The hero who was not a Celt

I love the work of author Lord Dunsany. He’s an interesting figure and nothing like as well known as he deserves to be, and his relationship with Celtic nationalism/revivalism is interesting to say the least. I’m rubbish at dates, but, Dunsany was writing up to and around the time of the First World War, making him contemporary with Yeats. He was an Irish Lord, at a time when Irish national identity was being constructed in part, through literature. W.B. Yeats being a fine example of this. I’ve read letters, I think, or excerpts of letters from Yeats to Dunsany in which he complains bitterly that Dunsany does not tap into the rich heritage of his nation, for the good of the nation.


So much of our modern notion of ‘Celtic’ nations owes everything to the nation building at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. But Dunsany wanted no part of it. He wrote about the Gods of Pagana, instead, who were wholly of his inventing. He’s one of the great grandfathers of the fantasy genre, with The King of Elfland’s Daugther far pre-dating the more famous Tolkien elves. With his lyrical style, dashes of humour and wild imagination, I think he’s brilliant. I wonder to what degree his lack of widespread current fame is due to him not being caught up in the political agenda of his day, though.


I can’t point at Lord Dunsany and claim him as a proto-Druid in the way that we like to claim Yeats retrospectively, and all those other folk working with mediaeval ‘Celtic’ myth at the time. But read his work and the love of landscape, the sense of magic, and the biting religious satires are thoroughly resonant. He reads like a pagan, to me.  Bits of more personal writing give me a sense of Dunsany as rather alone and isolated in his life and his work. There’s a mournful longing to his stories that result in me picturing him staring into the middle distance from high windows, utterly and totally alone. That may of course just be me, and not him at all, but it’s what I get.


Every time I read his work, I come away with the desire to be able to make him a nice cup of tea and say ‘well I get it, and you’re not on your own.” He writes like a man who has glimpsed the colours of faerie, who has heard the last, drifting notes of a song from the otherworld, and who would risk life and limb to see a unicorn for himself. Or anything else otherworldly for that matter.


To the best of my knowledge, Dunsany did not associate himself much with any traditions, new or old. He satirised religion, especially the Church. He was not afraid to mock gods, but not as an atheist might, more as a man who has seen the nature of small gods, and knows their terrible limitations. Whether he would have liked it or not, Dunsany gets me as a creative descendent. He also gets Neil Gaiman, which is probably far more cheering and much less complicated.


He chose not to be an overtly Celtic, druid revivalist type at a time when to do so would probably have done his writing career an abundance of good. Instead, he kept dancing to his own tunes, and to those echoes of otherworldly tunes that were so evidently in his ears. He was true to his awen, and I love his work. Having Dunsany as an ancestor of tradition, given where I stand as an aspiring druid and author, is an interesting place to be. Of all the people I would like to sit down and talk with, he’s one at the top of my list. And like most ancestors of tradition, his opinion isn’t available and he has no scope to rein me in, tell me off or point me in the right direction. This is usually part of the nature of ancestry.


If my own passions are not in tune with the zeitgeist, and are not tapping in to the next big commercial thing, then so be it. Like Dunsany, I can’t be what I am not, and I’d rather follow my inspiration than shoehorn it into a shape that feels unnatural to me. And for all that he did that, Dunsany was, in his own time, prolific and successful and while he may not get the attention he deserves, he’s not lost in the mists of time yet, and hopefully never will be.



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Published on October 02, 2012 05:32
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