Dunsany, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron (1878–1957), Anglo‐Irish writer of short stories, plays, and novels; became 18th Baron of Dunsany (1899), and remained throughout his life one of the 20th century's most prolific writers of fantasy for adults. Influenced by the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and the romances of William Morris, Dunsany began his literary career with the creation of his own mythical, quasi‐mystical universe in The Gods of Pegana (1905) and Time and the Gods (1906). The Sword of Welleran (1908) contained some of his best fantasy tales including the title story and ‘The Kith of the Elf‐Folk’, an account of a fairy‐like creature who chooses to enter the world of late Victorian England, finds it hypocritical and ugly, and then renounces her soul to escape. The tale manifests two abiding characteristics of Dunsany, his dislike of organized religion and his loathing of the Industrial Revolution. In A Dreamer's Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder (1912) which contains ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’ known for its brilliant unhappy ending (‘And, without saying a word … they neatly hanged him on the outer wall’), 51 Tales (1915), Tales of Wonder (1916, called in America The Last Book of Wonder), and Tales of Three Hemispheres (1919), Dunsany expanded his mythopoeic vision. The impact of these early dreamland stories was heightened by the illustrations of Sime, whose pictures sometimes inspired Dunsany's tales. Later collections include The Man who Ate the Phoenix (1949), whose title story utilizes traditional Celtic motifs: encounters with a leprechaun, a Banshee, and the Fairy Queen; and another tale, ‘Little Snow White up to date’, which modernizes the classic. More popular than the elaborately wrought, linguistically archaic fantasies are the Jorkens travel tales, which sometimes use folklore motifs for comic ends. Beginning with The Travel Tales of Mr Joseph Jorkens (1931), these records of a creative liar who entertains members of his club with his adventures—including, in ‘Mrs Jorkens’, his marriage to a mermaid—are among Dunsany's most amusing works.

Dunsany's second career, as a dramatist, associated him with Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, and the revival of the Irish Theatre. Several of his non‐realist plays, including A Night at an Inn, were popular, as were his short works utilizing fairy‐tale themes. Moreover, he began writing novels in the 1920s; filled with quests, imaginary kingdoms, dream atmosphere, and the pseudo‐medievalism of Morris's romances, these might be labelled fairy novels. Among them are a quest romance of fairyland, The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) and the equally folkloric Charwoman's Shadow (1926), which reworks the traditional motif of the lost shadow. In The Blessing of Pan (1927), Dunsany successfully fuses British folklore and pagan myth, while The Story of Mona Sheehy (1939) is an anti‐fantasy, a novel of a young woman who wrongly believes she is of fairy birth.

As a fabulist who imaginatively transforms materials from The Arabian Nights, classical mythology, Celtic, Germanic, and Hindu folklore as well as from medieval lays and quest romances, Dunsany is an important contributor to the fairy‐tale tradition.

Bibliography

• Anderson, Angelee Sailer, ‘Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things’, Mythlore, 15.1 (autumn 1988).
• Joshi, S. T., Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo‐Irish Imagination (1995).

— Carole Silver

The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.