Tag Archives: lord dunsany

Deals with the Devil

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Deals with the Devil (Abridged): Twelve Terrifying Tales About Men Who Made Pacts With the Devil [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] ed Basil Davenport, with stories from, I had trouble finding the list, so this may include sombunall from this abridged volume and may include some from the prior unabridged edition, in no particular order: J Sheridan LeFanu, Max Beerbohm, Lord Dunsany, Anthony Boucher, John Collier , John Masefield , Henry Kuttner, Theodore R Cogswell, Ford McCormack, Arthur Porges, Isaac Asimov, Guy Maupassant, Stephen Vincent Benét, and L Sprague De Camp.

Davenport Deals With the Devil

The abridgment of this volume consists in the omission of some stories from a larger earlier edition; the remaining stories are intact. Davenport’s chatty introduction is an admirable overview of the history of diablerie, given its brevity. The tales are an entertaining assortment, more given to the topics of riddles, trickery, gambles, and bargains, than to matters of metaphysics, demonology, or diabolism. I was especially interested in the Dunsany story “A Deal with the Devil,” and while I did enjoy it, it was far out of the orbit of the high-fanastic Dunsany that I relish. Two selections are preoccupied with betting on horse races, and many involve a three-wishes mechanism little different than yarns that might feature djinni or leprauchans. On the other hand, a few do emphasize gruesome punishments which the central characters want to avoid, or — in more than one case — to administer. Some of the later stories in the book tend toward the science-fictionally satirical, and remind me a little of the work of James Morrow.

Beyond the Fields We Know

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews Beyond the Fields We Know [Amazon, Abebooks, Local Library] by Lord Dunsany, introduction by Lin Carter.

Dunsany Carter Beyond The Fields We Know

This mass-market paperback is one of Lin Carter’s editions of Lord Dunsany’s fantasies issued by Ballantine in the early 1970s. It contains all of Gods of Pegāna and the better part of Time and the Gods, along with the play King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior, and a selection of poems and later stories. The Pegāna stories that make up the first part of the book represent one of Dunsany’s chief literary innovations. In Pegāna, he created a cosmology and mythology out of whole cloth to support a narrative universe, setting a precedent emulated by later writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft. Dunsany adopted the narrative styles of myth and high legend, often with surprisingly irreverent effects. In addition to Pegāna’s gods, this collection includes the hilarious later story of “Chu-Bu and Sheemish,” which makes light of divine jealousies. 

The thing that really stands out for me in Dunsany’s works is the language. I had to read this purple piece from “The Sword of Welleran” about four times just for the pleasure of it: “Then night came up, huge and holy, out of waste marshes to the eastwards and low lands and the sea; and the angels that watched over all men through the day closed their eyes and slept, and the angels that watched over all men through the night woke and ruffled their deep blue feathers and stood up and watched.” Also, I thought it was interesting in that same story that the nameless narrator and sometimes eyewitness of the story “I, the dreamer that sit before my fire asleep” — was asleep while telling it. Many of Dunsany’s stories are imbued with the flavor of dream and dream-vision to an extent that had perhaps at that time been rivaled in modern literature only by the fantasies of George MacDonald.

Carter’s introduction is chiefly biographical, while his afterword is sort of philological. Expanding on his claim that Dunsany was the first to base invented proper nouns in literary fantasy on Hebrew models — or more precisely the Anglicized Hebrew names of the KJV Bible — Carter traces the direct and indirect influence of Dunsany through those verbal sounds. (The broadest indirect path goes through Lovecraft.) He instances Clark Ashton Smith, Tolkien, Leiber, and many another author as coiners of names on the pattern laid down by Dunsany.

In editing these books, Carter earned the praise of Ursula LeGuin for saving “us all from a lifetime of pawing through the shelves of used bookstores somewhere behind several dusty cartons between ‘Occult’ and ‘Children’s’ in hopes of finding, perhaps, the battered and half-mythical odd volume of Dunsany” (The Language of the Night, 84). These days, much Dunsany is in print again, but Carter’s mass-market editions are still enchanting, and now themselves worth pawing through the shelves of used bookstores to obtain.

The Blessing of Pan

Hermetic Library Fellow T Polyphilus reviews The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany.

Dunsany The Blessing of Pan

“Christianity is stupid. Communism is good. Give up.”—Rev. Estus Pirkle, as sampled by Negativland

The 1927 novel The Blessing of Pan by Lord Dunsany is set in a late 19th-century English village, with the local vicar Elderick Anwrel as its protagonist. It’s rather like one of Charles Williams’ novels from the Aspects of Power cycle, crossed with The Wicker Man (1973). The book starts slow, and stays slow, but gathers a powerful momentum for all that. From the first, Anwrel is concerned about the effects of the mysterious music played by 17-year-old Tommy Duffin on the hill outside of town in the evenings. The novel is mostly focused on his efforts to find some sort of aid in his struggles against this influence, which is gradually identified with the ancient god Pan. 

The transformation of Anwrel’s parishioners is signaled through such cascading horrors as school classes untaught, hedges untrimmed, and a cravat clumsily tied. But the vicar remains steadfast, even when his fellow clergy discourage his preoccupation and question his sanity. The overall effect of the narrative resembles a Romantic English Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Supernatural effects are hardly in evidence, other than the mysterious seduction of conservative country folk by cares and customs far older than the ones to which they have been born and bred.

The Blessing of Pan

Julianus reviews The Blessing of Pan by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett in the Bkwyrm archive.

Dunsany Plunkett The Blessing of Pan

Heralded by no less an authority that Aleister Crowley as “a noble and most notable prophesy of Life’s fair future,” this novel recounts the return of the Old Gods to an English village sometime in the late 19th century. Told from the point of view of the local Church of England Vicar, it begins humbly enough. A not-terribly-bright boy makes panpipes from some reeds and plays them in the forests of an evening and from there the entire valley is slowly brought to the worship of Pan. Dunsany’s eye for the significance of small actions- or omissions- and his prose, less lofty that his earlier works but still marvelous to read, make this the perfect literary counterpart to “The Wicker Man.” One strongly suspects that Gerald Gardner had a copy on his bookshelf and all good Pagans should hope that this comes back into print.

You can find this book at Amazon, Abebooks, and Powell’s.

The Complete Pegāna

Julianus reviews The Complete Pegāna: All the Tales Pertaining to the Fabulous Realm of Pegāna by Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron Dunsany, edited by S T Joshi, in the Bkwyrm archive.

Dunsany The Complete Pegana

In the year 1904 e.v. an English Gentleman, big-game hunter and chess enthusiast created a new mythology; and no, I don’t mean Crowley. The gentleman in question was Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron Dunsany (1878 – 1957) and the book was The Gods of Pegāna. Dunsany created the first original mythology in English literature since William Blake and his work had tremendous influence on H.P. Lovecraft. Crowley was also passionately devoted to Dunsany’s work and got him to contribute a short story to the Equinox.

Dunsany generally wrote everything in a single draft with a quill pen and his prose style is unique. Brilliant and musical, it truly seems more like a newly-discovered scripture than a literary production. Fate and Chance, Gods large and small, heroes and prophets, Time and Death are all unveiled in glory and tragedy. Only Clark Ashton Smith, one of Lovecraft’s literary comrades, can approach Dunsany’s mastery of the short fantasy.

The present volume contains all the stories from The Gods of Pegāna as well as its sequel, Time and the Gods (1906,) along with three later stories on the theme. These books have not been reprinted in their entirety in eighty years and one may hope that more of Dunsany’s massive corpus, which includes over fifty volumes of fiction, drama (he once had four plays on Broadway at once,) poetry and autobiography, will follow.

You can find this book at Amazon, Abebooks, and Powell’s.

Smith of Wootton Major

Hermetic Library fellow T Polyphilus reviews Smith of Wootton Major by J R R Tolkien:

J R R Tolkien's Smith of Wooton Major

 

This slender novella was one of Tolkein’s last works that he saw published during his lifetime. It is a cross-generational fable about creativity, fortune, and loss. It is very effective when read aloud; I had the pleasure of having it read to me by my Other Reader over the course of three sittings.

Smith is unoriginal in the best possible way for a modern fairy-tale. I was reminded strongly of Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but some of the episodes in Faery in the middle of the book exhibit the sort of psychedelic reverie that I associate more with the work of George MacDonald. Sure enough, the wikipedia article on Smith of Wootton Major gives Tolkein’s story its origin in an attempt at a preface to MacDonald’s “The Golden Key.” Tracing the line of influence the other direction, I believe that Susanna Clarke must have read this book.

The Pauline Baynes illustrations are lovely, and really capture the spirit of the thing. [via]

 

 

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