This post is brought to you by the Bearshirt series, by G. W. Thomas, now six volumes long and growing. Arthan the Bear Man is a powerful swordsman who can also change into a thousand pound brown bear. Preferring a solitary life in the woods, he rarely enjoys such as terrible foes threaten his world, like an army of bee-men, lizard folk in a lost world, a horde of goblins in a secret city, and a war between the werewolves and bears. This is Heroic Fantasy filled with action and color.
Lord Dunsany was the man who gave Fantasy literature its lilting style. The “thees’ and “thous” of an Epic Fantasy might have come from William Morris, who predated Dunsany by a generation, but Morris was imitating the old Medieval tales. Lord Dunsany had a style all his own, a combination of elder days and the King James Bible. To appreciate Dunsany, you have to hear Dunsany, which is what we offer today.
H. P. Lovecraft was a huge Dunsany fan, imitating his style in his Dreamlands tales (which would make a nice second post, I think.) Sam Moskowitz once defined him as a Dunsany clone. (And for the Dreamlands stories, he is right.) HPL was so much more than that but unlike others he actually met Dunsany. Those others include Robert E. Howard (whose tower spider is certainly a descendant of The Fortress Unvanquishable, along with stylists like Clark Ashton Smith. The Big Three of Weird Tales, these men helped define dark fantasy and Sword & Sorcery.
Now let’s be clear here. Adding a bunch of thees and doths into your Fantasy doesn’t really improve it. In fact, it’s a clear sign of amateurishness most often. What we are really talking about is an elevated style, something above normal speech and perhaps even as high-phalootin’ as the elevated speech of a Shakespearean play. This was the norm back-in-the-day: poetry. Drama was poetry. Fiction could be poetry. Now, let’s be honest, Farnsworth Wright and the other Pulp editors would only put up with so much of this. Clark Ashton Smith was asked to tone-down stories for both Wright and Hugo Gernsback. But you can still find a good example of someone doing it right when you look at this:
When Dilvish the Damned came down from Portaroy they tried to stop him at Qaran, and again at Tugado, then again at Maestar, Mycar, and Bildesh. Five horsemen had waited for him along the route to Dilfar; and when one flagged, a new rider with a fresh horse would replace him. But none could keep the pace of Black, the horse out of steel, for whom it was said the Colonel of the East had bartered a part of his soul. (“A Passage to Dilfar” by Roger Zelazny in Fantastic, February 1965)
That was how Roger Zelazny opens his saga of Dilvish the Damned. Very Dunsany. By the time he writes “Garden of Blood” (Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Summer 1979) the style has become completely modern for an action tale in a Dungeons &Dragons RPGer’s magazine. Dunsany inspired Rog but the market would not bear too much elevation.
Here are a dozen of Lord Dunsany’s tales presented for the listener. These are the stories that most likely find their way into Fantasy collections. I’ve included some of the books that have used these stories beneath each entry. Have fun listening to a master. (I apologize if the folks reading them are not also masters, but hey, we try. Vincent Price, you can’t go wrong there.)
“Bethmoora” was originally from A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) but Lin Carter collected it in the first of three Dunsany collections in the Ballantine Fantasy Series volume, At the Edge of the World (1970).
“The Bride of the Man-Horse” is from The Book of Wonder (1912) but was anthologized in The Wildside Book of Fantasy (2012) edited by John Betancourt.
“Carcassone” was originally from A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) but was included in Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018) edited by Robert M. Price.
“Chu-Bu and Shemmish” (Read by Vincent Price – Full Album) is from The Book of Wonder (1912) with L. Sprague de Camp including it in Warlocks and Warriors (1970), Lin Carter’s Beyond the Fields We Know (1972) and Douglas A. Anderson’s Tales Before Tolkien: The Roots of Modern Fantasy (2003).
“The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweler” is from The Book of Wonder (1912) was anthologized by L. Sprague de Camp in Swords and Sorcery: Stories of Heroic Fantasy (1963) and Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018).
“The Fall of Babbulkund” is from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908) and was anthologized in Lin Carter’s New Worlds for Old (1971) and Over the Hills and Far Away (1974).
“The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save Sacnoth” (GWT’s fav) is from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908) and anthologized in L. Sprague de Camp’s The Fantastic Swordsmen (1967), Lin Carter’s At the Edge of the World (1970), Jane Mobley’s Phantasmagoria: Tales of Fantasy and the Supernatural (1977), Tom Shippey’s The Oxford Book of Fantasy Stories (1994), Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018) and Fire in the Sky: Gripping Fairy Tales of Dragons and Fantasy (2025) edited by ed. M. Grant Kellermeyer, Joe Monson and Charles G. Waugh.
“The Hoard of the Gibbelins” is from The Book of Wonder (1912) was anthologized by Donald A. Wollheim in Avon Fantasy Reader, No. 4 (1947), The Spell of Seven (1967) edited by L. Sprague de Camp, Monster Mix (1968) edited by Robert Arthur, Realms of Wizardry (1976) edited by Lin Carter, The Monster Book of Monsters (1988) edited by Michael O. Shaughnessy, Fantasy Stories (1996) edited by Mike Ashley, Swords and Sorcerers: Stories from the World of Fantasy and Adventure (2003) edited by Clint Willis, H. P. Lovecraft Selects: Classic Horror Stories (2016) edited by Stefan Dziemianowicz, The Big Book of Classic Fantasy: The Ultimate Collection (2019) edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, as well as others. It isn’t hard to tell which of Dunsany’s tales are well-loved classics.
“The House of the Sphinx” is from The Book of Wonder (1912) was collected by Lin Carter in Over the Hills and Far Away (1974).
“The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater” (Lin Carter’s Fav according to Imaginary Worlds (1973) is from The Book of Wonder (1912) Lin Carter collected it in At the Edge of the World (1970).
“The Lord of the Cities” is from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908) and collected in Carter’ Over the Hills and Far Away (1974).
“How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles” is from The Book of Wonder (1912) was used by Dorothy M. Sutherland in Argosy, June 1952, collected in Lin Carter’s Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), Harry Dolan’s The Mage, Winter 1988, Peter Haining’s The Wizards of Odd: Comic Tales of Fantasy (1996), Chris Clarke and Amber van Dyk’s Ideomancer, October 2002, The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories (2011) edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018) edited by Robert M. Price.
“The Sword of Welleran” is from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908) and anthologized in Lin Carter’s The Young Magicians (1969) and Beyond the Fields We Know (1972), The Fantastic Imagination (1977) edited by Robert H. Boyer and Kennth J. Zahorski, Fantastic Worlds: Myths, Tales, and Stories (1979) edited by Eric S. Rabkin, The Barbarian Swordsmen (1981) edited by Peter Haining (as Sean Richards), The Fantasy Hall of Fame (1983) edited by Robert H. Greenberg & Robert Silverberg, Masterpieces of Fantasy and Enchantment (1988) edited by Kathryn Cramer and David G, Hartwell, The Treasury of the Fantastic: Romanticism to Early Twentieth Century Literature (2001) edited by David Sandner ad Jacob Weisman and Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle (2018) edited by Robert M. Price.
Conclusion
Lord Dunsany was the man who brought the short story to modern Fantasy, just as William Morris had the novel. He is the master at creating a vision of another world, its people, its joys and terrors, with the quick skill of a poet. Even today we see the novel dominate as the preferred vehicle for Fantasy but a well-told story is ever a delight to me. (Dunsany did write novels too, like The King of Elfland’s Daughter.) Commercially less viable after the Pulps ended but we still have them even today, thank goodness. If you aren’t familiar with my Some S&S Stories You Might Have Missed… go here.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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