Edward Plunkett, known in society and to his vast
reading audience as Lord Dunsany, was one of the masters of fantasy, producing
more than sixty books in his lifetime at high speed, his publishers generally
content to print the first drafts that he sent them exactly as they came in. He
was an Anglo-Irish gentleman of the old school, a hunter, the chess and pistol-shooting champion of
Ireland. But while he rode his fields,
his mind was forever beyond the fields we know, in Elfland or in a Carcassonne
of the imaginal realm, where a witch queen, terrible in her beauty
Swims
in a marble bath through whose deeps a rive tumbles, or lies all morning on the
edge of it to dry slowly in the sun, and watches the heaving river trouble the
deeps of the bath. It flows through the caverns of earth for further than she
knows and coming to light in the witch’s bath goes down through the earth again
to its own peculiar sea….
When there is blood in the bath she knows there is war in the mountains.
When there is blood in the bath she knows there is war in the mountains.
Somewhere between here and Elfland, Lord Dunsany came
by an unhappy body engaged in a painful dialogue with its soul. “The Unhappy
Body” (his title for the tale) is tired; all it wants is to sleep. The soul
will not allow it to rest because it has an urgent assignment for this body.
Everywhere, the soul explains,
People’s
dreams are wandering afield, they pass the seas and mountains of faery,
threading the intricate passes led by their souls; they come to golden temples
a-ring with a thousand bells; they pass up steep streets lit by paper lanterns,
where the doors are green and small; they know their way to witches’ chambers
and castles of enchantment; they know the spell that brings them to the
causeway along the ivory mountains – on one side looking downward they behold
the fields of their youth and on the other lie the radiant plains of the future.
But people forget their dreams. From their dream
awakenings, they go back to sleep, forgetting the realms of magic and
enchantment, and the causeway from which they can see into past and future. The
soul’s urgent assignment for the body is: “Arise and write down what the people
dream.”
The body asks what reward it will receive for doing
this. When told there is no reward, the body declares, “Then I shall sleep.”
But the soul rouses the body with a song, and wearily the body takes up a pen
and starts recording what the soul wants it to preserve: a vision of dreamers
rising above the roar and distraction of the city to a shimmering mountain where
they board the “galleons of dreams” and sail through the skies in their chosen
directions. The soul goes on telling the dreams of all these travelers. But the
body is tired and mutinous; it cries out for sleep.
“You shall have centuries of sleep,” the soul tells
it, “but you must not sleep, for I have seen deep meadows with purple flowers
flaming tall and strange above the brilliant grass, and herds of pure while
unicorns…I will sing that song to you, and you shall write it down.”
The body protests, Give me one night’s rest.
Go on and rest, the soul at last responds, in disgust.
“I am tired of you. I am off.”
The soul flies away. The undertakers come and lay the
body in the earth. The wraiths of the dead come at midnight to congratulate the
body on its happy estate. “Now I can rest,” says the body.
Ursula LeGuin once said that Lord Dunsany is the worst
temptation for the novice writer of fantasy, and it must be conceded that his
prose can be overly rich and faery-infused. Yet A Dreamer’s Tales, where you will find "The Unhappy Body", is a book
for the ages, and reminds us that in fantasy we can sometimes the truth of our
condition more clearly than in the roar of the city.
Lord Dunsany, A
Dreamer’s Tales [1910] reprint: Holicong, PA: Wildside Press, 2002
Graphics: Top, Sidney Sime illustration for A Dreamer's Tales; Bottom, Portrait of Lord Dunsany by Serge Ivanoff (1953).
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