Dunsany's Ode to Death

Ah, now for the hour of the mourning of many, and the pleasant garlands of flowers and the tears, and the moist, dark earth. Ah, for repose down underneath the grass, where the firm feet of the trees grip hold upon the world, where never shall come the wind that now blows through my bones, and the rain shall come warm and trickling, not driven by storm, where is the easeful falling asunder of bone from bone in the dark.

The Gods of Pegana, Yun-ilara

Together with mark Twain's 'Death is a valuable Gift' quote, from his Letters from the Earth, this is one of the most moving yearning for death poems/quotes I've ever read.
It is spoken by Yun-Ilara, the one who thought himself clever when he challenged Mung, the God of Death. Yun-Ilara now is nothing but a heap of bones, lying around the ruined base of a tower that he once built, and he is still undying, and from his bones still goes up a shrill voice, crying out for mercy.

Fantasy Masterworks: Time and the Gods, Lord Dunsany

Fantasy masterwork nr 2; Time and the Gods collects 112 short stories in 6 short story collections. Written by Lord John Edward Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany, these collections quite rightly made the earliest cut of the Fantasy Masterworks, back when they were still being published under the initial Millennium imprint.

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?

Lord Dunsany

SO.

I got stuck for a long while on the Fantasy Masterwork write-up for Time and the Gods, and for the longest time I was clueless as to why. I kept writing and writing, and after a while I just stopped because it wasn't going anywhere I wanted. Then I stopped writing altogether because of a whole bunch of personal reasons, and most of those I've even talked about here on the blog.

A few days ago, maybe just due to the medication I was ready to again delve into it, but even then I ended up butting my head against a wall until I decided to split up the parts of the text to see what the problem was. Which is a very tried and true tactic for the longer posts and which was long overdue for this one.

I then realized immediately that I had let myself go a bit on the 'Dunsany, the man' part of the write-up and that I just didn't want to delete it, even though I should've.
So, here, for your delectation, a mildly humorous and an occasionally (unwarranted) scathing look at several aspects of Dunsany's life.
It's very incomplete (and I might come back and edit) but I bet I've got some information in here that you won't even find on Wikipedia.

Dunsany: The man

Born in 1878 in London to nobility, with a silver spoon in his hand and with the world delivered to him on an easy platter, John Moreton Drax Plunkett, the eighteenth baron himself might be forgiven for not having had to work a day in his life, or for never having been given over to backbreaking labour in order to make ends meet, and to verily be ground out under the daily toil and struggle of putting food on the table, as that would inevitably have crushed the talent and zest of a true creator, a true original, and the accomplishments of a giant in the field might have been less than those of the smallest field-mouse. I mean, God forbid Lord Dunsany were to have been born burdened by the iron ball and chain of 'working-for-a-living', right?

Far be it from me to throw shade at one of the English language's premier artists but I do generally find that the cumulative wallop of soldier, globetrotter, big-game hunter, sportsman, literary giant, and playwright has always sounded far less bombastic and admirable when you find that these people have actually been born into wealth, status and fame and have had their life's roads, and all those murky avenues and dead-end alleys ahead of them, well cleared of the debris that clogs the routes of so many of us. Not a pothole in sight, not a shred of detritus to be blown by errant winds into the spokes of benign forward momentum.

But, credit where it is due, even given the most clear and perfect road to travel, not a lot of us would be able to match the many varied achievements of this noble Englander scion.
During his life he was to become one of the most recognizable and famous writers in the English speaking world.

Before he ever published his first story or play though, the then not-yet-Lord Edward Dunsany traversed the many pitfalls of childhood with English reserve. He went to school at Cheam and college at Eton, while shuttling between the supervision of his father in Castle Dunsany, and his mother in Dunstall priory, as they mostly lived seperate lives.

By 21 he graduated from military school in Sandhurst.
That same year he also inherited the title of Lord Dunsany after the death of his father, whereafter he was promptly commissioned in the Coldstream Guards at Gibraltar. It seemed to have been a leisurely posting as he was able to take long rides through the Spanish countryside.
After this though he was active in the Second Boer war in Africa in 1900, where he fought in the battles of Graspan and Modder river, but there are scarce mentions of his time here.

Cue comments of British imperialism laid low, and a past preferably forgotten, or at best looked at through the selective rose-coloured lens of fleeting wealth and glory. Though any glory that's held onto after the use of concentration camps, under whatever pretext, has shaded from rose-coloured into a distinctly darker shade of red. Concentration camps? Yes. Look it up.

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Mind you, as a Belgian, my native association with Leopold the second, should prompt me to leave some things well enough alone, and to just shut my waffle-hole.

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Mind you, the second; the current Brexit-situation? Where we leave the past alone around here, mindful of our hidden misdeeds, there's a current imperialist sentiment rising in Great Britain. Where the British government is desperately shoving out piece-meal patriotism in a bid to remind the general populace of a so-called 'better' time before their inclusion into the European Union, which was seen as a last-ditch effort to halt the UK's economic situation, which had been declining since World War 2, which though it was not the largest catalyst for the Empire's decline, serves to mark the clear beginning of the end for the British Empire, when Britain's major colonies of the time took the opportunity to rid themselves of the 'British yoke'. 

Before WW2 Britain was still riding high, which is why there's so much of this Pre-World War 2 and World War 2 war-movie veneration going on in the British media.

By 1901 Dunsany had retired from his African posting and had returned to Dunsany castle.
3 years later he married his wife, Beatrice Villiers, who went on to support him in all his interests, and who had a large role in his writing, frequently typing out whatever he dictated, amanuensis-style.

When he wrote himself, he wrote fast, never rewrote and never corrected and in 1903 he finally began to write the stories that made him a master of the fantastique. Though he would go on to write an enormous amount of fiction, he actually said himself that writing took up less than 10 percent of his adult life, and that he mostly occupied himself with sport and soldiering.

Most notable of the latter, are ever the heroic exploits of the true Patriot, defending his country and his fellow man: In 1916 Dunsany volunteered to defend his native soil, and was promptly shot in the head while driving from Dunsany Castle to Dublin when he and a fellow officer ran into an IRA-manned street barricade. Though the car itself ended up totally riddled, Dunsany and his companion managed to get clear without any damage. However, a ricochet hit Dunsany as he dodged for cover, and the bullet lodged itself in his nasal sinuses. He was taken prisoner and apologized to profusely before being rushed to a doctor. He was then put in a hospital and tenderly cared for until the IRA was pushed back.

Later in the war he spent time on the front, though he was refused forward positioning, and relegated to the terrifying tediousness of trench warfare, where he was valuable as both a trainer and, by merit of his burgeoning literary credits, for the creation of propaganda material.

Dunsany was a noted chess player and once played 7-year-reigning world champion raul Capablanca to a halt, and in 1924 won the championship of Ireland. He also invented an asymmetric version of chess where one does not use the so-called 'fairy' pieces, which is more than slightly ironic.

In World War 2 Dunsany joined the home guard, in which he witnessed the Battle of Brittain, much of which took place right over his head, and which he commemorated with a poem.

One thing I know which Milton never knew:

When Satan fell, hurled headlong to the shade

Of Hell eternal out of Heaven's blue,

I know the screaming wail his pinions made.

After the war Dunsany traveled extensively, just like he did his whole life, but now especially to North America where he found himself more famous than in his home country.

Alas, even the best and most influential of lives come to an end and in 1957 Lord Dunsany died from appendicitis, (or quietly in a nursing home if L. Sprague de Camp is to be believed. Whatever the source, generally it is agreed upon that) he became 79 years old.

Image out of Providence, because of course.

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During his long life, Dunsany wrote over a 100 works consisting of poetry, short stories, novels, plays, essays and even an autobiography or two. During his lifetime his plays were more popular than his writings were. He was involved in radio, television, cinema and theatre.

These achievements never would have come about if he hadn't, himself, payed for the publication of his first short story collection; The Gods of Pegana, in 1905. After this, he never had to pay for the publication of anything else he ever wrote.

Born with a silver spoon in his hand, but damn it all if he didn't earn the rest of the silverware as well.