"Before there stood gods upon Olympus, or ever Allah was Allah, had wrought and rested Mana-Yood-Sushai."
When you think of fantasy writers, who do you think of? J.R.R. Tolkien? Terry Pratchett? Robert Jordan? Chances are, an Irish name wouldn’t even enter your head. But Ireland has as much of a connection to fantasy literature as the United Kingdom or America do. Just as Tolkien drew on Norse mythology for The Lord of the Rings, and Pratchett draws on elements of Hindu mythology for Discworld, so too has old Irish mythology left its impact on the fantasy world, perhaps no more so than in the hands of Lord Dunsany, one of Ireland’s most prolific and influential writers. Dunsany had a large hand in creating the fantasy genre with his seminal short stories, first collected in The Gods of Pegana, and in his novels including The King of Elflands Daughter, The Charwoman’s Shadow and his wildly popular Joseph Jorkens series.
In London in 1878, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was born the heir to one of the oldest Irish peerages. Having grown up in Kent and attending Eton and Sandhurst, Plunkett inherited the Dunsany title from his father at the age of twenty-one. After a brief spell in the military, he returned to his ancestral home of Dunsany Castle in County Meath, near the historically and mythologically significant site of Tara.
In 1903, he met the youngest daughter of the Earl of Jersey, Lady Beatrice Child Villiers, and they married the following year. They maintained an active social life--travelling between their homes in Meath and London, and Dunsany’s childhood home in Kent--and became friendly with many of the day’s most prominent literary figures, including Percy French, George “AE” Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Lady Gregory and W.B. Yeats, who made Dunsany the unprecedented offer of selecting and editing one of Dunsany’s works in 1912.
As a result of his moving in these literary circles, Dunsany became involved with the Irish Literary Revival, to which he was seen as a major contributor. His fantasy works drew heavily on old Celtic mythology. His first collection of stories, The Gods of Pegana, published in 1905, concerned his pantheon of invented gods, such as Mana-Yood-Sushai and Skari the Drummer and is considered a major influence on later writers like Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin. His 1924 novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter, is one of the earliest works of fantasy fiction in the world. Published before the genre was even named, it contains many of the tropes and conventions of fantasy used even to this day.
One of his best loved characters was Joseph Jorkens, an eccentric middle-aged raconteur who would regale members of his gentleman’s club with exotic and fantastical tales of his supposed travels around the world for the price of a drink. Jorkens’ popularity comes down to the fact that most people who read Dunsany’s work could relate to him. He was one of those characters about whom one could say “I know a fellow like that,” a chancer always looking for a free drink, a man who could sing for his supper.
Dunsany himself could certainly sing for his supper. He was a consistently prolific writer, having published 18 collections of stories and 14 novels, alongside many plays and poetry collections, in the space of 30 years. In 1919 he made his first tour of America and exploded onto the literary scene over there, helping to create the fantasy genre on the other side of the Atlantic. His Revival comrades assisted him greatly in making a name for himself (notably Yeats and Lady Gregory, whose collections of Irish myths and legends were a source of inspiration to Dunsany) but once his stories were being read, his fame grew exponentially.
Besides being a giant of the burgeoning fantasy genre, Dunsany was also instrumental in kicking off the Irish theatre. He was one of the largest donors to the new Abbey Theatre, and wrote a great many plays during his lifetime, collaborating with Padraic Colum and having his works staged regularly at the Abbey. Many of his theatrical works were also staged in the West End and on Broadway. Alongside his forays into live theatre, Dunsany wrote radio plays for the BBC, records of which survive to this day, though unfortunately none of the original recordings are in existence.
He was regarded as a pioneer and an innovator by his peers because of his inventive use of language (incorporating Irish speech patterns and wildly original metaphors and turns of phrase into his works) and as familiar and comfortable by his public on account of his popular and escapist style. Dunsany could be called the Stephen King of his age, but even this grossly understates his influence and popularity.
In all his fantastical writings, he never abandoned his Irish roots. On the contrary, his work was grounded quite firmly in Irish history and culture. Besides using Celtic mythology as his starting point, he used the Irish vernacular and mode of speech often in his works. These close ties to his homeland and its zeitgeist contributed majorly to his popularity. It could be argued that Dunsany did for the fantasy genre what Joyce did for postmodernism: both were progenitors of their respective genres and both did it in the peculiarly Irish style, never neglecting the common Irishman as a reader even when their works dealt with their loftiest intellectual ideas.
Dunsany’s work is as fresh today as it was a hundred years ago, still channelling something primal from within the human—and indeed the Irish—experience. To this day, Dunsany continues to influence writers and artists, with fantasy authors David Eddings and Neil Gaiman, and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, paying tribute to Dunsany in their works.
It is a pity that Dunsany is not as widely read and loved as he once was, and that his work is to some extent lost to the public, being read mainly by the more esoteric fantasy fans and writers. His influence, however, is not lost and remains powerful—perhaps more than ever—and to some extent, in one form or another, he is still being read today, by anyone who picks up a fantasy novel.
No comments:
Post a Comment