Lord Dunsany is one of the great late 19th / early 20th century fantasy
writers that wrote before J. R. R. Tolkien forever changed the field of
fantasy. (I'ld put William Morris & George MacDonald in the same company).
Aside from being a major writer of fantasy, he was a big-game hunter,
world-class chess player & playwright.
The prose of Lord Dunsany is different from modern usage, but by no means
impossible (I personally find E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake & Clarke Aston
Smith harder to read). The best place to start would be "The King of
Elfland's Daughter", a marvelous story of a King who falls in love with a
Faery Princess, loves & loses her & then tries to find her again. The
interweaving of the descriptions of Faery with mundane reality is
especially effective.
And for people interested in early fantasy, the best place to start would
be the "Ballantine Adult Fantasy" series. A group of books selected by Lin
Carter in late 60's to early 70's is now hard to find (my collection is now
80% complete), but contains some really good material.
[C] == Short Story Collection.
aka == Also known by this other title.
/John
arpa:
[email protected]
extremiststhinkcommunicationmeansagreeingwiththem-ly
----------------------------------------------------------------
Dunsany, Lord [The 18th Baron Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett]
[Ireland, 7/24/1878-10/25/1957]
The Jorkens Series:
The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens [1931] [C]
Jorkens Remembers Africa [1934] [C] [aka "Mr. Jorkens
Remembers Africa"]
Jorkens Has a Large Whisky [1940] [C]
The Fourth Book of Jorkens [1948] [C]
Jorkens Borrows Another Whisky [1954] [C]
The Gods of Pegana [1905] [C]
Time and the Gods [1906] [C]
The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories [1908] [C]
A Dreamer's Tales [1910] [C]
The Book of Wonder [1912, 1918] [C]
Selections From the Writings of Lord Dunsany [1912] [C]
Five Plays [1914] [C] [5 plays]
Fifty-One Tales [1915] [C] [aka "The Food of Death"]
The Last Book of Wonder [1916] [aka "Tales of Wonder"] [C]
Tales of War [1918] [C]
Tales of Three Hemispheres [1919] [C]
Unhappy Far Off Things [1919] [C]
Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley [1922] [aka "The Chronicles
of Rodriguez"]
The King of Elfland's Daughter [1924]
The Charwoman's Shadow [1926]
The Blessing of Pan [1927]
The Curse of the Wise Woman [1933]
Seven Modern Comedies [1929] [C]
My Talks with Dean Spanley [1936]
Plays for Earth and Air [1937] [C] [10 plays]
The Man Who Ate The Phoenix [1949] [C]
The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders [1950]
The Last Revolution [1951]
The Little Tales of Smethers [1952] [C]
The Sword of Welleran and Other Tales of Enchantment [1954] [C]
At the Edge of the World [1970] [C]
Beyond the Fields We Know [1972] [C]
Gods, Men and Ghosts [1972] [C]
Over the Hills, and Far Away [1974] [C]
