There's no reason to talk about this one too much (*manic laughter*) as anyone who's ever read Dunsany knows; he belongs to the greats, his work having had enormous influence on the genre as a whole and still being very readable now, over a hundred years later.
Style
Dunsany is another one of those few writers whose style and themes effortlessly evokes a gloriously mythic quality.
Many influences contributed to the creation of this style, but one of particular interest to me, and something which I had already noticed in his work before learning of it, was how much of an influence reading the King James Bible had on him. I've talked before how this style; the collage of epic pedantry present in the Bible, is one that has resonated with me most whenever an author employs it.
This ornate style doesn't stay the same throughout the book though, and in fact Dunsany changed his approach to whatever he was working on whenever he felt that he had exhausted the possibilities of a style or medium. And this is already very noticeable in the 6 short story collections in this Masterwork.
The Fantasy Masterwork
Dunsany's 6 short story collections are undisputed classics, both for their influence in the fantasy genre, and purely for their own dreamy lyricism.
But, it must be said, because of the aforementioned shifts in style, Time and The Gods (,the Gollancz Fantasy masterwork edition of) as a whole is a bit of an uneven work and could have done with a clearer divide in which works fitted in which universe. To wit: I've named them; the Books of Wonder, the Pegana Universe, and the Tales of Faery.
The first book in this collection; Time and the Gods, together with its last; The Gods of Pegana, form Dunsany's Pegana universe, a place of Gods, petty or not, and the men that worship them, willingly or not. These tales are clearly the most serious and are where Dunsany's the most in love with his world-building. Parabel and metaphor form an intriguing and deep narrative and occasionally serve to drive home a barb or two against organized religion.
Although it is the novel's last collection, The Gods of Pegana is more of a story cycle collecting 30 tales over the course of 50 pages. As their individual story threads tend to run one into the other, they are rather more inter-linked than the rest of the short story collections in this book and should be considered as one extended story. These should preferably also be read before beginning the Time and the Gods read.
Then you have the stories of The Sword of Welleran and A Dreamer's Tales, which are a collection of serious and occasionally quite beautiful Faery tales. And although there is on occasion made mention of several gods, named or not, and the ubiquitous entity 'Time', I never felt that these were the same characters as those from the realm of Pegana. But then it is my opinion that Dunsany was a bit careless about his continuity overall: Time switching from the Hound of the Gods, to their Swarthy servant with sword dripping red, to being the father of the gods in the House of the Sphinx (Book of Wonder).
And for the remainder you have The Book of Wonder and the Last Book of Wonder which are for the most part most clearly indicative of one of those shifts in Dunsany's style and his views on his work. Unlike both the Pegana stories and the Faery tales, these are more self-deprecating, more aware of themselves, and occasionally even outright mock the serious narratives of the previous collections.
Time and the Gods
Time and the Gods, the second collection, here put first (foolishly), was published in 1906, and builds on the mythology in the Gods of Pegana short story collection, which was released the year before.
Though the stories here proceed from the same basis, of Gods and the men who worship them, there's less tolerance of what was once so reverently created, those stories and themes once paid such dear homage to. There's a wistfulness here, a slight mockery that wasn't present yet in the Pegana tales. An attitude of small-mindedness where before was only awe and a sense of being separate from these beings and this mythology so far beyond ourselves.
The vignette-style of the Gods of Pegana has also vanished almost completely, with the longest story of the collection; The Journey of the King, comfortably taking up over 30 pages.
The Sword of Welleran (1908)
Contains among others, the (arguably) first ever sword and sorcery story; the Fortress Unvanquishable, save for Sacnoth. If that wasn't enough, also present is titular The Sword of Welleran, which, with its portrayal of an 'almost' sentient sword, delivering victory through bloody and horrific slaughter, likely influenced the creation of Sword and Sorcery's most famous anti-hero: Elric of Melniboné. It's also notable for shifting the focus from the divinely inspired narratives to one of a more human frame.
A Dreamer's Tales
In A Dreamer's Tales, published in 1910, we find many a memorable and influential tale. For instance; Idle Days on the Yann which directly inspired Lovecraft to write his Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
It also has the sad but triumphant melancholy of one the best Dunsany short stories, and my absolute personal favourite; Blagdaross, which is an anthropomorphic tale of a bunch of discarded objects left in a waste disposal park which regale one another each with a tale of how they ended up there. From an old wine cork, to a piece of rope, to the wooden rocking horse Blagdaross itself, the short recountings start out ordinary and whimsical but soon touch on profound themes of human darkness and loss. (Fun in-universe note: the House-God of Broken things is called Jabim. I enjoy lumping this particular tale in with the Pegana universe.)
The Unhappy Body reads like the lament of a creative soul, wishing he had more time in which to release his creativity.
The Book of Wonder
For the Book of Wonder Dunsany changed his work methods, and experimented a bit with his storytelling.
During the original short story publications Dunsany contracted Sidney Sime, a fantastical artist using monochromatic colours and frequently employing satire, to illustrate every collection, but of these it is the Book of Wonder that is the odd one out. Published in 1912, where before the art was created to suit the story, here Dunsany wrote stories to suit the art. Apparently Sime had complained that his editors did not offer him suitable subjects to work his art around, so Dunsany, in the hopes of adding some extra mystique to both his writing and Sime's art, wrote his tales inspired by them. Which led to some pleasingly memorable tales, such as The House of the Sphinx, a mystifying tale which offers up the possibility of reading the story in several ways; as dream, analogy, parable or just as a straight-up fantasy.
But is also leads to the side-effect that these 14 tales are even more than usual, very unrestrained in their imagination; a detrimental effect, as if Dunsany cobbled together a short tale by flinging anything together that he could come up with, leaving them more inconsequential, and unmemorable than previous tales.
A great many of the stories present in this one and in the following Book of Wonder are exercises in infinitely delayed gratification, with their plot and resolution remaining unresolved as Dunsany almost coyly drops back the curtain that he previously had only barely lifted.
There's a lax attitude to his own work here, as if unconvinced of previously held convictions of merit on his own stories.
The Last Book of Wonder
From The (first) Book of Wonder to the Last Book of Wonder (initially published as Tales of Wonder), where Dunsany clearly was more energized as he found his original idea, of working from Siney Sime's artwork, paying off. The idealism returns, the love of the telling, the romance.
This is most readily apparent in A Story of Land and Sea, which is far and away Last's longest tale, tying back to the (first) Book of Wonder's The Loot of Loma. In the Last Book of Wonder, originally published as Tales of Wonder in 1916, Dunsany revisits many of the characters and settings he visited for his previous Wonder outing, most notably, Captain Shard and his merry crew of pirates from The Loot of Bombasharna, get the lengthy prequel story: A Story of Land and Sea; set in the time before the crew's retirement on the floating island. It's a tale that unlike most other tales in the collection is more focused on historical adventure rather than outright fantasy.
Many of the tales in this collection end whimsically humorously: for instance; How Plash-Goo came to the land of None's Desire is a darkly ironic tale of a giant developing an irrational hatred for a dwarf, the title only given meaningful relevance at the very last sentence.
The Long Porter's tale, ends with self deprecating sentiment. A tactic Dunsany frequently employs in these, the latest written tales; Something to take the wonder out of the narrative, an unhappy denouement. However Thirteen at Table is one the few that doesn't take the wind out of its own sails and is instead a pleasant little ghost story.
The Gods of Pegana
Paid for publication in 1905 by Lord Dunsany himself, The Gods of Pegana is the book that's readily the most interesting as it flat-out gives you a whole mythology; The Pegana universe. Written and published in 1905, and despite being chronologically the first of the short story collections in this book, it is in this collection at the very back (it should not have been), probably because it's a bit of an unusual one, and any modern mainstream reader should be forgiven for exiting immediately upon being confronted with a narrative of this nature. It is in effect a linked series of character vignettes of various metaphors and parables. The longer the book goes on the more you can see Dunsany's narrative style shifting from vignettes to the longer form of his later short stories.
Upon its completion I found a few questions lingered, most interestingly; who is the victor in the game before the Beginning, Where lies Pegana, and what does it look like, and: when and what exactly will be THE END?
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