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Lord Dunsany (July 24, 1878 - October 25, 1957) was an Irish writer and dramatist. His full name was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany.
Biography
Edward Plunkett was born on July 24, 1878 to John William Plunkett, 17th Baron Dunsany (1853 - 1899) and his wife Ernle Grosvenor.
He was a relative of the Roman Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh. The Countess of Fingall, wife of Dunsany's cousin, the Earl of Fingall, wrote a best-selling account of the life of the aristrocracy in Ireland in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, called Seventy Years Young.
Lord Dunsany was educated at Eton College and Sandhurst. He served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards during the Boer War, and in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in World War I. He was a keen huntsman, and sportsman, and was at one time the chess and pistol champion of Ireland.
His fame arose, however, from his prolific writings of short stories, novels, plays and poetry, reportedly mostly written with a quill pen.
Writings
His most notable fantasy short stories were published in collections from 1905 to 1919: he had to pay for publication of the first, "The Gods of Pegana". The stories were set within an invented world, with its own gods, history and geography. His significance within the genre of fantasy writing is considerable.
The following is the opening paragraph of "The Hoard of the Gibbelins" (first published in The Book of Wonder in 1912), which gives a good indication of both tone and tenor of Dunsany's work:
- The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.
Writers influenced by Dunsany
H. P. Lovecraft was greatly impressed by Dunsany after seeing him on a speaking tour of the United States, and Lovecraft's early stories clearly show his influence.
Fletcher Pratt's 1948 novel The Well of the Unicorn was written as a sequel to Dunsany's play King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior.
Bibliography
The catalogue of everything that Dunsany wrote during a fifty-year writing career is quite extensive, and is especially fraught with pitfalls, owing to two things: first, Dunsany's many original books of collected short stories were later followed by numerous reprint collections that included some of this and some of that but nothing new; and second, many later collections bore titles distressingly similar to somewhat different original books.
The following is a partial list compiled from various sources.
Short-story collections
Original:
- The Gods of Pegana (1905)
- Time and the Gods (1906)
- The Sword of Welleran (1908)
- A Dreamer's Tales (1910)
- The Book of Wonder (1912)
- Fifty-one Tales, aka The Food of Death (1915)
- Tales of Wonder (1916) (published in America as The Last Book of Wonder)
- Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919)
- The Man Who Ate the Phoenix (1947)
- The Little Tales of Smethers (1952)
- Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer and Other Fantasms (1980)
Reprint Collections:
- Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany (1912)
- A Dreamer's Tales & Other Stories (1917)
- Book of Wonder (1918)
- The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of Enchantment (1954)
- 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)
- Time and the Gods (2000)
Jorkens
The Jorkens books were of a type popular in fantasy and science fiction writing: the gentlemen's club, where extremely improbable tales are related; they consist of:
- The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (1931)
- Jorkens Remembers Africa (1934)
- Jorkens Has a Large Whiskey (1940)
- The Fourth Book of Jorkens (1948)
- Jorkens Borrows Another Whiskey (1954)
- The Last Book of Jorkens (recently discovered and soon to be published)
Novels
Fantasy:
- Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley aka The Chronicles of Rodrigues (1922)
- The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)
- The Charwoman's Shadow (1926), second part of the Shadow Valley Chronicles
- The Blessing of Pan (1927)
- The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933)
- My Talks with Dean Spanley (1936)
- The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders (1950)
Other:
- Up in the Hills (1935)
- Rory and Bran (1936)
- The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939)
- Guerilla (1944)
- The Last Revolution (1951)
- His Fellow Men (1952)
Plays
- The Glittering Gate (1909, Abbey Theatre, Dublin)
- The Tents of the Arabs (1910)
- The Laughter of the Gods (1910)
- King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior (1910 or 1911: sources differ)
- The Queen's Enemies
- A Night at the Inn (1911)
- The Gods of the Mountain (1911, Haymarket Theatre, London)
Poetry
Essays
- Nowadays (1918)
- A Glimpse from a Watchtower (1947)
Autobiography
External links
Referenced By
25 October | 25th October | Fantasy Masterworks | Fifty-one | Francis Ledwidge | H.P. Lovecraft | H. P. Lovecraft | High Fantasy | Historical anniversaries/October 25 | Howard Philips Lovecraft | Howard Phillips Lovecraft | Lin Carter | Lovecraft | Norse mythological influences on later literature | October 25 | October 25th | Sword and sorcery
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