Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> I've read hardly any Jorkens stories -- thank you
> for reminding us that they comprise a major part
> of Dunsany's productivity. There is indeed a
> whole lot:
>
> [en.wikipedia.org]
> s
>
> Have you read 'em all, Sawfish?

Twice.

Once piecemeal, with some gaps of 3-3 months. This was 20 years ago.

The most recent time was 2 years ago, and I found them in the library catalog and ordered them and renewed them as needed, because there was apparently no one in line to read them after I was done.

Have you read the Pat Hobby stories? I ask this not to go off on a tangent, but I wonder if anyone has read, or even heard, of these stories.

>
> I'm acquainted with Sime's Dunsany art, which used
> to intrigue me but isn't much to my taste. Folks
> here probably know that Dunsany wrote stories to
> fit Sime's art on occasion.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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#5 “The Madness of Andelsprutz”

Another story about a “soul,” this time the soul of a city that was conquered. The city-soul hoped for 30 years that the mother-city, Akla, would help somehow, but the mother-city only laid a wreath against the walls of Andelsprutz, and could do no more. Then the Andelsprutz-soul went mad and, as a “grey shadow form,” left the city. After sitting for a while, raving, Andelsprutz was visited by the souls of Camelot, Troy, Carthage, Persepolis, &c., which soothed Andelsprutz’s soul and led her away, leaving the city dead forever. So far as I can tell, Andelsprutz, unlike the others mentioned, was not a real city, despite the Germanic name.

There are no details in the story to suggest that Dunsany intends to write poetically about the griefs of people who suffer the conquest of their cities in war. The details might actually suggest that the citizens surrendered, since the city seems to have been undamaged and, aside from having some conquerors in it, in occupation, the people’s lives seem to go on, with lights being lit at twilight and shutters lowered and so on. I thus infer that he really did mean to play with the fancy of a city having a soul of its own and that this was not necessarily the “epiphenomenon” of the people who live(d) in it. Some readers might see a “cosmic” viewpoint here, but others might feel the story deals in a highly unreal way with a topic (the experience of conquest) that has been addressed by literary artists of greater capacity than Lord Dunsany. Over against something such as Homer’s account of the conquest of Troy or Prescott’s account of the conquest of Tenochtitlan, Dunsany’s sketch seems hardly worth the writing.

Sawfish Wrote:

> Have you read the Pat Hobby stories? I ask this
> not to go off on a tangent, but I wonder if anyone
> has read, or even heard, of these stories.

Never heard of them, so far as I remember.

Quote:

DN:
Prescott’s account of the conquest of Tenochtitlan

I am unfamiliar with this. Can yiu supply a little more info?

I've read several versions of Bernal Diaz's account of the conquest. They are very vivid, and of course from the Spanish POV.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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That's Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. If you possibly can, get hold of the two-volume edition published in 1922 by Chatto & Windus, which is copiously illustrated by Keith Henderson, whose art for The Worm Ouroboros you'll know already. I'd rate this 2-volume book and Grant Uden's Dictionary of Chivalry, illustrated by Pauline Baynes, as among the most beautiful books I own.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> That's Prescott's Conquest of Mexico. If you
> possibly can, get hold of the two-volume edition
> published in 1922 by Chatto & Windus, which is
> copiously illustrated by Keith Henderson, whose
> art for The Worm Ouroboros you'll know already.
> I'd rate this 2-volume book and Grant Uden's
> Dictionary of Chivalry, illustrated by Pauline
> Baynes, as among the most beautiful books I own.


Thanks, Dale!

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish Wrote:
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> Since I've mentioned the Jorkens tales more than
> once as my favorite Dunsany stories, I'm curious
> how many here have read these stories, of which
> there must be well over one hundred.
>
>

I have not read any of them. Are they character-driven, or do they have much fantastic and supernatural substance? I have very little interest in the human perspective or interactions when it comes to weird fiction, except as a reference point for the sense of perspective.

Knygatin Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Sawfish Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Since I've mentioned the Jorkens tales more
> than
> > once as my favorite Dunsany stories, I'm
> curious
> > how many here have read these stories, of which
> > there must be well over one hundred.
> >
> >
>
> I have not read any of them. Are they
> character-driven, or do they have much fantastic
> and supernatural substance? I have very little
> interest in the human perspective or interactions
> when it comes to weird fiction, except as a
> reference point for the sense of perspective.

They are a serious of comic/ironic anecdotes told by a confirmed ne'er-do-well (Jorkens) in a British private club setting,often for drinks, and sometimes to twit his nemesis, another member. There may/may not be supernatural elements, but because Jorkens relates them, and he is by nature unreliable...

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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In postings at the threads on The Beautiful, OT: A Metaphorical Way to View Current Cultural Changes, and Poetic Consciousness vs. Sociological Consciousness, I have lately invited discussion that's tended to stay pretty theoretical.

So here's a case study. The concepts might be relevant to Lord Dunsany. The notion for discussion: "Lord Dunsany's writings suggest that he lived in the period when sociological consciousness was displacing poetic consciousness, and that, on one hand, he had little or no attraction to the new sociological consciousness but lacked a robust poetic consciousness. Hence the typical Dunsany story is either a dream, as in the famous fantasies about idle days on the Yann, etc., or a lie, as in the Jorkens stories about a storyteller whose art is exercised so that he can get further alcoholic drinks at his club."

Dunsany is a pessimist. The emerging world of sociological consciousness looks deathly to him; but he has little belief in, or commitment to, concomitants of poetic consciousness (religion, scholarship, history, great art, etc.). He is drawn to poetic consciousness but believes that, after all, it has to do only with dreams or lies. One's sense is that his stories help him to pass the time till he dies.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 22 Jul 21 | 10:45AM by Dale Nelson.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> In postings at the threads on The Beautiful, OT: A
> Metaphorical Way to View Current Cultural Changes,
> and Poetic Consciousness vs. Sociological
> Consciousness, I have lately invited discussion
> that's tended to stay pretty theoretical.
>
> So here's a case study. The concepts might be
> relevant to Lord Dunsany. The notion for
> discussion: "Lord Dunsany's writings suggest that
> he lived in the period when sociological
> consciousness was displacing poetic consciousness,
> and that, on one hand, he had little or no
> attraction to the new sociological consciousness
> but lacked a robust poetic consciousness. Hence
> the typical Dunsany story is either a dream, as in
> the famous fantasies about idle days on the Yann,
> etc., or a lie, as in the Jorkens stories about a
> storyteller whose art is exercised so that he can
> get further alcoholic drinks at his club."
>
> Dunsany is a pessimist. The emerging world of
> sociological consciousness looks deathly to him;
> but he has little belief in, or commitment to,
> concomitants of poetic consciousness (religion,
> scholarship, history, great art, etc.). He is
> drawn to poetic consciousness but believes that,
> after all, it has to do only with dreams or lies.
> One's sense is that his stories help him to pass
> the time till he dies.


In some ways, your description of Dunsany in the final paragraph applies to me, as well.

Since he was born to wealth and I wasn't, he had more time to kill, but in the end, we're both killing time as pleasantly as possible, waiting for it to end.

Does this make us both post-moderns?

But there the comparison may end. I think--and I feel sure--that things could be much, much worse. One need only look at history, or one's own antecedents, to see that by comparison, I've got it good in many ways.

And I could also have been born to a generation intent on giving away the farm, without really knowing what that means.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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#6 “The Hoard of the Gibbelins”

I thought of Tolkien’s warm, witty, inventive Farmer Giles of Ham, a medievalist’s lively tale of a knight and dragon. Dunsany’s ironic story makes the knight impelled by avarice, the moneylenders disturbed in case he should bring back treasure that would enable their debtors to pay them, the dragon who serves as the knight’s mount moved to subservience by a sardonic reminder of the stereotypical fate of his kind when knights attack them, and the uncanny Gibbelins eaters of human flesh who assuredly have no trouble luring greedy men to them. Tolkien revealed real feeling for and imaginative engagement with the traditions he deployed for fun in Giles, while Dunsany wanted his readers to enjoy their own sense of sophisticated amusement: humans hunger for money, Gibbelins for human flesh, dragons for the blood of maidens, and so this story of fairy-land is really about how everyone is “like that” – so do they all (cf. the expression cosi fan tutte, said of women). This is an example of why I see Dunsany as the anti-Tolkien.

Very interesting synopsis, Dale. I'll have to try to find it and read it.

There seems to be a cynicism that I would not have thought characteristic of Dunsany.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Fifty years or so ago, an adolescent kid could take to that kind of easy cynicism readily. It could be relatively new to him, not a literary flavor to which he was accustomed. The story has a plot, has adventure, has suggestions of strangeness, but that cynicism could appeal too.

And I think this is why Dunsany seems to be an author one can outgrow, even rather quickly. My buying of Dunsany books lasted longer than my interest -- I have a Tales of Three Hemispheres nicely illustrated by Tim Kirk that I've owned for about 40 years and never yet read, I suppose, while I eventually let go a copy of the Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library edition of Fifty-One Tales without having read it.

But what a favorite he was for me around the high school years. He's easy to read -- you hardly have to know anything in order to understand his stories, free as they are of a real sense of history, human complexity, etc. -- yet he can seem sophisticated, to a young reader. That can be attractive.

I would guess nearly all of the people who like Dunsany's fantasy short stories first read them as adolescents. Does anyone fall under their spell now who first read them as an adult? But of course I have a lot of them yet to revisit in this experiment in reading, and perhaps they'll do more for me than, now of retirement age, I expect them to. I do wonder if The Charwoman's Shadow might not still please me, too; and you've suggested the Jorkens stories as worth looking up.

I was never deeply impressed by most of the stories you've summarized, though "Kith of the Elf Folk" remains one of my favorite fantasies ever for its stronger sense of description and emotional depth than usual, leading up to that powerfully soaring climax. In my case it's true that I first read Dunsany during my adolescence and still rate him a little highly, though I have outgrown some of his fiction, like the Pegana and Book of Wonder stuff which were too brief and ironic for my taste.

Perhaps my issue is that I've never gone to university and majored in literature, so I never developed the sort of taste that would require a more rich and sophisticated sense of setting, psychology, experience, and anything else that might be important for stronger literature. HPL and CAS were both admirers of Dunsany (though CAS only liked a few books.), but neither of them attended university as students. It's possible I'd get over Dunsany completely (though never abandon or dismiss him) if I was exposed to a more steady, consistent pace of higher realistic literature.

By the way Dale, you seem to hold CAS just slightly above Dunsany, even though CAS often wrote fantasies that were also far-removed from reality, with settings in fabulous countries or imaginary planets having no connection with human history, and characters as simple as sorcerers seeking vengeance over love, and unbelievable creatures like the furry bat-toad-sloth-god from Saturn. If I understand you correctly, is this because CAS' fiction is generally more detailed than Dunsany's? Dunsany's stories make me think of living daydreams, while CAS' stories feel like accounts of other worlds that actually have some sense of history, time, nature, etc. no matter how distant from our real experiences.

Hespire, to start with CAS vs. Dunsany:

1.I want to thank ED folk for your hospitality in that you have made me welcome even though precious little of what I've written has been about CAS, and it's probably been evident that he is not one of my favorite authors. Any time you think I should pitch my tent somewhere else on that account, let me know.

2.Several years ago I set myself to read a fair bit of CAS and posted comments online, either here or at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Chronicles Forums. Guided by J. D. Worthington, I read enough of his stories to realize that there was more to his fiction than I tended to think. I'd have to look to see if I could find the remarks I posted. My sense is that Dunsany seems to make a point of the insubstantiality of his little tales where CAS doesn't.

By the way, I think that habit of Dunsany's gets things off on the wrong foot with me any more. I mean, Dunsany calls various stories of his "dreamer's tales." But when you are dreaming, do your dreams seem evanescent, as it were shiny soap bubbles? I don't think they do, and I've actually had a practice -- kept in only a desultory fashion -- of writing down my more interesting dreams. I see I haven't added to the document since last December!

So, anyway, we eventually realize that Dunsany's "dreamer's tales" work within an existing literary convention of his time, in which an artistic-type person, perhaps after supposedly smoking "Hasheesh," has a dream of some vaguely Oriental setting very different from his humdrum London residence.

This type of story might be an attenuated descendant of a rather powerful book, Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I recommend the old Penguin Classics edition with the dragon on the cover if you can get hold of it. De Quincey's dreams are not various Dunsanian.

Oh, by the way, here's a note jotted 18 April 1982 that records an actual dream of mine -- about Dunsany. Perhaps others have dreamed of authors whom they have read.

----Just awoke (alarm clock) from a dream about Lord Dunsany. He was a lovable old man. Had a deep voice. He was very old but apparently was a friend of the family... maybe he was family? [We lived in Oregon and have no connections with Ireland, by the way.] ...I was just beginning to tell him that his writing had given me a lot of pleasure for years ... when he pulled out a sort of wallet and took out some sort of [word missing] and showed it to me and reminded me that I owed him 7.03 -- for a bus ticket (?) to "Pasadena" I had as a kid bought, I think. So Dad (I think) and I chuckled and I took out some money, first paying him 4 cents ("interest") then going into the paper money -- I had pounds, dollars, and roubles all mixed together. Then I woke up.----

I wouldn't be able now to say whether I'd been reading anything by Dunsany lately, but I'd read Mark Amory's biography of Dunsany about a month previously.------

And, fellow EDers, I have actually dreamed about Lovecraft once. Here are the notes:

-----11 Oct. 2020: waking about 4:03 a.m.: I dreamed that H. P. Lovecraft had borrowed, by mail, a book from the collection of the Oregon Historical Society about a sea captain…. Now, I found the book on a shelf of a library, perhaps the Ashland public library, with an Oregon collection, and in it, sure enough, was a slip with Lovecraft’s name, address (I think Providence was abbreviated as Pice), and the date(s) he had borrowed it, perhaps in the early 1930s. I think Chautauqua (probably not spelled correctly), Ashland, was stamped in the book. “Chautauqua” isn’t a Lovecraftian entity but a word referring to a late 19th-early 20th-century adult education movement. In the dream it seems I got, as it were, a vision of the former location of the library from which the book that Lovecraft had borrowed had been mailed, which had an element of Ashland’s Lithia Park and perhaps of the massive Foellinger Auditorium on the University of Illinois-Urbana campus. I think it did seem, in the dream, that the book’s present location was less grand than its former one, but perhaps they were the same. I waited for many hours to type up this record from the notes I scribbled when I woke.-----

It was a pleasant dream.

3.CAS seems to me more interesting than Dunsany biographically as regards Smith's location. I used to live not all that far from Auburn, California, when I lived in southern Oregon. And it's kind of intriguing to think of Smith writing while living in this small former Gold Rush (?) town. Dunsany seems to have been something of an aristocratic idler. I'm not interested in that Abbey Theatre business although I keep meaning to read more of Yeats's early poetry at least. It seems like Smith must have coped with some interesting factors.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 26 Jul 21 | 04:58PM by Dale Nelson.