Minor Magus, an article by Laura Miller in The New Yorker, is a nice overview of the life and writing of Lord Dunsany.

I had grand hopes for this site when I first began it about three months ago, but my plans have fallen by the wayside, mostly as real life gets in the way as it is too often wont to do. I won’t go into the specifics (read my LiveJournal if you’re curious about that sort of drama. This space is meant for more intellecutal (I hope) disccussion. Leave it to say that I’ve been just too tired at the end of the day to sit and compose any sort of meanigful discourse. Hopefully as things begin to settle down now I can again give this site the attention I want.

Though I haven’t been writing in this space, I haven’t completely avoided the topic in my headspace. I finished the Dunsany book last week, and I just have to say it’s a treasure. There’s nothing about his work that I don’t like and I find it increasingly hard to believe that he so nearly passed out of public consciencesness. Less than a century ago, he was one of the most well known and prolific writers of his time, but now — though his work is in the midst of something like a revival — he’s really only known to those interested in the history of fantastic literature. He’s sort of “the fantasist’s fantasist”, to be very trite. I have more I want to say about Dunsany, but I’ll save it for a later entry, when I am more organized and less sleepy.

I’ve also been reading a book titled Sex and Sorcery, by Ron Edwards. It is actually a supplement to the Sorcerer RPG, which I am unfamilier with, but the book addresses issues of gender in roleplay that I haven’t seen addressed so explicitly before. What it has to say about the gender of players and the gender of the characters they play, and more importantly about the “gender” of stories is definitely grist for a longer entry here, but only after I’ve had more time to fiinish the book and digest what it has to say.

However, a reference to the game system Sorcerer stirred a minor revelation that I thought worth mentioning here, in reference to interactive storytelling. I don’t have the book in front of me for an exact quote, but it was implied that this game requires strong input from the player in regards to story creation, that there is as much responsibility on the player to provide interesting material as on the GM. This is a point of view I can heartily agree with, and I would hope to find a group that could support this sort of interchange in a tabletop gaming situation. It’s also the idea I had in mind in building Castle Marrach: individual characters get to tell their own stories against the backdrop of a larger tale that is gradually revealed.

But the word “responsibiility” is the key phase here. What I failed to acknowledge is that players either 1) Don’t recognize their own responsibility, 2) Don’t know how to fulfill it (i.e. don’t know enough about creating stories), or 3) Just plain don’t want it. It’s much easier, after all, to be either a task-based player, whether that task is to slay one monster so you can go up one level and kill the next montster or to follow the cat and figure out why he’s carrying the necklace or to diligently apply yourself to skill lessons so that you can impress a ranking character and get a promotion. Do this to get this, in innumerable variations. Or you can be a reactionary player, and simply respond to the circumstances that are presented to you. Neither of these are necessarly bad ways of playing, but I think that if you want to elevate your RPG beyond the level of game (which term implies that there is something to be won) to the realm of true interactive storytelling, then you really need to empasize the responsibility of the player to contribute creatively, and more significantly, teach her how to do it.

I’ll save the ramble on possible methods of teaching people to be good storytellers for another time.

The most interesting thing I’ve learned about Lord Dunsany since writing the last entry is that it’s not pronounced Dun-SAY-ny, not DUN-sa-ny as I’ve always said it. My brief experience with Celtic languages tells me that it makes sense, since in those languages emphasis usually falls on the penultimate syllable of a word. Since Dunsany is an Irish place name and not a given name (Lord Dunsany is his title, his given name is Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett), I had one of those “Oh, duh!” moments when I read the proper pronunciation of his name. Like I said, it just makes sense.

Okay, maybe that wasn’t the most interesting thing I’ve found out. After making my last post about Dunsany, I did a little research online to find out more about him. The first site I found is a biography and bibiliography maintained on the official homepage of the Dunsany family, castle and estate (or you can go over to the a profile and bibliography at Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works, and essay, Lord Dunsany: The Potency of Words and the Wonder of Things that was originally published in Mythlore, a collection of some of his works at Undecay, and a brief overview (oddly classified under “Supernatural Horror” with more links and publication listings.

That’s about as far as I got when I was diverted by the lovely Beyond the Fields We Know, a lovely site which is not about Dunsany per se but myth and story in general. The title, of course, comes from Dunsany’s most famous work, The King of Elfland’s Daughter. But the site is a more personal journey through topics that are important to the author, featuring on essays with evocative titles such as “On Thresholds and Liminal Places” and “If These Stones Could Speak”. It makes good use of imagery without falling into the kitchy trap that so many “fantasy” oriented sites seem to.

My exploration of the site ended my web quest for Dunsany materials, though, so I don’t have much more to offer on that end right now. There seems to be a great many of his works on line, the earliest ones, at least, that have outlived their copyright. Right now, he’s seeing a resurgance in print as well, as you can see from the Dunsanny.net bookstore. Aside from Dunsany’s own work, there are a couple of volumes of scholarship that I myself would like to investigate, particularly Darrell Schweitzer’s Pathways to Elfland: The Writings of Lord Dunsany and S.T. Joshi’s Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination (the two of them have also collaborated on a published bibiliography of Dunsany’s works). Additionally, there is a volume of correspondence between Dunsany and Arthur C. Clarke, which looks like it is probably very interesting. I am wondering if any of these books have found their way into my public library, or if I’ll have to start checking out the local universities.

What’s not listed on the bookstore page, though, is a new compilation of Dunsany’s work put out by Penguin Classics. I didn’t know about that until the current issue of Realms of Fantasy arrived in my mailbox last week, with a review of the volume by Gahan Wilson. With an introduction and notes by the above mentioned Joshi, the book features a selection of Dunsany’s most important short works from his long and very prolific career. I had to go and get a copy for myself, which brings me up to the present in my current Dunsany study phase.

I’ve just begun to dip into the book, and am happy to have my instinct confirmed, that The Gods of Pegana (self-published in 1904, which makes this year a very appropriate one for my study, I suppose — I wonder if anyone is planning any Dunsany centennial celebrations?) was the first work of it’s kind, the first to create a mythic world for it’s own sake. From the introduction:

What Dunsany had done was to create an entire cosmogony, complete with a pantheon of ethereal but balefully powerful gods — a cosmogony, however, whose aim was n ot the fashioning of an ersatz religion that made any claim to metaphysical truth, but rather the embodiment of Oscar Wilede’s imperishable dictum, “The artist is the creator of beautiful things.”

And The Gods of Pegana is certainly a beautiful thing. I’ve written about Dunsany before, in a review of The King of Elfland’s Daughter, but I think my appreciation for his prose has grown in the years since I called it “bordering on purple.” There’s nothing extraneous or excessive in his writing — each word is chosen with care. It is still slow reading, but mostly because I have to keep going back and rereading the best passages. It’s like poetry, not to be rushed through, devoured all at once like the best modern novels, but tasted and savored and enjoyed thoroughly before moving on.

Have I said that you should read Dunsany? If you haven’t, you should.

Gods of Pegana, a text he downloaded from Project Gutenberg. He knows I’ve been wanting to practice my nascent bookbinding skills on, so it was a very thoughtful and well-thought-out gift.

I bound the first copy over the weekend, a simple sewn tape binding with pages of plain printer paper. This is really meant to be the test product, as the second copy of the text is on very nice, heavy weight bond paper. There’s a couple pictures if you click on “continued” below, if you’re interested. I’m planning on doing something a bit more elaborate for the second copy, with different ribbons and beads and charms threaded onto the stitches. I think a somewhat fetishist look will fit the subject matter.

Once it was bound, I started reading the book. I hadn’t, before, though I’m familiar with other books of Dunsany. This one is pretty much a creation mythos with a listing of the gods of some imaginary world. As I was reading, I wondered if Dunsany was the first person to make up a complete imagined pantheon like this. There’s no publication in my book, but I think it was first published in the first decade of the 20th century. I’m really interested in investigating Dunsany’s inspiration for this work, and examining the text more closely. After all, inventing gods is really the heart of mythopoeia.