In the Land of Time (2004) by Lord Dunsany

Cover of the 2004 Penguin Classics Lord Dunsany compilation- the first- over a hundred years after he started publishing stories. 

Book Review

In the Land of Time (2004)

 by Lord Dunsany

  Lord Dunsany is the greatest fantasy writer you've never heard up.   Even if you haven't heard of him:

Dunsany can nevertheless be seen as the source and inspiration of much of the writing that followed in his wake; such figures as H. P. Lovecraft, J. R. R. Tolkien, Fritz Leiber, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Moore herself are deeply in Dunsany’s debt for the example he set as a prose stylist and as a creator of an entire universe of shimmering fantasy. 

    The strongest look is between Dunsany and Lovecraft.  Dunsany's breakthrough came with The Gods of Pegaana, 1904- self published.  The achievment is described S. T. Joshi, who provides the introduction:

 What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods—a cosmogony, however, whose aim was not the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s imperishable dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

 

     His secret, it turns out was a combination of a style derived from the English translation of the Old Testament with the classic-revivalism of Nietzsche:

  Dunsany read Nietzsche in 1904, just around the time he wrote The Gods of Pegaāna, and we can detect the presence of the German iconoclast in numerous conceptions and perhaps even in its ponderous phraseology, so similar to the prose-poetic rhythms of Thus Spake Zarathustra. In effect, Dunsany was seeking to fuse the naïveté and spirit of wonder that had led primitive humanity to invent its gods with a very modern sensibility that recognized the insignificance of mankind amidst those incalculable vortices of space and time that modern science had uncovered.

      Joshi also addresses one of my favorite questions, "What happened?"  Dunsany was huge in his day- though Joshi points out that his best work was published early, and the stories from the end of his career including the sadly Wellsian  Jorkens stories, published towards the end of his career.   Joshi has this to say on the subject of "what happened" to Dunsany's literary reputation:

How did a writer so well known in his time, and so showered with critical acclaim, lapse so far into obscurity? A number of factors having nothing to do with the merit, or lack of it, of Dunsany’s work conspired against him. First, fantasy has always been relatively restricted in its appeal, and in the course of the twentieth century it gradually dropped out of mainstream fiction and became a narrow “genre” somewhere between science fiction and horror fiction, and incurring the critical disdain that those literary modes suffered. Second, Dunsany’s ambiguous involvement with his Irish literary compatriots—to say nothing of his Unionist sympathies at a time when most leading Irish writers were Nationalists—caused his work to be either scorned or deliberately ignored by those who should have been acknowledging it as a distinctive contribution to the national literature. And third, Dunsany, like so many writers, wrote too much.

         There is a strong argument that only the first two sections, Pegaana and Environs and Tales of Wonder.  The rest of it- including his "prose poems" is more for the completest than the casual reader of the antecedents of weird fiction.