At David Eddings' fervent recommendation, I picked up a copy of Lord Dunsany's "The Book of Wonder" from Amazon. It was quite short weighing in at less than ninety pages. I read through the fourteen stories and loved it. In "The Rivan Codex," David Eddings noted that Lord Dunsany could do in four pages what it took him four hundred pages to do. It's intriguing to me that I felt, at the time, those numbers were just arbitrary but most of the stories in this book he recommended were indeed four pages. And they were quite good. The book I bought was really nice though cost a good ten dollars or more. It had illustrations following most of the stories in the book.
I had not heard of Lord Dunsany prior to this recommendation. He not only inspired David Eddings, but also J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ursula Le Guin. I wonder how many others he inspired from those authors whose work I enjoy. "The Book of Wonder" was published back in 1912, so it is quite old. It had lots of time to influence fantasy authors and other authors throughout the 1900's and later.
I thought I would share a couple of moving passages. The first regarding beauty: "The lions came not to woo her because they feared her strength, and the gods dared not love her because they knew she must die."
And another - this one about the futility of mortality: "And Ackronnion sang as he never sang before, and will not sing again. O, but dolorous, dolorous, are all the ways of man, few and fierce are his days, and the end trouble, and vain, vain his endeavor: and woman - who shall tell of it? - her doom is written with man's by listless, careless gods with their faces to other spheres." Beautiful stuff.
There was a wide variety of stories among the fourteen included in "The Book of Wonder." I was struck that, although they are blatantly fantastic in nature, several of them noted real-world places, such as London. The juxtaposition works, though, and they were each a joy to read. In one of the stories, three thieves are set on stealing a golden box. I was concerned, at the time, that its contents wouldn't be revealed but it was - the box contained the finest literature that mankind had known...poems, stories, sonnets....stuff that can make you cry. I loved that. The box wasn't loaded with diamonds or with magical trinkets but with art. Literary art.
I don't know how I missed having heard of Lord Dunsany for this long and overlooked his work. His contributions to modern fantasy literature are apparently indelible. I wonder if he wrote any longer works or if he stuck with extremely short stories....I'll be reading more of his work in time, so I'll find out.
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