In the Land of Time

Table of Contents

IN THE LAND OF TIME AND OTHER FANTASY TALES

EDWARD JOHN MORETON DRAX PLUNKETT, 18th Baron Dunsany was born in London in 1878, the scion of an Anglo-Irish family that could trace its ancestry to the twelfth century. In 1905 he self-published
The Gods of Pegaāna,
and its critical and popular success impelled the publication of numerous other collections of short stories, including
A Dreamer's Tales
(1910),
The Book of Wonder
(1912), and
The Last Book of Wonder
(1916). Dunsany also distinguished himself as a dramatist, and his early plays—collected in
Five Plays
(1914) and
Plays of Gods and Men
(1917)—were successful in Ireland, England, and the United States. Dunsany was seriously injured during the Dublin riots of 1916, and he also saw action in World War I as a member of the Coldstream Guards.

In the 1920s Dunsany began writing novels, among them
The King of Elfland's Daughter
(1924) and
The Blessing of Pan
(1927). He also wrote many tales of the loquacious clubman Joseph Jorkens, eventually collected in five volumes. His later plays include
If
(1921),
Plays of Near and Far
(1922),
Seven Modern Comedies
(1928), and
Plays for Earth and Air
(1937). By the 1930s, encouraged by W. B. Yeats and others to write about his native Ireland, he produced
The Curse of the Wise Woman
(1933),
The Story of Mona Sheehy
(1939), and other novels. His later tales were gathered in
The Man Who Ate the Phoenix
(1949) and
The Little Tales of Smethers
(1952), but many works remain uncollected. Lord Dunsany died at Dunsany Castle in County Meath, Ireland, in 1957. He is recognized as a leading figure in the development of modern fantasy literature, influencing such writers as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Ursula K. Le Guin.

 

S. T. JOSHI is a freelance writer and editor. He has edited Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft's
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
(1999) and
The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories
(2001), as well as Algernon Blackwood's
Ancient Sorceries and Other Strange Stories
(2002). Among his critical and biographical studies are
The Weird Tale
(1990),
Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination
(1995),
H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
(1996), and
The Modern Weird Tale
(2001). He has also edited works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, and H. L. Mencken, and is compiling a three-volume
Encyclopedia of Supernatural Literature.
He lives with his wife in Seattle, Washington.

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First published in Penguin Books 2004

Introduction and notes copyright © S. T. Joshi, 2004

All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with the Trustees of the Estate of Lord Dunsany. © Dunsany Will Trust.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, 1878-1957.
In the land of time, and other fantasy tales / by Lord Dunsany ; edited with an introduction and notes
by S. T. Joshi.
p. cm.

ISBN : 978-1-4406-5026-0

1. Fantasy fiction, English. I. Joshi, S. T., 1958- II. Title.
PR6007.U6A6 2004
823'.912—dc21 2003054901

 

 

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Introduction

“No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried.”
¹
This perspicacious comment by C. L. Moore underscores both the devotion, extending to a kind of reverential adulation, elicited in readers of the fantasy fiction of Lord Dunsany (1878-1957) and the extent to which subsequent writers in the fantasy tradition have striven to capture dim echoes of the crystalline beauty of Dunsany's literary creation. Largely unknown to even the average literate reader, and merely a hallowed name to many enthusiasts of imaginative literature, Dunsany can nevertheless be seen as the source and inspiration of much of the writing that followed in his wake; such figures as H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Moore herself are deeply in Dunsany's debt for the example he set as a prose stylist and as a creator of an entire universe of shimmering fantasy.

The notion that Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, who became the eighteenth Baron Dunsany (pronounced Dun-SAY-ny) upon his father's death in 1899, would become a central figure in twentieth-century fantasy would have struck the author himself as little short of fantastic. Certainly there was little in his background or early upbringing to suggest that Dunsany would be anything other than an average scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. His birth in London on July 24, 1878, is not insignificant, for it highlighted the fact that Dunsany would remain
Anglo-Irish
to the end of his days, with perhaps a slightly greater emphasis on the first element of that compound. A devoted Unionist who loathed the Nationalists who wished to tear Ireland away from Great Britain (in later years he would speak bitterly of the “Disunited Kingdom”), Dunsany regularly alternated his living quarters from Dunsany Castle in County Meath to his home at Dunsall Priory, Shoreham, Kent. During his early education, at Eton and Sandhurst, he showed no particular literary bent; and his first published work, a mediocre poem in the
Pall Mall Magazine
for September 1897, did little to indicate that Dunsany would, in the course of a fifty-year career, produce dozens of novels and plays and hundreds of short stories and poems, and would receive accolades from both sides of the Atlantic and from critics ranging from Rebecca West and Graham Greene to H. L. Mencken and William Rose Benét.

But then, in 1904, Dunsany took it into his mind to write
The Gods of Pegaāna.
Because he had no literary reputation, he was forced to subsidize its publication by Elkin Mathews the next year; but never again would Dunsany have to pay for the issuance of any of his work. This very slim volume, scarcely twenty thousand words in length, created a sensation among both readers and critics—especially after a favorable review by the poet Edward Thomas in the London
Daily Chronicle
—and could well be said to have introduced something quite new in literature. What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde's imperishable dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”
²
For Dunsany, who was probably an atheist, the creator god Mäna-Yood-Sushai was not a replacement of either the jealous god of the Old Testament or the loving god of the New, but a symbol for the transience and ephemerality of all creation: it is not through any conscious act that Mäna brought the worlds into existence; those worlds are, instead, merely the dreams that arise in his mind, ruled over by “small gods” who, nevertheless, exercise awesome power over their little realms. One day Skarl, whose continual drumming keeps Mäna asleep and dreaming, will cease to pound his drum, and Māna will wake, and the worlds will vanish like bubbles in the air. . . .

What could possibly have led Dunsany to fashion such an extraordinary universe of pure imagination? The literary influences operating on his work are difficult to specify, especially since Dunsany, although the author of three substantial autobiographies, is himself rather cagey in speaking of his literary antecedents. It has long been recognized that both the archaic cast and the stately cadences of Dunsany's prose style derive from his thorough familiarity with the language of the King James Bible. But the multiplicity of gods in Dunsany's pantheon, as well as their creation in a spirit of tenuous beauty rather than cosmic truth, may also suggest the influence of Greco-Roman mythology, and Dunsany himself admits as much. His inability to master Greek in youth “left me with a curious longing for the mighty lore of the Greeks, of which I had had glimpses like a child seeing wonderful flowers through the shut gates of a garden; and it may have been the retirement of the Greek gods from my vision after I left Eton that eventually drove me to satisfy some such longing by making gods unto myself, as I did in my first two books.”
³
But a philosophical influence can also be conjectured. Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904,
⁴
just around the time he wrote
The Gods of Pegaāna,
and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of
Thus Spake Zarathustra.
In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognized the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered.