In Lord Dunsany's early work of fantasy, The Gods of Pegana, an elder god with the resounding name Mana-Yood-Sushai makes the lesser gods including a drummer named Skarl. The effort of creation and the sound of the drum put the creator to sleep. Skarl sits on the mist before Mana's feet, drumming away.
"Some say that the Worlds and the Suns are but the echoes of the drumming of Skarl, and others say that they be dreams that arise in the mind of Mana because of the drumming of Skarl." Either way, when the drumming stops, the world of gods and humans will end. Skarl may grow weary, but he plays on, "for if he ceases for an instant then Mana-Yood-Sushai will start awake, and there will be worlds nor gods no more".
From these self-published tales of a fictional pantheon Dunsany went on to virtually found the fantasy genre. He was endlessly prolific and soon wildly popular, publishing some 90 books before he died from appendicitis at 79. The Anglo-Irish aristocrat's writing habits were as strange as his stories. According to his wife Lady Beatrice, he wrote with quills he sharpened himself, while sitting on a crumpled old hat. He rarely revised anything. The first draft, often streaming directly from dreams, was usually the last. I would like to know what was going on with the hat.
The entertaining Jorkens stories are among Dunsany's later productions. Jorkens is a portly bibulous member of the Billiards Club who will spin a yarn for a large whisky and soda. One of his tales, “Lost” is about time travel, about a man who succeeds in going to the past and changing something there but then can’t find his way back to his starting point; in fact he’s bewildered by a wilderness of diverging paths. In another Jorkens story, he claims that in Africa he found a being very different from humanoids, whose species had also discovered fire. He could not produce the evidence because he couldn’t kill a creature that had this ability, previously thought unique to humans.
Dunsany's family, the Plunketts, settled in Ireland in the 11th century. Dunsany Castle has been in theitr possession – inherited from in-laws – since the 14th century. In the time of Edward Plunkett (the writer) it was still 1600 acres with great herds of cattle and sheep. The current Baron Dunsany is a young metalhead turned vegan who has sold off the livestock and “rewilded” 750 acres.
Lord Dunsany was actually born in Kent and
moved to another family estate there for his last years. pistol and chess
champion of Ireland, often out with horse and hounds, schooled at Eton and
Sandhurst – not , from the outside, a likely scribe for a dreaming god or an
elven princess. Perhaps the hat made all the difference.
Drawing by Robert Moss
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