but I will here consider only the novels and short stories.
The tales are all masterpieces (literally), but without doubt their greatest virtue lies
in the language Dunsany uses in telling them. As we would expect of a master, he uses
many voices, as appropriate to his material. I suppose that I can do no better than to
display for you some samples, but you should grasp two points before tasting those
samples: first, that I made no effort to locate especially fine passages--I merely opened
a book of each kind of Dunsany's work and almost at random selected a representative bit;
and second, that no short passage from the work of a master language user can possibly
convey the cumulative effect of a bookful of such prose.
In his earliest work, an extended series of very short tales in which he creates--possibly
for the first time in literature--a completely invented world, with its own gods and
histories, he uses language reminiscent of the King James Bible:
"One day the King turned to the women that danced and said to them: 'Dance no more,' and
those that bore the wine in jewelled cups he sent away. The palace of King Ebalon was
emptied of sound of song and there rose the voices of heralds crying in the streets to
find the prophets of the land."
Later, when Dunsany turned to making tales of the land of dreams--tales often soft and
pleasant like the dreams had of a nap on a warm afternoon, but sometimes bleak and
ominous--he used a lighter but still sonorous tone:
"And now the sun had set, and all the colours of the world and heaven had held a festival
with him, and slipped one by one away before the imminent approach of night. The parrots
had all flown home to the jungle on either bank, the monkeys in rows in safety on high
branches of the trees were silent and asleep, the fireflies in the deeps of the forest
were going up and down, and the great stars came gleaming out to look on the face of
Yann."
When he spun out little parables--for so we may call them--he used irony, sometimes
gentle, sometimes not:
"When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked
at them and wept.
'If only,' he said, 'this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it
in your soup, ladies like it."
(That is the entire text of Dunsany's story aptly titled What We Have
Come To).
When he told the longer tales, the novels of a never-never Spain and of characters not unlike
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, he used a lighter, warmer, laughing-with-not-at tone:
"Now there be few things indeed which la Garda resent more than meagre hospitality in the
matter of drink, and with all their wits striving to cope with this vicious defect in
Rodriguez, as they rightly or wrongly regarded it, how should they have any to spare for
obvious precautions?"
Or, taking to a longer tale of matters serious and deep, he again found a style to match
his material:
"And then she sighed for a moment for those fields, for she had heard how life
beautifully passes there, and how there are always in those fields young generations, and
she thought of the changing seasons and children and age, of which elfin minstrels had
sung when they told of Earth."
It is often said that Dunsany's especial genius was in making names. That is assuredly
one of his strengths--King Ebalon, the River Yann--but we must not over-emphasize Dunsany
the name-coiner, lest we eventually come to think of him as merely a clever fellow with a
trick; he is a master of the English language, no less.
Dunsany seemed most at home with the short story--indeed (as you have seen), with the
very short story (the 51 tales collected as The Food of Death take up 130
pages, and that in unusually large type with a lot of white space). His three novels in
our fields (Don Rodriguez and The Charwoman's Shadow--collectively referred
to as The Shadow Valley Chronicles--and The King of Elfland's Daughter)
remain, however, books of wondrous delight; it was not that he was uncomfortable with or
unable to manage longer works, but rather that his remarkably full, busy life dictated
runs of shorter works.
Dunsany's power of language is so dominating that it would be easy to forget that even
with less mellifluous telling his tales would still be worthy reading. The tales
uniformly are gentle in tone, stately in progress. They reflect an author with a keen
sense of the humor and irony in life--with the proverbial twinkle in his eye--and with a
keen appreciation of the ultimate futility of most human longings. But that sensed
futility does not, in Dunsany's work, translate to despair: it generates the attitude
that as we humans are all in the same sinking boat of mortality we were best to accept our
lots graciously and, correspondingly, to behave graciously. That ineluctable mortality
also inspires Dunsany's deep thirst for beauties and joys beyond what our world can truly
offer, to quench which he makes worlds in which such beauties and joys can be
found. The thirst, and the attempted quenching, are common to all artists of any
meaningful caliber; it is the extravagant success of Dunsany's attempts that distinguishes
him.
Gentle, stately, gracious, sensitive to beauty, joyful--such are Dunsany's tales. (The
frequent air of melancholy amidst such beauty recalls to me a line from
C. S. Lewis: Eternal sorrows eternally consoled.) One
not yet having read any Dunsany might, from the seeming languor of pace and richness of
language, form the impression that his tales are spun sugar, cotton candy with no
substance; that would be a sorely wrong impression. The tales are better compared to
jewels, polished, glowing, but hard and keen enough to cut deeply.
Dunsany's worlds, as suggested by the earlier samples, are various: some, but by no means
all or even many, are of the medieval sort so dominant today; many seem Biblical, others
Eastern; some are thoroughly contemporary. Dunsany was learned and able and needed no
clichés as crutches to support his tales. (In reality, there were no cliché
settings then--imitators of Dunsany made some of those settings cliché by endlessly
emulating him, albeit with less ability.)
(Dunsany also wrote a set of six books--the sixth only just recently discovered--in the
classic English "club tales" tradition--well, almost in that tradition, for the
narrator of those tales was no Colonel Mustard but a free-loading Baron Munchhausen, Mr.
Joseph Jorkens [all but the fourth Jorkens book have been rarities, hard to find and dear
indeed to purchase, but there is now a uniform set of the full six out--see the list
below]. Many of Jorkens' tales are simply wry exotica with punch endings, but several
are, while still wry, true fantasies--though it is never clear whether we readers are to
take them as veritable or as tall tales. Jorkens' fellow club members--most of them, but
there's a skeptic in every crowd--value them enough to be constantly buying Jorkens
another whiskey to get him to start or continue a tale.)
The best way to start out with Dunsany is to take on any collection of his short stories
you can conveniently find. The earlier collections are all original; the later ones--some
compiled by Dunsany, most by others--are cherry-picked assortments from the earlier works,
which is harmless save that you will find a lot of content overlap among those later
collections. You really can't go wrong with anything by Dunsany (unless you pick up, just
on the author's name, one of his few non-fantasy works--they're probably fine work too,
but, by definition, not in our fields).
Other Lord Dunsany Resources
Lord Dunsany Resources On the Web
The Dunsany family maintain a keystone
Dunsany
site. Beside that, for an author who can well be considered the premier in his main
field, there is remarkably little besides small or individual-book focussed pieces. There
is, though a nice little
essay
on Dunsany's prose style ("The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things") available.
(If you are a Dunsany aficionado, while the family's site is delightful within its
self-imposed bounds, a site with full literary scope is sorely wanted: get going!)
(Although not strictly relevant to the purposes of this site, of interest is this
catalogue of
Dunsany's
plays on Broadway; he sometimes had several running at one time.)
Lord Dunsany Resources In Print
S. T. Joshi's book Lord Dunsany, Master of
the Anglo-Irish Imagination, though not yet read here, is--based on the author's
known expertise--probably a good work to have (albeit expensive).
Notable Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books by Lord Dunsany *****
A Dunsany bibliography can be confusing, for three reasons: first, many of his original titles are quite similar; second, some of his books are known under two titles; and third--and
most serious--many later-assembled collections of his tales, containing a few stories each from a number of his original works, have titles confusingly similar to those original works.
I have tried below to sort out some of the mess, though I'm not sure whether I have helped or made it more confusing yet. I have omitted all books composed entirely of poetry or of
plays, which is arbitrary on my part but there it is.
- The Original Short-Story Books:
(There is a preferred edition collecting six of the first seven of these.)
- The Novels:
- The Jorkens Sextet:
These are all collections of short stories featuring Jorkens.
(There is now a preferred edition collecting the entire lot.)
- Later Edited Collections:
(There is much overlap in the contents of the books listed below, which contain no tales not in the books listed above.)
You loaded this page on Sunday, 6 July 2008, at 00:51 GMT
it was last modified on Saturday, 5 July 2008, at 13:00 GMT
Warning: Division by zero in /usr/www/users/owlcroft/know.php on line 22
What do you know about a http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8?
|
Musings: