In the Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales
by Lord Dunsany
edited with an introduction and notes by ST Joshi
(Penguin Classics, $14.00, 400 pages, trade paperback; published in
February 2004.)
Lord Dunsany was once an immensely  prolific
world-famous author whose writings appeared in the leading periodicals
of the early twentieth century. He is now mostly forgotten, save within
fantasy, where his name is often uttered reverentially despite the relative
unavailability of his work in the past several decades.
S.T. Joshi has assembled a selection of Dunsany's fiction, In the
Land of Time and Other Fantasy Tales, spanning the legendary author's
entire career, from his innovative mythological tales of the early 1900s
to his more realistic texts of the 1950s.
Joshi identifies six stages in Dunsany's oeuvre, each successive one
shedding layers of fantasy. Even within each stage, a thinning of the
fantastic occurs, as the real world intrudes with increasing insistence
on the author's imagination.
The highlight of this retrospective, for both its historical importance
and its imaginative daring, is The Gods of Pegäna. This novella,
with its evocatively archaic and poetic prose, details a bizarre otherworldly
cosmogony, from creation to apocalypse. In 1905, the world had never
seen anything like it.
The invention of mythological otherworld fantasy is Dunsany's greatest
and most idiosyncratic contribution to the literary canon; that type
of world-building reportedly influenced J.R.R. Tolkien's creation of
Middle Earth.
Other basic templates of fantasy were first articulated in Dunsany's
early works. His shorter mythological tales contain stylistic flourishes
and ideas creatively appropriated by H.P. Lovecraft. The sword and sorcery
genre popularized by Robert E. Howard can be traced to Dunsany's "The
Sword of Welleran".
In the long-running Jorkens series (five examples are reprinted here),
Dunsany engages in wildly imaginative tall tales, as recounted by a
notoriously unreliable narrator. Other memorable stories include "Idle
Days on the Yann", which blends fantasy and reality with dreamlike charm,
"The Cut", a mordant social satire, and "Poseidon", a melancholy parable.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 24 April 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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