Dunsany is one of James's favorite authors and one that's particularly meaningful to him
We will fully admit that Dunsany could have easily just been included in our recent forgotten foundations episodes
but James feels like that would be doing Dunsany and justice
given that he
influenced Robert E
Howard and HP Lovecraft
Arthur C. Clarke and jorge luis borges
gene wolfe
Tolkien
Michael Moorcock,
Ursula K Le Guin
David Eddings
Peter beagle
even Guillermo del Toro and Neil Gaiman
We think he deserves more than a paragraph in this overview.
We're gonna give Lord Dunsany his own episode
A young man is born into one of the oldest
peerages in Ireland
He will become a man of service
a man of letters
a man torn between his love of Ireland
and his love of the crown
His youth was filled with the peaceful idols of noble life
But like many of his station that piece was broken when he was called upon to serve in the Boer War
he took up arms
In the Coldstream Guards and shipped off to Africa
where he became fast friends with a fellow named Rudyard Kipling who he would exchange
Letters and discuss story ideas with for decades
by the time he had returned from the war though. The world had changed
Ireland was coming into its own within the Empire
Literature and arts were flourishing
and it's in this new Irish Renaissance that the young man
We've been following
one Edward John Morton Drax Plunkett
The 18th Baron of Dunsany
became friends with the foremost literary voices of his country
great names like Podrick colum and to WB Yeats
who would later go on to collate and
publish some of his work
and it was in this flourishing of Irish thought and art
that he decided to dedicate himself to
literature
He threw himself at it avidly
publishing stories in the local papers whenever he could
until in 1905
he decided to take a gamble on himself and pay for the
publication of his first
full-length work the gods of pagane
It was an instant success and a milestone in the history of science fiction fantasy and horror
It was praised by critics for its novelty
because it truly did something new
It created a Methos
Dunsany drew on the three favorite sources of his youth
The Greeks
Po and the King James Bible
to create a world of his own
with its own Pantheon and its own history
He took the style of King James
the uncanny supernaturalism of Po and the lush
fully realized mixing of history and the divine that the Greeks offered
and put it all together in his own unique work
it really was the first complete modern Methos and it was
Devoured by future authors ranging from Lovecraft to Tolkien
the next year Dunsany followed up on this success with a book called
Time and the gods
and expansion to his world of pagana
and then he moved into human stories
Releasing tale after tale set in pagana that expanded on the doings of the realms
human inhabitants
Then the First World War began
Now in his mid-30s
Dunsany was stationed back away from the action
Serving as a trainer and a captain for the Royal in his killing facili airs
one day in
1916 while he was on leave and taking dinner with George Bernard Shaw
whose legendary cantankerous nough stunts
aney always maintained was just an act
as Shaw was very kind about Dunsany's work the
Conversation turned to the troubles in Ireland
a scant two weeks later those troubles would prove all too real
Hour by hour news reached his house.
Something's happening in Dublin.
The trains are stopped
There's shooting in the streets
Then an armored car pulled up to the great dunsany estate
and a Brigadier General who was staying at
Dunsany house was told that
he had to leave now
Something major was happening
Dunsany hopped in his own car and raced to Dublin.
It was the Easter uprising
The rebel army intercepted his vehicle
the car screeched to a halt
for a moment
Everything was still
then the car was enveloped in a hail of fire
Bullet after bullet ricocheted off the street
don't say knees driver was forced back behind the car door
Dunn sani himself dropped to the ground
The road was torn up all around him
something hit him in the face.
He was bleeding
He had to make a run for it
He dashed towards a doorway for cover bullets trailing him all the way
his military belt was torn from him
left lying in the street
Now faint from blood loss
Dunsany was taken prisoner by a man with a bayonet
the wound in his head was gruesome
He was sent to a hospital serviced by the local nuns
for a week
He lay there
listening to the machine-gun fire
Then the shelling
as the British army rolled into the city
when the British forces
Retook the hospital a doctor was finally able to see him and immediately
Decided to operate
there was a bullet lodged very close to his brain
the doctor kept a piece of
Dunsany skull as a souvenir
and handed Dunsany the bullet to keep
and his belt
the legendary Irish revolutionary leader
Michael Collins was buried with it
as a trophy of war
in the interwar years
Dunsany took to writing plays
he would act them out with his children
Romping around the house to make sure they were just right
he was experimenting with a new form
radio plays
stories that could never be performed in a theater and just
Like his pagane stories. These were a smash success
It was around this time that he first toured America
Stopping by Rhode Island where he met an avid young fan one
HP Lovecraft
who would later lament that he was only capable of writing Poe's stories
and Dunsany stories, but didn't even know
What a real Lovecraft story was in
1924 Dunsany was sent to
Czechoslovakia as part of a delegation of authors including HG Wells who he had known for years
Although he and Welles never got along very well
Not for like a good reason, but just because every time Welles stayed over done sane
He always beat him in crickets and billiards.
In fact, Dunsany was also a great gamesman
He played one of the greatest chess masters in history to a draw.
He invented a new chess variant
He became the pistol shooting champion of Ireland
and when not doing these things
or writing even more books
He campaigned against animal cruelty
and somewhere in there right around the time of his trip to Czechoslovakia
He found the time to write what today is probably his most famous novel
the king of Elfland daughter
It takes the ethereal mythical quality of his short stories
and touches it out to a full-length book
It was this work that made arthur c clarke
declared Dunsany one of the greatest writers of the century
and while in my opinion like Lovecraft
Dunce a nice strength was in his shorter work
the king of Elfland daughter
Certainly paved the way for much of the fantasy genre that would follow
from there
He went off to teach in Athens
only to have a wild adventure getting back when the italians invaded Greece
Too old for active service in world war ii Dunsany
Volunteered to be part of the Home Guard
and ended up in the hardest-hit part of England during the Battle of Britain
Working tirelessly to organize the civilians and manage the defence
after the war ended
Dunsany's novels took on a bit of a grimmer tone
Showing some of the disappointment these two world wars brought
these post war novels offer a lament for the promise of Science and Industry
turned as he saw it towards nothing but
Mechanization and destruction
and as his life came to a close
He was working on a post-apocalyptic novel with many parallels to after London
But this one warning of the dangers of the atom bomb
during Dunsany's lifetime
f scott Fitzgerald had a character quote his poetry
and jorge luis borges included him in a compilation of
Fantastic stories for the spanish-speaking world,
but it's Dunsany is a lasting influence that brings him up in this series today Lord
Dunsany is the father of fantasy and the father of mythos
Hugely popular in his time and one of the most influential genre writers of the 20th
century and it's really a crime that his works are so nearly forgotten today all
modern myth-making and world building are his
Descendants
from the flowing worlds of Tolkien to the ecology of dune
from the horror of Lovecraft to the wastes of the Dark Tower
Directly or indirectly they all owe a debt to Dunsanny
if this extra sci-fi series ends up achieving anything
I hope that it's giving done say needs work a chance to inspire another generation.
We'll see you next time