Fifty-One Tales

You sometimes read that the late Victorian/Edwardian periods were marked by cultural lassitude and a general feeling of exhaustion, but "Fifty-One Tales" might be the best example I've actually seen of this culture-wide ennui. In Lord Dunsay's mini-stories, industrialism foretells the ruination of mankind, nature is in retreat, the old gods are in hiding, and the modern world looks generally bleak. In some ways, Dunsany has most of the prejudices that you'd expect an Anglo-Irish Lord of his era to have. A lot of people, most notably W. B. Yeats, played with classical and natural themes at about this place and time, but Dunsany's has none of Yeats' vigor: he comes off as merely defeated and melancholy, while Yeats seemed to draw real show more power from the literary and mythological past.

Which isn't to say that "Fifty-One Tales" is a necessarily terrible book. It's amazing to realize that somebody out there was writing microfictions -- or flash fictions, or twitter novels or whatever you'd like to call them -- one hundred years ago. Dunsany's stories are compact and often feel complete, which considering that some of them aren't longer than a few paragraphs, is something of an achievement. And Dunsany can write, after a fashion, even if his style will probably come off as too perfect and excessively ornamented to many modern readers. Still, every once in a while he hits the mark, thereby keeping things somewhere above the Mendoza line. And I'm sure that a lot of fantasy and Victoriana fans will find a lot of this stuff positively charming. But, unsurprisingly, these tales lack any trace the engagement with the physical body or with a particular individual consciousness that tends to characterize Modernist writing.. I enjoyed this one mostly as a historical curiosity. show less

One or two-page tales, usually piquant, written in high style, often twists on myths or fables, sometimes silly, sometimes exquisitely philosophical. Sometimes Dunsany describes London or the Irish countryside in a mythic context. "And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief had in the beginning sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms." That is from a tale titled Charon, which imagines Charon ferrying the last living soul across the great river. From such a sentence, I can see why he hung out with Yeats and was an inspiration for LeGuin.

Flash from a hundred years ago. Fairly quick read, since most of these fit on a page each. Lot of what most people would classify as either parables or homilies. There's a still a touch of Dunsanian dreaminess in them.

A facsimile of a collection originally published in 1915. I suppose these would be called "short shorts" today - there are a few that are one or two paragraphs long, and none longer than a few pages.

Most are fables or parables. Quite a few involve Death, as well as other anthropomorphized seasons and elements and such. Another major theme is Man and Technology vs. Nature. The standout for me was a twist on the Tortoise and Hare story. And there are others that clearly stand as influences on writers such as Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith.

I'm not sure how this compares to the rest of his oeuvre, just because the stories are so short. But there are certainly some good stories in here, and I think it makes for a nice diversion (shouldn't show more take you more than an hour or two to read this). show less

Fifty-One Tales is a collection of fantasy short stories by Irish writer Lord Dunsany, considered a major influence on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin and others. This collection of tales was fun to read. You get many tales from The Assignation, Charon, The Death of Pan, The Worm and the Angel, Roses, The Song of the Blackbird, and The Messengers. All of these by Lord Dunsany are great little reads that can be comical or thought provoking. The are derived from mythology and truth. You get it all in these tales from ghosts to kings, angels and dreams, gods and men. Some are quite short and will take mere minutes to read, but give it a go and read them all because in the end you will be glad you did.