By Epic Fantasy Novels
In 1905, an Irish aristocrat sat down in his medieval castle in County Meath and invented a religion.
Not borrowed. Not adapted from mythology. Invented — complete with a supreme deity, a creation myth, a pantheon of lesser gods, and an eschatology. He called the supreme creator Mana-Yood-Sushai. He sleeps, this god, while a drummer named Skarl beats a rhythm that keeps him unconscious. Should Skarl ever stop, Mana-Yood-Sushai will wake, and everything will end.
The man’s name was Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany. His book was called The Gods of Pegāna. He was twenty-six years old and it was his first publication.
Nobody had quite done this before. Writers had borrowed from mythology — Greek, Norse, Celtic, Babylonian. Dunsany created one. From nothing. With its own internal logic, its own beauty, its own cosmological weight.
Twenty years later, J.R.R. Tolkien would do the same thing, on a grander scale, and call it The Silmarillion. Tolkien cited Dunsany directly. The Ainulindalë — Tolkien’s creation myth, where the Valar sing the world into existence under the watching eye of Ilúvatar — is structurally the same as Pegāna: angelic powers managing a world under the shadow of a supreme being. Not copied. Absorbed, transformed, made new.
This is how the genre was built. Dunsany first. Then everyone who came after.
The Forgotten Grandfather
Ask a fantasy reader to name the founders of the genre. You’ll hear Tolkien. You might hear Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, maybe Michael Moorcock. Dunsany’s name almost never comes up.
This is one of the great injustices of literary history.
H.P. Lovecraft — a man not given to lavish praise — wrote in 1927 that Dunsany stood “in the front rank of living imagination.” Lovecraft was so influenced by him that he wrote an entire cycle of stories in direct imitation: “Celephais,” “The White Ship,” The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Lovecraft’s dreamlands — Ulthar with its cats, the sunset city of Dylath-Leen, the cold waste of Kadath — are Dunsany’s invented geographies with cosmic dread layered on top. Without Dunsany, there is no Lovecraft dreamscape.
C.S. Lewis read him. Clark Ashton Smith absorbed his mythological mode. The lyrical prose of Zothique — those stately sentences weighted like scripture — traces directly back to Dunsany’s voice. Ursula K. Le Guin. Neil Gaiman. Terry Pratchett, whose self-aware satirical fairy tales descend from Dunsany’s sardonic Book of Wonder stories. The entire tradition knew him.
We forgot.
What He Actually Did
Dunsany’s best work falls into two modes, and both matter.
The mythological mode. The Gods of Pegāna (1905), Time and the Gods (1906), The Sword of Welleran (1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910). These are prose poems disguised as stories. They’re written in a voice deliberately modelled on the King James Bible — measured, grave, rhythmically hypnotic. They invent places (the lands beyond the fields we know), gods, cosmologies, and then populate them with stories of human longing and divine indifference. They feel ancient because they’re written as if they are.
The sardonic mode. The Book of Wonder (1912). This is Dunsany in a different register — knowing, playful, dark. “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” is three pages long and probably the funniest dark fantasy story ever written. It concerns a tower full of treasure guarded by Gibbelins, who eat adventurers. An adventurer goes to steal it. The Gibbelins eat him. That’s the story, more or less — but the way Dunsany tells it, with complete deadpan seriousness and perfect comic timing, makes it feel like the genre looking at itself in a mirror and laughing. Pratchett is in that tradition. So is every fantasy story that knows its own conventions.
And then there is the novel.
The King of Elfland’s Daughter
Published in 1924, The King of Elfland’s Daughter is Dunsany’s masterpiece and one of the great unread fantasy novels in the English language.
The premise is simple. The people of the village of Erl ask their lord to give them a magical ruler — a lord touched by Elfland. The lord sends his son Alveric to the land of Elfland to bring back the Elf King’s daughter as his bride. Alveric goes. He finds Lirazel. She returns with him. They have a son, Orion, who grows up between two worlds. And the Elf King, unable to bear his daughter’s absence, begins reaching out his magic to bring her home.
What Dunsany does with this material is remarkable. The novel is really about the impossibility of holding onto magic in the daylight world. Lirazel cannot adapt to mortal life — not because she’s weak, but because mortal life is genuinely smaller than what she came from. The people of Erl got what they asked for, and they find the magical unsettling. Alveric loves Lirazel but cannot follow her into Elfland without losing himself. Their son Orion belongs fully to neither world.
The ending — which I won’t give away — produces exactly the emotion that the best fantasy produces: a recognition that beauty and the ordinary cannot coexist, and a complicated peace with that fact.
The prose is extraordinary. No summary does it justice. Here is the novel’s opening paragraph:
“The fields we know” — Dunsany’s phrase for the real world, the one without magic — “slope to the edge of Elfland.” And the edge of Elfland is a place where the fields end and something else begins.
He wrote it in a prose that sounds like no one else. It’s not purple or overwrought — it’s precise. Every word weighted. Every sentence earning its place.
Lin Carter, who selected books for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in the early 1970s — the series that introduced a generation of readers to pre-Tolkien fantasy — called it one of the finest fantasy novels ever written. He was right.
What This Means for the Genre
Here is the argument in brief:
Tolkien invented the blueprint for modern secondary world fantasy — the independently-created world with its own mythology, history, languages, and moral weight. The Lord of the Rings gave the genre its dominant template for fifty years.
But Tolkien didn’t invent this from nothing. He absorbed Dunsany, who had already shown that you could build a mythology from scratch, that invented gods could carry real cosmological weight, that a story set in a world that never existed could produce genuine emotional truth.
The chain runs: Dunsany → Tolkien → everything.
Which means if you love the genre — if you love the feeling of stepping through a door into somewhere else — part of what you love was made possible by a man in a medieval Irish castle in 1905, writing about a god who sleeps while a drummer keeps him from waking.
Where to Start
Start here: “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” — three pages, free online, immediately tells you what Dunsany is doing at his best. If it makes you laugh, you’ll love The Book of Wonder. If it makes you sad in a way you can’t quite explain, you’ll love The King of Elfland’s Daughter.
The masterpiece: The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924) — free on Project Gutenberg.
The mythology: The Gods of Pegāna (1905) — also free on Project Gutenberg. Short, strange, reads like scripture for a religion that never existed.
The sardonic stories: The Book of Wonder (1912) — free on Project Gutenberg. Start with “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” and “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles.”
All of it is free. All of it is short. None of it sounds like anything else.
Lord Dunsany died in 1957. His castle in County Meath is still in his family’s hands. His early work is available free at Project Gutenberg. Start with one story. See what happens.
