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    Fifty-One Tales
    Fifty-One Tales
    Fifty-One Tales
    Ebook78 pages47 minutes

    Fifty-One Tales

    By Lord Dunsany

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    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. The first editions, in hardcover, were published simultaneously in London and New York City by Elkin Mathews and Mitchell Kennerly, respectively, in April, 1915. The British and American editions differ in that they arrange the material slightly differently and that each includes a story the other omits; "The Poet Speaks with Earth" in the British version, and "The Mist" in the American version.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSerapis Classics
    Release dateSep 30, 2017
    ISBN9783962557614
    Author

    Lord Dunsany

    Edward J. M. D. Plunkett, the 18th Baron of Dunsany, was one of the foremost fantasy writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lord Dunsany, and particularly his Book of Wonder, is widely recognized as a major influence on many of the best known fantasy writers, including J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and C.S. Lewis. Holding one of the oldest titles in the Irish peerage, Lord Dunsany lived much of his life at Dunsany Castle, one of Ireland’s longest-inhabited homes. He died in 1957, leaving an indelible mark on modern fantasy writing.

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    Reviews for Fifty-One Tales

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    • 4/5
      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 take you more than an hour or two to read this).
    • 3/5
      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 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.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.

    Book preview

    Fifty-One Tales - Lord Dunsany

    Published 2017

    All rights reserved

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    THE ASSIGNATION

    CHARON

    THE DEATH OF PAN

    THE SPHINX AT GIZEH

    THE HEN

    WIND AND FOG

    THE RAFT-BUILDERS

    THE WORKMAN

    THE GUEST

    DEATH AND ODYSSEUS

    DEATH AND THE ORANGE

    THE PRAYER OF THE FLOWERS

    TIME AND THE TRADESMAN

    THE LITTLE CITY

    THE UNPASTURABLE FIELDS

    THE WORM AND THE ANGEL

    THE SONGLESS COUNTRY

    THE LATEST THING

    THE DEMAGOGUE AND THE DEMI-MONDE

    THE GIANT POPPY

    ROSES

    THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN EAR-RINGS

    THE DREAM OF KING KARNA-VOOTRA

    THE STORM

    A MISTAKEN IDENTITY

    THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE HARE AND THE TORTOISE

    ALONE THE IMMORTALS

    A MORAL LITTLE TALE

    THE RETURN OF SONG

    SPRING IN TOWN

    HOW THE ENEMY CAME TO THLUNRANA

    A LOSING GAME

    TAKING UP PICADILLY

    AFTER THE FIRE

    THE CITY

    THE FOOD OF DEATH

    THE LONELY IDOL

    THE SPHINX IN THEBES (MASSACHUSETTS)

    THE REWARD

    THE TROUBLE IN LEAFY GREEN STREET

    THE MIST

    FURROW-MAKER

    LOBSTER SALAD

    THE RETURN OF THE EXILES

    NATURE AND TIME

    THE SONG OF THE BLACKBIRD

    THE MESSENGERS

    THE THREE TALL SONS

    COMPROMISE

    WHAT WE HAVE COME TO

    THE TOMB OF PAN

    THE ASSIGNATION

    Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.

    And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.

    And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.

    And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not foreborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men, and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by.

    And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:

    I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.

    CHARON

    Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.

    It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.

    If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.

    So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.

    It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon's duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.

    Then no one came for a while. It was not usual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.

    Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger: the gods knew best. And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.

    And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had 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.

    Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of

    Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and

    Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the

    little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

    I am the last, he said.

    No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.

    THE DEATH OF PAN

    When the travellers from London entered Arcady they lamented one to another the death of Pan.

    And anon they saw him lying stiff and still.

    Horned Pan was still and the dew was on

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