Reflecting on Lord Dunsany's Book of Wonder
Friday, January 6, 2012 at 10:43AM | by Otter 
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957) When I was in college and kicking around the United Kingdom with friends, wearing backpacks and eating from tins and smoking pipes and drinking cheap beer, I first read Lord Dunsany’s Book of Wonder. It was an old book, bound in oxblood leather with yellowing pages. (That edition was combined with Dunsany’s Time and the Gods.) It had been stolen from the Wheaton College Library by a friend who subsequently became a talented Presbyterian minister, and who shall remain nameless, but whose reading voice was excellent.
Yes. I own a book stolen from a library, albeit not by me. I am currently in possession of stolen goods. Goods stolen in 1988.
He first introduced me to the book while we sat at a table outside The Perch near Oxford, drinking beer on a chilly summer night. He read from the short story “The Hoard of the Gibbelins” in the sort of voice that one usually only hears scripture read:
The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man. Their evil tower is joined to Terra Cognita, to the lands we know, by a bridge. Their hoard is beyond reason; avarice has no use for it; they have a separate cellar for emeralds and a separate cellar for sapphires; they have filled a hole with gold and dig it up when they need it. And the only use that is known for their ridiculous wealth is to attract to their larder a continual supply of food. In times of famine they have even been known to scatter rubies abroad, a little trail of them to some city of Man, and sure enough their larders would soon be full again.
At the end of that magical summer, my friend bequeathed the book to me, and it followed me around for years. I used to read from it to students. On one occasion I had one of my night classes follow me out to the levee behind the University of New Orleans, and they sat in a circle listening to Lake Pontchartrain lap against the sand as I read to them the story “Time and the Gods.”
One or two asked (fruitlessly) if they could borrow the book itself, but nobody that I recall ever asked me for the title or the author’s name. There was something almost scriptural about the stories, beyond authorship, coming from some realm of the imagination that resists attribution. Myth is like that, and I think there’s something mythic in Dunsany’s tales. But there was an author: an unusually gifted member of the Irish aristocracy, living in one of the oldest houses in Ireland.
I have read that Tolkien and Lewis and other writers more famous than himself read Lord Dunsany. I can well believe it. He reminds me more of George MacDonald, though, in the way that he lets imagination shape the world that we know.
A student and friend gifted me another copy of the 1918 edition of The Book of Wonder, this one in an old dark green leather cover. I have two old copies now. I was thinking of them this morning as I had trouble sleeping, and slipped outside to collect the green edition from my car and to dip into it again.
I still grin after twenty-three years as I read the last words of “The Horde of the Gibbelins.” It made my classes sometimes cry aloud in surprise.
There are of course e-texts and audiobooks of Dunsany’s work. But this strange imagination really can never for me be reduced to the words on the page. I need the feel of old leather between my fingers, the vanilla-scent of old pages, and the memories that come with a physical object in space and time that has traveled with me these many years, with more to come.
Reader Comments (4)
I am so disappointed that you never read to us on the shore of the lake.
We had other mighty books to read, Victoria, but I really wanted to. When you're teaching, as you might well be one day, you can rectify my mistake.
I remember this book :)
It's rather unforgettable, isn't it? :) When I die, somebody start a "When did he read you The Book of Wonder?" thread.