#7. “The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller, and of the Doom That Befell Himâ€
This is the story I’d begin with, to make the case that, in his famous short fantasies at least, Dunsany is the anti-Tolkien. (Tolkien himself regarded it as showing “Dunsany at his worst.â€)
It’s the “Hoard of the Gibbelins†plot: a would-be thief seeks treasure of preposterous value, ventures in a well-prepared manner into the fastness of the guardian(s), is caught, and is hung up on a hook. The knight in “Hoard†was motivated by greed; the master thief is motivated by professionalism (“business was business†is repeated) and lust for the merchant’s daughter’s screams when he shall possess her soul.
Lin Carter used to rave about Dunsany’s invented names. Here we have Zid, Mursk, Snarp, Ag, and Woth, which probably few Dunsany admirers have celebrated; but they fit a story whose unreality the author is happy to emphasize, as he does in the well-known final paragraph: “And the only daughter of the Merchant prince felt so little gratitude for this great deliverance that she took to respectability of a militant kind, and became aggressively dull, and called her home the English Riviera, and had platitudes worked in worsted upon her tea-cosy, and in the end never died, but passed away at her residence.†The story-bubble bursts and the reader is meant to laugh, or, I suppose, grin anyway.
In other words, the whole thing is a performance and the reader is invited to feel sophisticated because he enjoys it. This is the opposite of Tolkien’s effort to give to the world a consistent secondary world and that awakens in us a refreshed, restored delight in the primary world.
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Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 11 Aug 21 | 10:00AM by Dale Nelson.