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Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works
Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.
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This is a brief discussion of Lord Dunsany and, of course, of some speculative-fiction books by 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 Lord 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 seven novels in our fields 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 recently assembled from previously uncollected stories—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).
A Dunsany Bibliography
As you can see below, Lord Dunsany was a prolific writer of short stories, and one whose works have been collected and re-collected many times in numerous overlapping (and often confusingly like-titled) collections. It is difficult for the Dunsany fancier to sort out which collections are essential and which would largely duplicate works already owned. I have put in some time and effort to make a Dunsany bibliography (with an especial focus, of course, on his speculative-fiction work). There have been published bibliographies, notably that by Joshi and Schweitzer, but they are expensive, scarce, and tend to be out of date (which is not in any way to deny their importance and usefulness). Here, the whole shebang is made available in a good number of different views: books by stories, stories by books, unique works, and so on. I think it the most comprehensive and useful Dunsany bibliography freely available on the web, and I hope you will find it useful (just click on the link in this paragraph).
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. The fuller current resources are:
“Lord Dunsany and the Great War: Don Rodriguez and the rebirth of romance” (by David J. Carlson as it appeared in the Fall-Winter, 2006, issue of Mythlore; Carlson concludes that “well-crafted modern myths can demonstrate a vital kind of critical and moral intelligence”, which seems a sound summing-up.)
(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.)
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 thus now made a completely separateDunsany bibliography, which I think well worth perusing by any at all interested in this masterly author’s works. In the summary list below, I have tried a brief sorting-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—though those are in the linked full bibliography—which is arbitrary on my part but there it is.)
The Great Book of Wonder * (An omnibus of the ten books listed below; those are—excepting the two non-fantasy ones—separately linked below, but it would be folly not to just buy the omnibus, which also includes 8 stories never previously collected and is modestly priced.)
A Dreamer’s Tales *
(not be confused with the collection A Dreamer’s Tales & Other Stories)
The Book of Wonder *
(not be confused with this collection, nor with Book of Wonder, nor with The Last Book of Wonder)
Fifty-One Tales *
(As included in the omnibus, it actually has 52 tales, as the omnibus contains both the American and the British editions’ contents, which vary by one story each; the American version was later re-printed as The Food of Death.)
Unhappy Far-Off Things *
(This is non-speculative “war-themed tales”.)
Tales Of War *
(This also is “war-themed tales”, though it is said that “some…are fantasy”.)
Plus, as noted above, eight stories never previously collected.
The Man Who Ate the Phoenix * [This has 35 tales not to be found elsewhere, but is rather expensive in the U.S. owing to copyright issues.]
The Jorkens Sextet: (These are all collections of “club story” short stories featuring Jorkens. There is also The Complete Jorkens, a deluxe three-volume preferred edition; it is now quite expensive, so I also link the individual Jorkens books below, but some are very hard to find outside the set, and even the individual volumes tend to the pricey.)
Posthumous Short-Story Books: (These are collections that contain at least some late-discovered tales not collected during Dunsany’s lifetime and uncollected elsewhere.)
There is also a set of—so far—six collections from the Pegana Press of “Lost Tales”; those have some slight overlap with some of the works in the books above, but seem to be mostly unique. Those books—all of which are super-rare and super-expensive—are:
Lost Tales, Volume 1 (2012) Previously uncollected short stories appearing in magazines between 1909 & 1915.
Lost Tales, Volume 2 (2013) Previously uncollected short stories appearing in magazines and newspapers between 1915 & 1920 and a previously unpublished story from 1909.
Lost Tales, Volume 3 (2014) Four previously uncollected short stories appearing in magazines and newspapers between 1910 & 1954 and three previously unpublished stories.
The Men of Baldfolk & Other Fanciful Tales (2016) Five previously unpublished stories and four uncollected stories ranging from 1908 to 1955.
Lost Tales, Volume 4 (2018) Eight previously unpublished stories and one uncollected story ranging from 1909 to 1956.
Lost Tales, Volume 5 (2021) Six previously unpublished stories and two uncollected stories from c. 1914.
Lost Tales, Volume 6 (2023) Four previously unpublished stories (including a Jorkens) and three previously uncollected stories, plus other goodies.
Later Edited Collections: (This books in this list, which may not be complete—it’s hard to keep up with all the public-domain reprints—contain no tales not in the books listed farther above—the books I would call the Dunsany canon; those below are shown here only for attempted completeness.)
Published During Dunsany’s Lifetime:
Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany * [1912; edited by W. B. Yeats]
A Dreamer’s Tales and Other Stories * [1917; A Dreamer’s Tales and The Sword of Welleran; unauthorised edition]
Book of Wonder * [1918; The Book of Wonder and Time and the Gods; unauthorised edition]
The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of Enchantment * [1954; collection selected by Lord and Lady Dunsany]
Published Posthumously:
At the Edge of the World * [1970]
Beyond the Fields We Know * [1972]
Gods, Men and Ghosts * [1972]
Over the Hills and Far Away * [1974]
Bethmoora and Other Stories * [1993]
The Exiles’ Club and Other Stories * [1993]
The Lands of Wonder * [1994]
The Hashish Man and Other Stories * [1996]
The Complete Pegana * [1998]
Time and the Gods * [2000; a collection of Dunsany’s first six short-story books]
Dreams Assembled, I * [2009; first of a projected 3-volume set to collect Dunsany’s first eight books]
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