Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett,
18th Baron (1878-1957)
The ornate fantasy of Lord Dunsany (otherwise known as Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett; he was the eighteenth Baron Dunsany) was the product of a writing career of astonishing longevity, extending from the first decade of this century through 1948; he died in 1957.
His literary works are highly poetic and imaginative. They began in 1905 with the mythological novel The Gods of Pegana. At Yeats's invitation he wrote many plays for the Abbey Theatre, including The Glittering Gate (1909) and The Laughter of the Gods (1919). His verse is contained in Fifty Poems (1930) and Mirage Water (1939). He also wrote an autobiographical series: Patches of Sunlight (1938), While the Sirens Slept (1944), The Sirens Wake (1945) and To Awaken Pegasus (1949).
He achieved enormous popularity with his stories, novels, and plays (he was also an accomplished dramatist, perhaps the only major one in the literature of fantasy); this bejeweled style was of a piece with all the exotica of the East being discovered by the pre-World War I Intellectuals through the Ballets Russes and the ever-growing importing of art and ideas from India and the Moslem world.
There are innumerable short stories, all the very essence of concise elegance. Typical are "The Hoard of the Gibbelins," in which it is told how the Gibbelins, who eat, "as is well known, nothing less good than man," protected their hoard of wealth from an epitomal Hero (and oh, what a devestating last sentence that story has!), and "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller, and the Doom Than Befell Him" (whose title alone should intrigue), the hero of which has an encounter with Hlo-hlo, the spider idol.
Lord Dunsany's writings explore a world of fantasy. He created his own mythology for his plays and tales, frequently with an element of the macabre.
Bibliography:
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This page last updated: January 11/2000©Iris García
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