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Anna Vaninskaya
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Fantasies of
Time and Death
Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien
Anna Vaninskaya
Fantasies of Time and Death
“Anna Vaninskaya’s study of three major fantasists offers an important new per-
spective on the origins of the genre as a vehicle for philosophical speculation.
By grouping J. R. R. Tolkien with his contemporaries Lord Dunsany and E. R.
Eddison rather than with C. S. Lewis and the Inklings, she shows how these writ-
ers similarly use fantasy to explore time, death, love, and change.”
—Prof. Brian Attebery, Professor of English, Idaho State University, Editor,
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Author of Stories About Stories:
Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth
“This important book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the

impulse to create fantasy. Through a detailed study of three writers working
in the first half of the twentieth century—Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison and
J. R. R. Tolkien—Vaninskaya demonstrates how their invented worlds showcase
their very different philosophies, providing them with an experimental testing
ground as vibrant and complex as anything created by their modernist contem-
poraries. Ambitiously conceived, beautifully written and convincingly argued,
her narrative helps explain as well as any book in recent memory why so many
authors have turned to world creation as a means of expressing ‘the nature of
mortal existence’ at a time of unprecedented global change.”
—Dr. Robert Maslen, Senior Lecturer, University of Glasgow,
Convener of the MLitt in Fantasy
“This is an important piece of scholarship that offers much-needed critical explo-

rations of the works of Dunsany and Eddison alongside highly original readings
of Tolkien’s legendarium and manages to help the reader navigate very complex
philosophical questions with lucidity. I can see this book being read and enjoyed
by general readers too, which is quite an achievement.”
—Dr. Dimitra Fimi, University of Glasgow, Author of Tolkien, Race and
Cultural History and Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children’s Fantasy
Anna Vaninskaya
Fantasies of Time
and Death
Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien
Anna Vaninskaya
English Literature
The University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
ISBN 978-1-137-51837-8 ISBN 978-1-137-51838-5 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51838-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

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Contents
1 Introduction: The Game of Life and Death 1

1 Canon Creation 1
2 Scope, Nature and Theme 4
3 In Fantastic Company 8
2 Lord Dunsany: The Conquering Hours 23

1 Introduction 23
2 The Figure in the Pattern 26
3 Time’s Tradition 29
4 Dying Gods 34
5 The Chill of Space 39
6 The Uncertain Universe 41
7 The Horns of Elfland 45
8 The Pipes of Pan 51
9 The End of the Golden Age 56
3 E. R. Eddison: Bearing Witness to the Eternal 69

1 Introduction 69
2 A ‘Consolation’ Devoutly to Be Wished 72
3 The World’s Desire 78
4 Symbols of Vanitas 81
5 E Pluribus Unum 85
6 The Paradoxes of Perfection 89
v
vi CONTENTS
7 Metaphors of Duality 91
8 Sub Specie Aeternitatis or Sub Specie Temporali?
The Right Perception of Death 95
9 Many Pairs of Eyes 102
10 Crossing Lethe 104
11 ‘Not in Entire Forgetfulness … Do We Come’ 109
12 To Know or Not to Know, That Is the Question 114
13 Capturing the Moment 120
14 The House of Heart’s Desire 128
15 The Form of Time 134
16 The Great Pursuit 139
17 The Eternal Now 141
4 J. R. R. Tolkien: More Than Memory 153

1 Introduction 153
2 Eschatological and Perspectival Uncertainty 155
3 Hope, Trust and Faith 161
4 Evil, Pride and Despair 172
5 (Dis)Possession, Exile and Nostalgia 185
6 Sehnsucht and the Final Departure Over Sea 194
5 Envoi 229
Bibliography 233
Index 245
Conventions and Abbreviations
Foreign words and phrases used in the text are italicised, except in direct
quotations from a referenced source (unless the source itself uses italics).
Where necessary, translations are provided either in the main text or in
the Notes.
To designate multiple works by one author in parenthetical citations
or Notes, I use either short-title forms or abbreviations, as follows (origi-
nal publication dates):
Dunsany
BP The Blessing of Pan (1927)
CS The Charwoman’s Shadow (1926)
CR The Chronicles of Rodriguez (1922)
FOT Fifty-One Tales (1915)
KED The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)
PS Patches of Sunlight (1938)
TG Time and the Gods (2000 omnibus of six of Dunsany’s early tale
collections, not the 1906 publication of the same name)
Eddison
Z Zimiamvia: A Trilogy (1992 omnibus)
vii
viii CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS
Tolkien
LT I The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1983)
LT II The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984)
FR The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)
LR The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
MC The Monsters and the Critics (1983)
MR Morgoth’s Ring (1993)
OFS On Fairy-stories (1947)
PM The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
RK The Return of the King (1955)
SD Sauron Defeated (1992)
S The Silmarillion (1977)
TL Tree and Leaf (1988 second edition)
UT Unfinished Tales (1980)
WJ The War of the Jewels (1994)
I follow the practice common in Tolkien studies of italicising all discrete
works by Tolkien; but not by other authors. Because the spellings of
Tolkien’s invented proper names (e.g. Eärendil) have a complex history,
I usually use the best-known ‘final’ version, except where I am explicitly
referring to an earlier version from a particular text.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Game of Life and Death
Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?

Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass?
(Robinson, ‘Tuberoses’, 24)
1 Canon Creation
In the twenty-first century, fantasy is everywhere: on television, at the
cinema, online and, of course, in paperback. But although literature has
always been the home of the fantastic, the strange, the imaginary, the
supernatural and the unreal, modern ‘fantasy’ is a very young shoot off
this ancient tree of fancy. In the period with which this book is con-
cerned—roughly the 1900s to the 1950s—it did not exist as a category in
the British literary landscape, and the British authors under consideration
here certainly did not know they were writing it.1 The familiar classifica-
tion of Lord Dunsany (1878–1957), E. R. Eddison (1882–1945) and J.
R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) as ‘fantasy’ writers in a single British tradition
is thus an entirely ex post facto one, and it was the American publisher Bal-
lantine Books that first brought them together under the ‘Adult Fantasy’
rubric in the 1960s. The Ballantines launched their adult fantasy line in
1965 with best-selling paperback reprints of Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937)
and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), and from 1969 to 1974 the
series assumed its ultimate shape under the editorship of Lin Carter. In its
modern sense of ‘a genre of literary compositions’, therefore, fantasy was
© The Author(s) 2020 1

A. Vaninskaya, Fantasies of Time and Death,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51838-5_1
2 A. VANINSKAYA
as much the creation of literary gatekeepers as of creative writers (‘Fantasy

| phantasy, n.’). We owe the linking of those three names from the 1960s
onwards to the search for roots, for a pantheon of founding fathers (and
to a lesser extent mothers) by the self-aware critics, editors and publishers
of a newly coalescing ‘commercial genre’ (Stableford 449).2
That pantheon is extremely diverse (in literary, if not in any other
terms). In addition to Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien, Ballantine also
reprinted works by the following pre-1950 British authors: William Mor-
ris, George MacDonald, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, David Lind-
say, G. K. Chesterton, Ernest Bramah, William Hope Hodgson, Arthur
Machen, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, H. Rider Haggard, Andrew Lang, George
Meredith and William Beckford.3 Ballantine’s selection is the most exten-
sive to date, but later series such as Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library
(1973–1980) and Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks (launched in 2000) have
expanded the list to include books by Rudyard Kipling, Bram Stoker,
Edwin Lester Arnold, Henry Newbolt, Kenneth Morris and Leslie Bar-
ringer. Between them, the texts co-opted for these canon-making exer-
cises represent nearly the entire spectrum of the fantastic: from hor-
ror/weird fiction and science fiction to alternative history, time-travel,
retellings of or sequels to classical myths and medieval legends, philo-
sophic thrillers and imperial adventures with elements of the supernatu-
ral, secondary-world fantasies and a few works that are simply unclassi-
fiable. Some were bestsellers of their day, others entirely unknown. All
were subsequently packaged together and sold as ‘fantasy classics’. If the
editors and publishers had dug through the back issues of Victorian and
early twentieth-century popular magazines such as Tit-Bits and Pearson’s
Magazine, where the works of Haggard and Hyne reprinted by Ballantine
first appeared, they could have unearthed many more stories with fantas-
tic elements for their use. But even without such extra titles, the fantasy
‘back-catalogue’ created by these earnest or enterprising gatekeepers has
proved enough of a generic ragbag to keep critics occupied all the days
since in trying to classify and theorise its contents. If after 1950 fantasy
could indeed be described as a ‘fuzzy set’—in Brian Attebery’s seminal
definition—whose centre was Tolkien (Strategies, 12–13), before 1950 no
centre existed, and this is clearly illustrated by the contents of the reprint
series. The gatekeepers were involved in an anachronistic regrouping of
such works in the light of subsequent generic and publishing develop-
ments. The last thing they were interested in was placing them back into
their literary-historical context. But the three authors this study focuses
1 INTRODUCTION: THE GAME OF LIFE AND DEATH 3
on—an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, a high-ranking civil servant in the Depart-

ment of Overseas Trade, and an Oxford professor of Old English—did
not spring fully formed ex nihilo to appear between the psychedelic covers
of Ballantine Books. Each came from his own particular milieu, and much
recent criticism has been dedicated to exploring their cultural roots and
formal achievements in their own terms, on the understanding that their
work deserves to be taken out of the straitjacket of the fantasy ‘canon’
retrospectively imposed upon it, and reinserted into the wider literary
contexts in which the authors actually operated.4
In the first decades of the twentieth century, Dunsany was by far the
most famous of the three: a transatlantically successful playwright, as well
as short-story writer and novelist, and a friend of literary celebrities such
as W. B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling. Eddison was never popular, but his
books were also read on both sides of the Atlantic, reviewed in the main-
stream press, and published by Faber and Faber until the paper shortages
of the Second World War made it increasingly difficult for him to find a
British publisher (he had more luck with the Americans). Tolkien, as late
as 1950, when Eddison was already dead and Dunsany’s fame a thing of
the past, remained comparatively unknown. He had already spent over
thirty years producing many volumes’ worth of drafts—in addition to his
writing for children and academic audiences—but most of it had still to
find its way into print. He had met Eddison and admired his work (all
of which he claimed to have read) with qualifications; he had also read
Dunsany (his own writing was once compared to Dunsany’s by a per-
plexed publisher’s reader).5 But there is no real evidence of a relation-
ship of influence or emulation in either case.6 It is worth remembering
that these writers never constituted a school amongst themselves; each
was independent and sui generis, and each was destined for a very differ-
ent kind of afterlife. The reversal of fortunes was particularly striking in
Tolkien’s case, who went on—thanks largely to the accidents of publish-
ing history—to have a major impact on the subsequent development of
the mass fantasy genre. Dunsany exerted a much narrower though still
notable influence as what might be called a fantasist’s fantasist7 ; while
Eddison, admired by many, but rarely imitated, has had the fewest direct
descendants.
The selection of these writers for comparative study might thus appear
arbitrary, if it were not for the fact that there are two weighty reasons
to bracket Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien together that have little to
do with matters of canon creation. The first is related to the scope and
4 A. VANINSKAYA
nature of their work; the second, to its shared thematic preoccupation.

All three produced large, stylistically heterogeneous oeuvres; and all three
devoted them to the exploration of mortality and temporality, in both
their divine and human dimensions.
2 Scope, Nature and Theme

For all the significance it has assumed in post-Tolkien fantasy, ‘world-
building’—defined in literary terms as the proliferation, as an end in itself
and in superfluity to the requirements of any given plot, of detail about
an imagined (alternative, secondary, other) world—was not a shared pur-
suit among practitioners of early fantasy.8 But Dunsany, Eddison and
Tolkien were all masters of world-building in the literal sense. They wrote
about god(s) and the creation of reality, adopting allegorical or discursive
styles, and drawing upon philosophical models, as well as key theological
elements from Christian, Norse, Celtic or Greek mythoi. All three also
wrote narratives that took the ‘world’ for granted and chronicled instead
the adventures of individual heroes in it. Such texts, modelled on epics,
quest romances, fairy-tales or Kunstmärchen, and at times inflected by
the techniques of the realist novel, include their best-known publications:
Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), Eddison’s The Worm
Ouroboros (1922) and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings . But crucially,
these texts are not standalone works: they are situated either within or in
relation to the authors’ broader cosmopoietic (literally ‘world-creating’)
frameworks in a way that has no equivalent in the work of any other writer
from the British fantasy ‘back-catalogue’. David Lindsay’s A Voyage to
Arcturus (1920) might rival Eddison’s philosophical ambition, but can-
not remotely match the sheer scale of Dunsany’s, Eddison’s and Tolkien’s
visions.9
Dunsany started out with cosmopoiesis in his earliest story collections
and then shaded off into fairy-tale romance; Eddison’s development fol-
lowed a reverse trajectory. He only slowly groped his way from the heroics
of The Worm Ouroboros , a straightforward fantasy adventure in imitation-
Jacobean prose, to the philosophico-mythological complexity of the Zimi-
amvia trilogy—Mistress of Mistresses (1935), A Fish Dinner in Memison
(1941), and the posthumously published and incomplete The Mezentian
Gate (1958). These books rework the Homeric Hymns to Aphrodite
and Spinoza’s Ethics in the context of a Renaissance-inflected secondary
world, exploring, like Dunsany but much more systematically, the inter-
relations of time and eternity, the creation of worlds and the meaning
of death and personal annihilation in the light of a new conception of
Beauty as the governing value of existence. The trilogy is—sometimes
by turns, sometimes simultaneously—a theological treatise, an action fan-
tasy, a realist society melodrama set in the Edwardian and interwar peri-
ods, and a semi-modernist experiment characterised by vertiginous shifts
of perspective, complicated play with narrative time and dense multilin-
gual allusiveness.10 Modernist devices aside, Tolkien’s oeuvre matches this
formal variety point for point, and then takes it further. To the autobi-
ographical realism of Tolkien’s unfinished time-travel novels, the exuber-
ant archaism and narrative impulse of his early myth-making, and the ever
more involved metaphysical speculations about the relationship between
the body and soul, the incarnation, and the nature of evil in the imag-
inary universe, one can add Tolkien’s large and stylistically diverse cor-
pus of poetry, his maps, linguistic essays and etymological dictionaries of
invented languages, not to mention translations into Old English of the
historical annals of the Gods and Elves. Dunsany’s work lacked Tolkien’s
world-building versatility, and the rigorous controlling vision of Eddison’s
later and more complex project, but just like them he operated freely
in the cosmopoietic, romantic and realist modes, producing alternative
theogonies alongside conventional romances and novels.
All three writers, in the words of Olaf Stapledon’s preface to his sci-
ence fiction novel Last and First Men (1930), aimed ‘not merely to create
aesthetically admirable fiction … nor mere fiction, but myth’—something
that, as Stapledon implies in his preface (9), and as C. S. Lewis remarked
of the Victorian fantasist George MacDonald, may not be understandable
in terms of literary art at all.11 Myth is, of course, a pre- or extra-literary
category, and the same may be said of other purely theological compo-
nents of cosmopoietic invention, but in the trio’s work these serve as
enablers of literary creativity all along the spectrum from lyrical poetry to
prose pastiche. Consider ‘When the Gods Slept’ from Dunsany’s second
collection of creation myths, Time and the Gods (1906) (the first, The
Gods of Pegāna, appeared in 1905):
All the gods were sitting in Pegāna, and Their slave Time lay idle at
Pegāna’s gate with nothing to destroy, when They thought of worlds …
Then (who knoweth when?), as the gods raised Their hands making the
sign of the gods, the thoughts of the gods became worlds and silver moons.
6 A. VANINSKAYA
… Then upon earth the gods played out the game of the gods, the game
of life and death … At last They mocked no more at life and laughed at
death no more, and cried aloud in Pegāna: ‘Will no new thing be? Must
those four march for ever round the world till our eyes are wearied with
the treading of the feet of the Seasons that will not cease, while Night and
Day and Life and Death drearily rise and fall?’ … It may be that the worlds
shall pass and we would fain forget them.’
Then the gods slept. (TG, 24–5)
The passage provides an illustration of literal cosmopoiesis that perfectly

analogises the task of the cosmopoietic fantasist, whose purpose in writing
is the creation of new worlds, a playing around with life, death and time
in just the fashion embodied in the myths he creates, a taking on of god-
like powers in order to justify the ways of god to man. Cosmogony and
eschatology, how it all began and how it is all going to end, and the nature
of mortal existence in the interim between creation and apocalypse—that
is ultimately what the fantasy of Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien is about.
The gods’ game of life and death is probably the most ‘universal’ theme
in existence; and no period or mode of literature has neglected to engage
with their slave Time.12 Indeed, time and death are not easily uncou-
pled, since their relationship is both antithetical and mutually constitu-
tive. ‘What is it all’, asks the Victorian Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson
after a fourteen-couplet-long panorama of human existence, ‘if we all of
us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last’? (‘Vastness’ in Ten-
nyson 551). Individual death here is a discrete event or terminus: the
cessation of life in time. But it can also be a state: either the absence of
life (life’s obverse, nothingness) or a different kind of life (the afterlife)
characterised by its timelessness, a part of God’s eternal now, the time-
less eternity of Augustine and Boethius. Time, on the other hand, has
since Aristotle’s day been associated with change, with successiveness or
sequentiality, whether as a perception of the human mind or an actual
characteristic of external reality. It is neither event nor state, but pro-
cess: Virgil’s fugit inreparabile tempus, whose flight in relation to human
life always brings death in its wake, while remaining its opposite. Shake-
speare’s and Marvell’s ‘Devouring time’ on his ‘wingèd chariot’, scythe
in hand—as much as Tennyson’s ‘Time, a maniac scattering dust’13 —are
personifications of the movement that issues in stillness, the sequence that
leads to a last term, the ceaseless changefulness that brings us inexorably
to the final change, to the threshold of death-as-event, and propels us
into eternity or nothingness, into death-as-state. For the human individ-

ual and for all of humanity’s works, the process not only contains its own
end, but is defined by the end towards which it must inevitably tend, a
kind of Heideggerian being-toward-death. Philosophers, theologians and
poets have been contemplating this process for thousands of years. As
Augustine says in The City of God, inspired by Seneca’s famous cotidie
morimur [‘we die every day’]14 :
no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, than we begin to move

ceaselessly toward death. For in the whole course of this life … its muta-
bility tends toward death. … our whole life is nothing but a race toward
death, in which no one is allowed to stand still for a little space, or to
go somewhat more slowly, but all are driven forward with an impartial
movement, and with equal rapidity. (377)
Life in time, in other words, is but the process of dying.

This is the second reason why Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien deserve
to be bracketed together. The bodies of work they created, running into
many thousands of pages, are characterised by an obsession with tempo-
rality, mortality and eternity, with process, event and state. In this, they
are not alone. From among the inhabitants of the early fantasy canon, one
can easily select others who were just as fascinated with these perennial
themes. This is hardly a surprise, even when it comes to those authors
who had no biographical reason to be drawn to the topic, related to per-
sonal bereavement, Christian belief, or experience of the carnage of two
world wars, as was the case to varying degrees with Dunsany, Eddison
and Tolkien. All writers are human beings, and fantasy has from its very
beginnings proved as useful a vehicle for the expression of human hopes
and fears as any other genre.15 But of these other fantasists, the majority
did not choose to take the high road of cosmopoiesis, to engage with the
divine that ‘visits time and belongs to eternity’ on equal terms with the
human.16 Instead, they settled for what in Northrop Frye’s terms may be
called romantic fantasy, in which the gods appear (if at all) only as off-
stage ciphers.17 Their main template was the quest romance rather than
the creation myth; their most typical product a cohesive narrative rather
than a multi-generic universe. In romantic fantasy, the grand philosophi-
cal questions and the divine perspective entailed in cosmopoiesis yield to
an elegiac preoccupation with the individual’s personal experience of the
8 A. VANINSKAYA
passage of time and the encounter with death. Such texts are not con-
cerned with the eternity of god, but with the place and value of immor-
tality in a mortal world—being ‘allowed to stand still’ or go slowly, in
Augustine’s words—with fairylands and fountains of youth, all of which
a hero may strive for in this life.
The rest of this introduction will briefly place Dunsany, Eddison and
Tolkien back in the company of a fellow trio of fantasists from the Bal-
lantine list—two Victorian precursors and a twentieth-century contempo-
rary—who took the romantic road to arrive at a similar destination. If
Dunsany, Eddison and Tolkien were solely the authors of the three books
they are best known for today, the following overview would serve to
remind us of the deep affinity of method and purpose amongst key early
practitioners of the genre—and to vindicate the construction of the genre
in the first place as a unified field. As things stand, the overview will also
serve to establish a reference range against which the three extended case
studies that form the bulk of this book can be set, to show how much
further and in what different directions fantasy writing could go in its
pursuit of answers to the problem of time and death.
3 In Fantastic Company
The wanderer in search of lost time and an escape from death is a key
figure of romantic fantasy, and so is his opposite, the seeker wishing to
embrace death and come to terms with time. Often, the two figures turn
out to be one and the same. Consider the progress of the young king’s
son Ralph, riding across a medieval romance landscape to find the well
at the World’s End, whose draught restores strength, prolongs life and
assuages sorrow. At the very beginning of his quest, he is told: ‘I hear
say that [the water of the well] saveth from weariness and wounding and
sickness; and it winneth love from all, and maybe life everlasting’.18 But
after hundreds of pages of adventures, on the very brink of the quest’s
fulfilment, the real nature of the well is revealed: ‘it may not keep any
man alive for ever; for so have the Gods given us the gift of death lest
we weary of life’.19 Death as the ‘gift’ of God to men, and the weariness
of life attendant upon an endless existence are the cornerstone concepts
of Tolkien’s universe, but Ralph is not Tolkien’s hero. He is the hero of
the ur-romantic fantasy: William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End,
published in 1896. Morris (1834–1896)—the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite
poet, arts and crafts designer, socialist campaigner and fervent medieval-
ist—dedicated the last eight years of his life to the composition of a string
of highly patterned romances of idealised love and war. These brought
together stylised archaism, pseudo-medieval settings, supernatural beings
and artefacts and quest narratives: elements that have now come to char-
acterise fantasy tout court in the popular imagination. Read avidly by
Tolkien about twenty years later, they (along with Morris’s poetry) fur-
nished a storehouse of tropes that lasted Tolkien until the middle of the
twentieth century. Three of the seven main romances, A Tale of the House
of the Wolfings (1889), The Story of the Glittering Plain (1891) and The
Well at the World’s End, dwelt with particular feeling on the subject of ‘the
Great Escape’ from ‘Death’,20 and the desire for or rejection of personal
immortality in this world (Tolkien, OFS, 74).
Morris had been nursing this theme for a long time. The Earthly Par-
adise epic (1868–1870) that made his name as a poet (and that Tolkien
carried with him on the Western Front) had already set out the parameters
of the problem. In the poem’s frame narrative, a group of wanderers sail
away from medieval Norway to seek ‘that desired gate / To immortality
and blessed rest’ that legends say may be found in the West (Morris 3:
13). But their quest for the Earthly Paradise ‘where none grew old’ turns
into ‘a tale of woe, / A tale of folly and of wasted life, / Hope against
hope, the bitter dregs of strife, / Ending, where all things end, in death
at last’ (3: 6–7). They grow old and disillusioned in the search, frittering
away their life in the attempt to prolong it. When Morris turned to this
theme again in his prose romances of the late 1880s and 1890s, his pro-
tagonists had learned better. Another group of wanderers appears in The
Glittering Plain, searching for the land of eternal youth, and—unlike the
wanderers of the poem—they find it. Happy ending? On the contrary, the
hero of the romance cannot wait to get away from the ‘Land of Living
Men’ and strives with all his might to return to mortal life. The ‘Great
Escape’ here leads towards death rather than away from it. The fantastic
mode thus enables Morris to present the temptation of immortality as a
real possibility: death ceases to be a necessity and becomes a choice. In
The Glittering Plain, the earthly paradise receives a decidedly ambivalent
portrayal, and the hero Hallblithe spurns its promise of eternal youth,
peace and sexual pleasure in favour of a return to the family home and,
eventually, the family grave.
All of Morris’s romances, whether or not they are concerned with the
temptation of immortality, centre around the same set of values: strong
10 A. VANINSKAYA
kinship ties, struggle against oppression and, if necessary, honourable

death for the individual to ensure the continuation of life for the commu-
nity. The dilemma—whether to buy the life of one’s extended family at
the cost of one’s own death or to choose life everlasting at their expense—
is most evident in the predicament of Thiodolf, the Gothic tribal hero
of The House of the Wolfings. He voluntarily chooses death in the cause
of his Folk’s survival when offered the chance of individual immortality.
But even those characters who do not have to sacrifice themselves must
still learn to live by the same rule: to place the needs of their fellows—
those people who, whether related by blood or not, constitute their true
home in this life—above individual aggrandisement. To those of Morris’s
heroes and heroines of superlative prowess and beauty who follow this
rule, happiness in this life is granted and death itself becomes sweet: ‘he
fell asleep fair and softly, when this world had no more of deeds for him
to do’ (The Wood Beyond the World in Morris 17: 128). The water of the
well at the World’s End—Morris’s reworking of the fountain of youth—
grants Ralph not immortality, but enhanced power to protect his home.
In this most utopian of the romances, real immortality is never even on
the table, and no one mourns its absence overmuch. Ralph does drink
the water of life, but life is not the same thing as immortality—it may
be improved, but it cannot be indefinitely extended. The model of the
good life that Ralph embodies is one in which death is accepted—when
the time comes—as life’s natural and fitting outcome. It is a model that
Tolkien took to heart. In Tolkien’s legendary history, the refusal of death
brings about the downfall of a kingdom and divine intervention to change
the fashion of the world. In The Lord of the Rings , Gollum is the pitiful
victim of a life extended beyond its proper scope; and the calm accep-
tance of death—neither desperately expedited, as with Denethor’s suicide,
nor cravenly delayed—underlines more than anything else the nobility of
Aragorn. Almost as to Ralph, to Aragorn ‘has been given not only a span
thrice that of Men of Middle-earth, but also the grace to go at [his] will,
and give back the gift’ (‘The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen’ in RK, 425).
Learning to embrace the gift of death is also the central message
of George MacDonald’s fantastic oeuvre. ‘Death’, as Tolkien wrote in
On Fairy-stories , ‘is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald’
(75).21 MacDonald (1824–1905) was Morris’s contemporary and oppo-
site in most respects. A former Congregationalist minister where Morris
was an unbeliever; a student of German Romanticism where Morris was
a medievalist to the marrow of his bones; and a religious writer whose
fairy tales (such as The Golden Key [1867]) and children’s novels (such
as At the Back of the North Wind [1871]) often allegorised the journey
of life into death, MacDonald produced quest fantasies that in their mys-
ticism, symbolism, and theological heterodoxy were as unlike Morris’s as
could be conceived. Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895)—the two adult
romances that book-ended MacDonald’s literary career—send their pro-
tagonists on journeys not just to ‘Fairy Land’ or the ‘Region of the Seven
Dimensions’, but to the afterlife. For Morris, death is the terminus: all
longings for its transcendence on the part of mortal beings are natural
but ultimately misguided; nothing more exists beyond the desires, hopes
and fears of this life. For MacDonald, death is the beginning, and the
other world more real than this one. He insists on the absolute necessity
of death for the proper fulfilment not only of a character’s own individual
identity but of his being in God as well. Fantasy is what allows MacDon-
ald to give concrete imaginative form to his notion of the soul’s progress
to this realisation. It is not just the confused mortal protagonist of Lilith,
but the eponymous immortal demon herself who must reject ‘death-in-
life’ in favour of ‘life-in-death’. Both must go to sleep in order to awaken
in a higher reality and be reconciled to God. Indeed, MacDonald’s sleep
of death bears as little resemblance to Morris’s dreamless slumber after a
good life’s work, as the Biblically inspired phantasmagoria of Lilith does
to the medieval patterning of Morris’s romances.
MacDonald’s first fantasy, just like his last, is best understood as a quest
of the soul, pursued by a protagonist from the primary Victorian world
across a fragmented semi-allegorical dreamscape. Phantastes ends with an
awakening from death back in the ‘real’ world, and so does Lilith—and
it is a distinctly bitter awakening. ‘[A] writhing as of death convulsed me;
and I became once again conscious of a more limited, even a bodily and
earthly life’ (Phantastes, 268). Having died in Fairy Land, the hero of
Phantastes is wrenched back into life, ‘[s]inking from such a state of ideal
bliss, into the world of shadows which again closed around and infolded
me’. The experience of returning to life on this earth ‘seemed to corre-
spond to what we think death is, before we die’ (269). His only conso-
lation is the realisation that ‘I have come through the door of Dismay;
and the way back from the world into which that has led me, is through
my tomb’ (272). The reversal of connotations is here complete: death is
life, and life is death. Although the implications of Phantastes ’s ending
are undoubtedly Christian, it took MacDonald nearly forty years before
12 A. VANINSKAYA
he resorted again to secondary-world fantasy in order to explicitly con-

nect ‘the realms of lofty Death’ and the ‘great good’ they have in store
with a Biblical kingdom of heaven (268, 272). The promise of paradise
hovers over MacDonald’s fantasy as much as Morris’s, but it is a true
Christian rather than a false earthly one: a destination that can only be
reached by first dying into (after)life. The narrator of Lilith spends most
of the narrative literally running away from the house of death. But the
way to paradise in MacDonald is always through that house—through
the tomb—as much in 1895 as in 1858. If Morris’s protagonists learn to
spurn the earthly paradise in order to embrace death, MacDonald offers
death as the doorway to the heavenly city.
It would be too much to claim that after the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury a shift occurred from death to time as the dominant focus of fantastic
writing. But in the work of Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien and their contem-
porary Hope Mirrlees (1887–1978), time does emerge as a preoccupation
of equal importance to death—a significance it simply did not hold for the
two Victorians. If Morris and MacDonald were concerned with individual
readiness (or lack thereof) for the act of passing over the threshold into
that bourne from which no traveller returns—for death-as-event, in other
words—Dunsany, in his early parables of Time, chose rather to reflect
on the general human condition, to offer the kind of long view that the
individual-focused romances of Morris and MacDonald could not com-
pass by definition. The enormous timescales of Eddison and Tolkien here
make their first appearance, and a personified Time nearly always conquers
in Dunsany’s stories, for no work of gods or men can withstand it. And
even though Dunsany returned to the realm of fairy-tale and romance
in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, to Morris-style witches, king’s sons,
beautiful maidens and magic spells, something had changed irrevocably in
the make-up of the form. Instead of a Morrisian celebration of the sturdy
acceptance of natural death (sweetened by the knowledge of a continuing
life for the community and the afterlife afforded by memory), and instead
of MacDonald’s reluctant but eventually joyful resignation to the life-in-
death offered by God, we find in Dunsany an extended meditation on the
glories and ravages of time-as-process and timelessness-as-state.
The particularly curious thing about The King of Elfland’s Daughter
is its ending. Alveric, the Earthly Paradise-like wanderer on a hopeless
quest, returns defeated after many years from his search for Elfland—
where his estranged wife (the titular daughter) has fled—just in time to
see his home engulfed by it. He rejoins his wife, their son and most of
the other inhabitants of his village in what has now become a province of
timeless Elfland—his youth regained, the dead come back again. A piece
of mortal earth—of ‘the fields we know’, in Dunsany’s beloved phrase—
is taken out of history and out of time, never again to be ‘known’ by
those (all of us) who are left to the cycle of the seasons, of births and
deaths, and to the incessant process of creation and destruction so lyrically
evoked in the romance’s descriptions of time. Dunsany’s Elfland is not the
traditional kingdom of the dead. It is, if anything, a thought experiment:
the physical manifestation of the state of a mind (its King’s) not subject
to the laws of duration. But the individual happy ending—the recovery
of the past, the reunification with loved ones thought to be lost forever—
is only made possible by the suspension of time, and therefore by the
rejection of life in the only form with which human beings are familiar.
Loss and ruin are postponed indefinitely, but this very postponement is
tantamount to death.
In Hope Mirrlees’s Lud-in-the-Mist (1926), published two years after
The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Fairyland is, quite unambiguously, the
land of the dead. Like Elfland, it borders upon the mortal lands; like
Elfland, it is changeless; and like Elfland’s, its border is permeable. Lud
too concludes with an invasion of sorts, or rather, a welcoming opening of
the gates to a visitation from the other side of the grave. But more impor-
tant than this ending is the narrative journey of the protagonist, the depic-
tion of which recalls the moral purposiveness of Morris and MacDonald,
except that instead of coming to terms with death, Mirrlees’s hero must
come to terms with ‘life-sickness’, with the vertigo induced by change and
the passage of time, by ‘things happening’ (50, 30).22 Nathaniel Chan-
ticleer wishes to escape not from death, but from life; he seeks comfort
in silence and stillness and peace, in the ‘motionless and soundless’ view
from a hilltop graveyard (31). This yearning for an Elfland-like stasis, for a
break in the constant movement and restlessness of existence, for a refuge
from the fear of loss, is only countered at last by ‘the will to action’—
a temporal moving forward, in other words, rather than a holding back
(121). He must become the friend rather than the prey and fugitive of
time. Though it offers a powerful meditation on the fear of change, Lud-
in-the-Mist refuses to endorse existential despair and provides an effective
antidote to the early Dunsanian view of Time as ‘the Enemy of the Earth’.
‘There’s no bogey from over the hills that scares one like Time’, says the
wisest female character in the book, ‘But when one’s been used all one’s
life to seeing him naked … one learns that he is as quiet and peaceful as
14 A. VANINSKAYA
an old ox dragging the plough’ (Mirrlees 116). Nathaniel must learn to

overcome his fear and nausea, to find his ‘sea legs’ and achieve a mod-
icum of psychological stability and rootedness here, amidst the ‘surges and
swells’, the ‘ebbs and flows’ of ‘that great, ungovernable, ruthless element
we call life’ (50). But, in the great paradox of the novel, he finally learns
to deal with life when he is proclaimed dead in the eye of the law and
sets out from home to seek his son in Fairyland—the land of the dead.
Only in death can life be renewed, only out of the dream-like suspension
of time on the marches of Fairyland can a proper attitude to time in this
world at last emerge. The ultimate lesson—if a book as symbolically dense
(by turns beautiful and macabre) as Lud-in-the-Mist can be said to teach
a lesson—is that the ‘sweet’ and the ‘bitter’, ‘life and death’, are both
necessary, both ‘proper nourishment for the souls of man’ (237).
In its reworking of the idea of the triumph of death opening the pos-
sibility of a new life, Mirrlees’s conclusion echoes MacDonald, though
divested entirely of the Christian trappings of MacDonald’s vision. In its
focus on the repercussions of the desire to suspend the natural process of
time, the novel fits well with Dunsany’s and Eddison’s nearly contempo-
raneous fantasies. In Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros , radically different
as it is from Mirrlees’s and Dunsany’s tales of Elf- or Fairyland in nearly
every other respect, the dead too return to life and time can be rewound
if the gods so ordain. But it is Tolkien’s work that truly subsumes within
itself all the lines of development adumbrated by his predecessors: Mor-
risian longing for immortality, MacDonald’s theological reimagining of
the gift of death, Dunsany’s attempt to preserve beauty from the ravages
of time, Mirrlees’s exquisite nostalgia for the losses incurred by living.
What he brings to all this is a pervasive and piercing melancholy: the fate
of Tolkien’s world is to pass ‘from the high and the beautiful to darkness
and ruin’ (S, 255), and all attempts to halt the process, to create eddies in
the stream of time, are doomed to failure. Time-as-process in Tolkien is a
winding down and a running out, but it is also a heaping up of the sands:
the accumulation of the unbearable weight of time across his world’s long
and sad history.
All six fantasists were ultimately aiming for one thing: to capture
humanity’s attempts to come to terms with its transience, with the ‘min-
utes hasten[ing] to their end’.23 Facing death, fleeing it, or embracing
it; desperately trying to freeze time, to rewind it, or yielding—joyfully,
bitterly, apathetically—to its flow: all varieties of temporal experience
may be found in the pages of their books. The refrain echoing down
the centuries of literature—The Wanderer’s Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær

cwom mago?, Villon’s Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!—is amplified and
infinitely modulated in their work.24 But to the perennial ubi sunt ques-
tion the early fantasists also propose a partial answer—a fantastic variation,
to all intents and purposes, on one of the most familiar answers in the his-
tory of literature:
But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade

Nor loose possession of that faire thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wandr’st in his shade,
When in eternall lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breath, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.25
With this Shakespearean sonnet, sung by the immortal Queen Sophon-

isba, Eddison concludes his romance of resurrection and eternal return,
The Worm Ouroboros . ‘This’, in the final clause of the sonnet, refers at the
most literal level to the gods who have granted ‘youth everlasting’ to the
protagonists and life renewed to their enemies (439). ‘This’ is also the
book that gives life, again and again—every time it is opened at the first
page—to the fantastic characters and their world. ‘This’, ultimately, is the
fantastic art, the art of sub-creation in Tolkien’s terms, which not only
confers eternity on the passing moment, but gives life to new visions of
reality and thereby ‘assist[s] in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of
creation’ (OFS, 79).
But this power of art is predicated on our mortality. In Tolkien’s alle-
gory of the artist’s journey from life to death, Leaf by Niggle (1945),
the live Tree can only grow from Niggle’s painted leaf after he himself
has passed the threshold of death. Death and immortality are indissol-
uble not just for MacDonald, but—when immortality is understood in
the Shakespearean rather than the Christian sense—for all the six authors.
The flowers of fantastic art, like the ‘flowers’ of God the artist in Eddis-
on’s Zimiamvia, ‘are immortal’ (Z, 523); the same ‘immortal flowers’
that, according to Lud-in-the-Mist , ‘spring from the thoughts of death’
(Mirrlees 237). The flower—that ultimate symbol of vanitas , of the tran-
sient and the ephemeral—‘shall not fade’ if it is immortalised as a work
of imagination, especially a work of fantasy; but it will only be so immor-
talised if ‘the thoughts of death’ spur us on. As the aestheticist poet A.
Mary F. Robinson put it in her sonnet sequence ‘Tuberoses’ of 1888:
16 A. VANINSKAYA
Everything dies that lives – everything dies;

How shall we keep the flower we lov’d so long?
O press to death the transient thing we prize,
Crush it, and shut the elixir in a song. …
Sweet Tuberose, adieu! you fade too fast!

Only a dream, only a thought, can last. (23)
III.
Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?

Who dream a dream if Passion did not pass?
But, once deceived, poor mortals hasten hither
To watch the world in Fancy’s magic glass.
Truly your city, O men, hath no abiding!

Built on the sand it crumbles, as it must;
And as you build, above your praise and chiding,
The columns fall to crush you to the dust.
But fashion’d in the mirage of a dream,

Having nor life nor sense, a bubble of nought,
The enchanted City of the Things that Seem
Keeps till the end of time the eternal Thought. (24)26
Death and time’s passing cause us to dream, and our dreams preserve
that which death and time destroy. The ‘tides of Time [may] sweep [all]
away’ in the ‘fields we know’, but between the covers of the imaginary-
world fantasy, in enchanted Elfland—pressed like Robinson’s tuberose
between the pages of a book—time has no sway. It is a sentiment Tolkien
evoked with particular pathos in The Lord of the Rings : ‘Frodo felt that
he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into for-
getfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world,
still Frodo the wanderer from the Shire would walk there, upon the
grass among elanor and niphredil in fair Lothlórien’ (Tolkien, FR, 474,
455). The ‘flowing streams of Time’ will carry us, like Frodo, on, when
we have closed the book and passed again into the outer world; but what
is on the page remains there forever, and will greet us or our descendants
when the book is opened again ‘as if [it] had been first conceived’ just
then (485, 455). Finding himself in ‘the heart of Elvendom on earth’,
Sam says: ‘I feel as if I was inside a song’ (457, 455; original italics). He
is right, both literally and metaphorically. The Elves, masters of fantasy
that they are,27 have caught for a while ‘the transient thing we prize’.
The song is Lórien, and it is also The Lord of the Rings , but it may as
well be Dunsany’s timeless Elfland—‘only told of in song’ (KED, 14).
In the words of another song from Morris’s The House of the Wolfings:
‘remembrance still abideth, and long after the days of my life / Shall I
live in the tale’ (Morris 14: 176).28 That is the paradox at the heart of
Shakespearean immortality. To live in the tale you must die in the world;
for the flower to endure, it has to be pressed to death; Tolkien’s ‘mul-
tiple enrichment of creation’ can only really take place after ‘Man’ has
been ‘redeemed’ (OFS, 79). Just as there is no life without death in Lilith
and Lud-in-the-Mist , so there is no fantastic art without ‘the thoughts of
death’ that make it possible.
Notes
1. ‘Fantasy’ as a term was familiar in the comparatively small world of British
pulp genre magazines (a magazine called Fantasy appeared briefly in
1938), but its differentiation from science fiction was at this stage mini-
mal, and none of the authors considered here would have associated their
writing with it. The situation was somewhat different in the United States,
where pulp fiction magazines of the pre- and interwar period, such as The
Argosy and Weird Tales , published the Edgar Rice Burroughs romances
and Robert E. Howard ‘sword and sorcery’ tales that laid the foundations
for the emergence of the mass genre in the middle of the century (‘fan-
tasy’ entered into the titles of American popular fiction magazines such
as Unknown: Fantasy Fiction and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction in the 1940s). American pulps also reprinted supernatural material
from British periodicals. In fact, Britain’s established nineteenth-century
generic traditions—the ghost story, fairy writing, occult and decadent fic-
tion, the scientific romance—were all selectively but repeatedly plundered
in the twentieth for redefinition as various kinds of ‘fantasy’.
2. Publishers include Ballantine Books and its imprint Del Ray Books (part
of Random House), Newcastle Publishing Company, and Gollancz (an
imprint of the Orion Publishing Group). The list of editors, authors
and critics in the last fifty years who have traced the line of descent in
imaginary-world fantasy through Dunsany and Eddison to Tolkien is very
long. A partial list of those—excluding theorists of the fantastic in gen-
eral—who have given some attention to the formation of fantasy as a genre
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries or have examined more
18 A. VANINSKAYA
than one of the authors involved in that process (including but not lim-
ited to those authors reprinted in the canon-making series) would feature:
Ursula Le Guin, Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Colin Manlove, Kath
Filmer, Karen Michalson, Stephen Prickett, William R. Irwin, Rosemary
Jackson, Brian Attebery, John Clute, Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James,
Brian Stableford, Michael Saler, William N. Gray, Richard Mathews, Jason
Marc Harris, Bruce Stewart, Gary K. Wolfe, Mark Wolf, Jamie Williamson,
and Elizabeth M. Sanders.
3. Beckford is a Gothic chronological outlier, but the rest were all active
from the Victorian period onwards.
4. Even a partial list of the Tolkien criticism that does this—including
essays in numerous collections, companions and encyclopaedias, articles
in journals dedicated to the Inklings and to Tolkien specifically, such
as Tolkien Studies, monographs from publishers such as Walking Tree
Publishers, McFarland, Kent State UP, Greenwood, Palgrave Macmillan
and HarperCollins—would exceed the space available. There is a ven-
erable tradition of source and context-study in Tolkien scholarship that
covers not just the Middle Ages, but also classical antiquity, and Victo-
rian, Edwardian and later twentieth-century literature and culture, includ-
ing modernism. References to individual pieces of Tolkien criticism in
this book are therefore highly selective and are not intended to be in
any way comprehensive. Dunsany and Eddison have received substan-
tially less attention, so it is possible to indicate some general highlights,
not all of which, however, manage to go beyond the fantasy frame-
work. On Dunsany see Joshi’s Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination,
his edited collection Critical Essays and other publications; Touponce;
Schweitzer’s Pathways to Elfland and chapters on Dunsany and Eddi-
son in Discovering Classic Fantasy; Rateliff’s Beyond the Fields We Know;
and back issues of Studies in Weird Fiction and Mythlore for quite a
few articles approaching Dunsany from different angles, including post-
colonial ones. No monographs have been dedicated to Eddison and
unreflectingly dismissive criticism will remain uncited; however, illumi-
nating work has appeared in doctoral and essay form, including Rol-
land; Flieger’s ‘The Man Who Loved Women’; Young’s Secondary Worlds,
which engages at length with Eddison’s unpublished archival papers, and
his articles: ‘Aphrodite’; ‘Artemis’; ‘Salvation’; ‘Foundations’; and vari-
ous older articles on The Worm Ouroboros in Extrapolation and other
journals. Geeraert’s dissertation is notable for situating Dunsany, Eddi-
son and Tolkien not just in relation to both nineteenth-century and
later twentieth-century fantasy, but also in their broader literary-cultural
contexts (Tennyson, Yeats, Ruskin, Nietzsche, etc.). Such exceptions
notwithstanding, most criticism still comes from within the field of fan-
tasy scholarship, and enlightening work by critics outside the field is,
unfortunately, rather rare. Exceptions may be found in other ‘niche’ fields,

such as Irish studies treatments of Dunsany, amongst the more relevant
of which are Scott’s doctoral dissertation and her subsequent published
work on Dunsany in relation to the Celtic Revival, and Foster’s Dunsany
chapter in Words Alone.
5. For Tolkien’s thoughts on Eddison, see Letters 84, 174, 258, 377; brief
references to Dunsany can be found on 26, 375. For the publisher’s read-
er’s full comments in the infamous 1937 report on ‘The Geste of Beren
and Luthien’, see McIlwaine 219. The reader also compared Tolkien’s
submission to Fiona Macleod’s 1908 play The Immortal Hour, based on
‘Gaelic’ legend, about the relationship of mortals and ‘the deathless folk’
of the Celtic otherworld.
6. More of a case for ‘influence’ could be made in relation to some of the
other authors in the Ballantine ‘canon’. Tolkien did borrow from William
Morris: the list of parallels ranging from narrative structure to poetic style
is extensive and has been the subject of doctoral dissertations such as
Massey’s, as well as essays and chapters in various monographs. Eddison
also read Morris and engaged with him directly in the apparatus to his
translation of Egil’s Saga (1930). Eddison was, like Morris and Tolkien, a
connoisseur of Norse literature, and the author of his own Icelandic saga-
inspired novel Styrbiorn the Strong (1926). On the connections between
Eddison, Tolkien and Morris in this regard, see Wawn. Eddison’s and
Tolkien’s writing has also been fruitfully compared to George MacDon-
ald’s: see Young’s Secondary Worlds on the former and Eilmann’s Roman-
ticist and Poet on the latter, not to mention seminal works of fantasy
criticism such as Manlove’s and specialist journals including North Wind
and VII.
7. H. P. Lovecraft was probably Dunsany’s primary ‘disciple’ in the early
twentieth century; Neil Gaiman is the best-known contemporary fan-
tasist who has ploughed the Dunsany furrow in Stardust (1999); and
quite a few fantasy and ‘weird’ fiction writers in between have signalled
their admiration (Ursula Le Guin and Jorge Luis Borges deserve special
mention). But Dunsany never shaped the popular form of the genre like
Tolkien did.
8. There are many definitions of world-building in fantasy, and even more
outside it. For a comprehensive introduction, see Wolf’s Building Imagi-
nary Worlds, and his edited collections Revisiting Imaginary Worlds and
Companion to Imaginary Worlds, as well as Fimi and Honneger. For a
completely different approach, see Doležel.
9. A case could be made for C. S. Lewis’s fantastic-apologetic output, espe-
cially the Lindsay-inspired Space Trilogy (1938–1945) which combines
cosmopoietic and romantic impulses, but Lewis was never part of the
20 A. VANINSKAYA
publisher-created adult fantasy canon. For an interesting recent approach

to early fantasy which brings together Tolkien and Lindsay, see Langwith.
10. Untranslated Greek, Latin and French quotations and passages pepper the
pages of his books. Eddison’s range of allusion is indicative of a traditional
English public school background—he was an old Etonian and an Oxford
man—and literary tastes formed as much by the fin de siècle as by the early
twentieth century: Sappho and other classical Greek sources, early mod-
ern drama and poetry, especially Shakespeare, Webster and Donne, but
also obscure French alchemical writings of the Renaissance and medieval
French lyrics, Icelandic sagas, Scottish ballads, Keats, Baudelaire, Gautier,
Meredith and Swinburne.
11. See Lewis’s ‘Preface’ to George MacDonald. I use the term ‘cosmopoi-
etic’ fantasy throughout, rather than the more familiar ‘mythopoeic’ pio-
neered by Lewis and Tolkien, because I am interested specifically in world-
creation rather than the invention of myth more generally.
12. This book makes no attempt to offer a single theoretical framework for
understanding time or death. Instead, each of the three authors is taken
on his own terms, in line with Benedetto Croce’s view of the aesthetic
uniqueness of the individual text or corpus, which remains the centre of
analysis. The intellectual futility of attempting to come up with a single
set of general definitions quickly becomes apparent when one contem-
plates the vastness and complexity of the field revealed by the conferences
of the International Society for the Study of Time and its two journals,
or The Encyclopedia of Time, or the range of perspectives covered by the
recent outpouring of publications on the philosophy of death (epony-
mously titled Oxford and Cambridge handbooks and companions; books
by Bernard N. Schumacher, Steven Luper, and Samuel Scheffler and Niko
Kolodny), or even the profusion of monographs dedicated to time and
death in modern literature, Brombert’s, Vesterman’s and Levy’s among
the latest.
13. William Shakespeare’s Sonnets 19 and 60; Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy
Mistress’; Tennyson’s In Memoriam (234).
14. For an in-depth exploration of death in Seneca’s writings and in the
centuries-long reception of his own death-scene, see Ker.
15. Of critics who have dealt with these ‘big’ themes in fantasy, Gray deserves
a special mention: see his collections Death and Fantasy; Fantasy, Myth
and the Measure of Truth; Fantasy, Art and Life; see also his ‘A New
Literary Species’. The other major name is Flieger, who has published the
definitive account of time in Tolkien (and has come back to this topic
in essays since), and the first treatment of time in Eddison: see her A
Question of Time and ‘The Ouroboros Principle’. The topic of Tolkien’s
engagement with time and death has been unsurprisingly well-served, not
just by generalist works of scholarship addressing this theme inter alia,
beginning with Shippey’s seminal Road to Middle-Earth, but by a stream

of dedicated essays, monographs, collections and proceedings: including
but not limited to, most recently, Amendt-Raduege; Helen; Arduini and
Testi’s Broken Scythe; Garbowski; Hiley; Vink; Aldrich; Senior; Rateliff,
‘The Lost Road’; Agøy; the special Tolkien issue of the Journal of the
Fantastic in the Arts 9.3 (35) (1998); and articles in journals ranging
from Mythlore to Medical Humanities. On Eddison and Dunsany, see the
major works of criticism mentioned above, and also Menegaldo; and Pesch
(the author’s approved version of the printed essay is published online).
16. See the epigraph from George Santayana to Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in
Memison.
17. I draw here on the framework for understanding myth and romance
(including ‘legend, folk tale, märchen’ [33]) provided long ago by Frye
in Anatomy of Criticism: ‘Mythology projects itself as theology: that is,
a mythopoeic poet usually accepts some myths as “true” and shapes his
poetic structure accordingly. Romance peoples the world with fantastic,
normally invisible personalities or powers’ (64). In particular, the dying
gods of mythology found in Dunsany and, in a very different way, in Eddi-
son, may be set against the romance ‘hero’s death or isolation [which] …
evokes a mood best described as elegiac … often accompanied by a dif-
fused, resigned, melancholy sense of the passing of time, of the old order
changing and yielding to a new one … In elegiac romance the hero’s mor-
tality is primarily a natural fact, the sign of his humanity’ (36–7). Eliade’s
definition of myth may also be recalled: ‘Myth narrates a sacred history; it
relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the
“beginnings” … [it] tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings,
a reality came into existence … Myth, then, is always an account of a
“creation” … it is as a result of the intervention of Supernatural Beings
that man himself is what he is today, a mortal … being’ (5–6).
18. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, vol. 1, in Morris 18: 11.
19. Morris, The Well at the World’s End, vol. 2, in Morris 19: 65.
20. The other romances were The Roots of the Mountains (1890), The Wood
Beyond the World (1894), The Water of the Wondrous Isles (1897) and The
Sundering Flood (1897).
21. It would not be too much to say that there is a whole critical industry
dedicated to examining death in MacDonald (and to a much lesser extent,
in Morris). Lack of space prevents any attempt at an overview.
22. Because Mirrlees, unlike Morris and MacDonald, was this study’s authors’
direct contemporary, it is worth saying a few words about her intellectual
background. Her work grew out of the ‘myth and ritual school’, located at
the intersection of anthropology and classical studies, whose most famous
exponent was James Frazer and most famous literary adaptor T. S. Eliot—
a friend of Mirrlees’s. In Lud-in-the-Mist , Mirrlees essentially rewrote the
22 A. VANINSKAYA
ancient Greek mysteries that so fascinated her mentor, the Cambridge clas-
sicist Jane Ellen Harrison, though like MacDonald in Phantastes she also
drew heavily on the nineteenth-century fairy-tale tradition. Christina Ros-
setti’s ‘Goblin Market’, Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’,
the fairy ballads and the Grimms’ märchen provide just some of the more
obvious intertexts for the book, though the interpolated references to rit-
uals, mysteries and Dionysian revelries, to sirens and herms, all point to
the ultimate source of the inspiration. For a discussion of Lud-in-the-Mist
and the mythic method see Attebery’s Stories About Stories, 57–69; see
also Swanwick; and Enemark. Most criticism dedicated to Mirrlees comes
out of modernist studies and deals primarily with her avant-garde poem
Paris , published by the Hogarth Press in 1919.
23. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60 in Sonnets , 231.
24. The Old English translates as ‘Where is the horse gone? Where is the
rider?’—which will be familiar to readers of Tolkien; the French as ‘But
where are the snows of yesteryear?’, from François Villon’s ‘Ballade Des
Dames Du Temps Jadis’.
25. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 as printed in Eddison, Worm, 439. It is sung
about half a page before the end of the book.
26. For an in-depth discussion of this poem, its contexts and meanings, see
Maxwell 193–7.
27. As Tolkien puts it in On Fairy-stories : ‘If you are present at a Faërian
drama you yourself are, or think that you are, bodily inside its Secondary
World’ (OFS, 63).
28. Rebirth through memory as expressed in songs and tales is a major theme
of Morris’s work: ‘No story of that grave-night mine eyes can ever see, /
But rather the tale of the Wolfings through the coming days of earth …
And I amidst it ever reborn and yet reborn’ (14: 109).
CHAPTER 2
Lord Dunsany: The Conquering Hours
[E]nnemi vigilant et funeste, / Le Temps

(Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, 245)
1 Introduction
Even inanimate objects understood the significance of time for Lord Dun-
sany’s work:
A queer thing happened on the day that I first met Mrs. Bland in her
office amongst heaps of manuscript that was to make the Neolith: she had
a grandfather’s clock in the room and the hands began all of a sudden to
race, at the rate of an hour every few seconds; and it almost seemed odd
that I, who had written so much about Time in my Time and the Gods ,
should have been so greeted. (Dunsany, PS, 141)
Mrs. Bland was Edith Nesbit, who herself published a time-travel chil-
dren’s fantasy in the same year as Time and the Gods , and who printed
some of Dunsany’s stories in her short-lived literary journal, The Neolith.
The lesson of her racing clock can be applied not just to Time and the
Gods but to all of Dunsany’s writings in the first three decades of the cen-
tury.1 Reading across their span with an eye to appearances of time and
death makes for an overwhelming experience, for the two flash by with
a frequency and insistence not found in the work of any other author
© The Author(s) 2020 23

A. Vaninskaya, Fantasies of Time and Death,
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51838-5_2
24 A. VANINSKAYA
considered here. This is due in large part to the nature of Dunsany’s cre-
ative output, which was not just prolific, but repetitive, with a marked
preference for short forms. The impression produced by the multitude
of volumes, collections, and individual titles within them is akin to that
created by the innumerable sparks thrown off a spinning grindstone. The
grindstone is an imagination obsessed with transience; the sparks, unique
texts without analogue in the history of fantasy literature. Instead of—to
switch metaphors—digging down into the deeps of a single philosophical
and symbolic deposit, the reader slides along a shimmering surface com-
posed of countless little tiles: plays, prose poems, myths, allegories, won-
der tales, and fairy stories—each branded with the sign of time. Repetition
in Dunsany has a different quality altogether from the endless redraft-
ings and repurposings of Tolkien’s legendarium, or the figurative and ver-
bal correspondences of an architectural edifice like Eddison’s Zimiamvia
trilogy. Dunsany’s writing lacks the system, concentration and density of
Eddison’s, the complex interconnectedness of Tolkien’s; it is not thought-
provoking but ‘mood-engendering’, in MacDonald’s words. The mood
evolves over the three decades: from the sublime and awful to the beauti-
ful and wistful, from the mythical to the romantic, from the grandeur shot
with cynicism of Time destroying the gods to the melancholy melody of
memories fading in the sunset. But the latter mood is already present in
the pre-War work, and the former recrudesces in the novel-length pro-
ductions of the 1920s. And like a pulsing vein, a thread of ironic humour
runs through them all.
Thus, while it would not be true to say that once you have read one
Dunsany tale, you have read them all—for the fecundity of his imagina-
tion was such that each spark or tile differed indelibly from the rest—
it is true that his oeuvre resolves, in the final analysis, into a series of
poetic variations on a single set of themes, images and rhetorical devices.2
The same personifications of abstractions (death, time, the hours, the
years, the centuries, the seasons); the same cruel, mocking or defeated
gods; the same ancient ruins and doomed Biblical-Oriental cities—real
and invented—overthrown by Time; the same twilit fields and valleys of
England, drifting after the horns of Elfland or the pipes of Pan out of time
and into eternity; the same curious blends of parable and symbolism, and
juxtapositions of cities and nature, of the earthly and material and the
magical and numinous, of cold abysses of space and delicate anemones in
spring, are spread thinly over the surface of many discrete texts. Death
stalks, Time wrecks, Centuries flow, Memories sing, the Past beckons,
2 LORD DUNSANY: THE CONQUERING HOURS 25
the Spider spins,3 and the Hours fly through them all. Oral formulae,
Psalmist-influenced incantatory repetitions, and bewilderingly various but
instantly recognisable names and toponyms pattern the writing, threading
together the many individual patches into one quilt without beginning or
end.
Dunsany was fully aware of at least some of these qualities. He viewed
himself as a poet and his creative writing as a species of prose poetry, a
prose that shared with poetry (and with Dunsany’s brand of political ora-
tory) its basis in oral rhythm: ‘Prose then learns its rhythm from speech,
and rhythm is a kind of chariot that carries thought into the attention of
man’ (PS, 128). He found it easier to compose orally and dictated, rather
than wrote, many of his early tales (predictably, to his wife).4 In the first
volume of his autobiography, Patches of Sunlight , he revealed his fixation
on developing the rhythms of prose and extolled contrasts as the key to
poetry. And this is indeed the best way to approach not just his style, but
his fantasy output as a whole: as an expression of a repeated poetic pat-
tern, point and counterpoint, not just at the level of the sentence and the
paragraph, but of metaphor and narrative form. Although early twentieth-
century editors such as Edwin Björkman spoke of Dunsany from the out-
set in terms that would become staples of fantasy criticism later in the
century: as the creator of ‘a new mythology wholly his own’, a ‘maker’ of
new ‘countries’ and ‘worlds’, Dunsany was first and foremost the maker
of a new fantasy rhythm (Dunsany, Five Plays, ix). Rhythm is, of course,
a way of structuring time, of stressing certain elements again and again,
and Dunsany’s writing lends itself to the same kind of measuring, cat-
aloguing instinct that obsessively counts the repeated beats in line after
line of verse and the ticking seconds of the clock. One is tempted not to
analyse, but simply to enumerate5 all the occasions when Time overturns
the temples of the gods and ink, in its turn, defeats Time; when civil-
isations fall, but Homer persists; when kings call upon prophets to tell
them of death, and poets call upon romance to restore the past; when
quests fail and wanderers pass into legend; when flowers wither in the
gardens of childhood and the songs of youth fade into silence. Again and
again, the reader encounters the same motifs, the same skeleton storylines.
Again and again, plots are structured around a basic contrast or opposi-
tion: thesis-antithesis, high-low, stress-unstress—timeless Elfland vs. time-
ridden Erl in The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Christian past vs. Pagan past
in The Blessing of Pan (1927). The beat of Dunsany’s formulae is insistent,
but his invention is also inexhaustible, and it preserves the formulae from
26 A. VANINSKAYA
turning into clichés, embroidering them with ever new variations, keeping
the rhythm supple. Dunsany avoids mechanical repetition, but repetition
remains the heartbeat of his work.
2 The Figure in the Pattern

Fifty-One Tales (1915), a collection of short prose poems written and
published incrementally over several years,6 of which approximately forty
deal centrally with time or death, is a perfect test case of Dunsany’s pat-
terning impulse. Although the collection serves as an omnium-gatherum
of motifs from across Dunsany’s oeuvre, hitting many of the keys sounded
in the earlier wonder tales and looking forward to the later romances,
it cannot itself be characterised as a ‘fantasy’ work. All the more reason,
therefore, to consider it first, for what Dunsany expressed elsewhere using
the more familiar mythopoeic and quest romance forms of fantasy, is seen
here in what could be called its raw form. Beginning with a brief allegory
of Fame telling a poet that she will meet him ‘in the graveyard at the back
of the Workhouse in a hundred years’, the pattern is established (‘The
Assignation’, FOT, 2). The poet-dreamer speakers or protagonists, the
personified abstractions and anthropomorphised nature (talking flowers,
mountains, mists, seasons, animals), the punch-line moralité endings, are
all there to buttress five overlapping ideas mostly premised on an internal
contrast:
The extinction of the human race and/or the reclamation of its urban
civilisation by nature (‘Charon’, ‘The Prayer of the Flower’, ‘The Little
City’, ‘Roses’, ‘After the Fire’, ‘Furrow-Maker’, ‘The Three Tall Sons’);
The gods in exile or defying their own death (‘The Death of Pan’, ‘The
Tomb of Pan’, ‘The Prayer of the Flower’, ‘The Lonely Idol’, ‘The Trouble
in Leafy Green Street’, ‘The Return of the Exiles’);
Time, the triumphant or defeated enemy of cities and men (‘The Sphinx at
Gizeh’, ‘Time and the Tradesman’, ‘The Unpasturable Fields’, ‘The Latest
Thing’, ‘The Man with the Golden Ear-rings’, ‘Alone the Immortals’, ‘The
City’, ‘The Lonely Idol’, ‘The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)’, ‘Nature
and Time’);
Death winning over or losing to classical or modern Man (‘The Guest’,
‘Death and Odysseus’, ‘Death and the Orange’, ‘A Losing Game’, ‘The
Food of Death’);
Poetry, song and dreams as bulwarks (frequently vain and futile ones)
against time and death (‘The Raft-Builders’, ‘The Workman’, ‘The Worm
and the Angel’, ‘The Songless Country’, ‘The Giant Poppy’, ‘The Dream
of King Karna-Vootra’, ‘The Return of Song’, ‘The Song of the Black-
bird’).
Within the parameters of this pattern, the reader encounters profound

variations in register, structure and form: satires of modern life alternate
with jewelled allegories, exquisite poetic sketches with biting social cri-
tiques, Psalmic parallelisms with Cockney dialect. But nearly all march to
the persistent drumbeat of time, Time that has a thousand faces: that is
a whale swimming in the deeps of ‘Oblivion’ (‘The Raft-Builders’, 15),
a river that ‘terribly floods’ ‘Whenever the centuries melt on the hills of
Fate’ (‘The Latest Thing’, 36), a worm whose food is humanity (‘The
Worm and the Angel’), a poppy humming ‘Remember not’ and ‘suffo-
cating the world’ with its ‘fumes’ (‘The Giant Poppy’, 39). And Time is
also a warrior ‘who slew Babylon’s winged bulls, and smote great num-
bers of the gods and fairies’, whom ‘We have tried to bind … with song
and with old customs, but they only held him for a little while, and he
has always smitten us and mocked us’, and who Samson-like ‘may take
hold blindly of the world and the moon, and slowly pull down upon him
the House of Man’ (‘The Sphinx at Gizeh’, 8–9), as he had pulled down
the temples of the gods in Dunsany’s earlier volumes.
As might be surmised even from this truncated summary, Dunsany’s
figurative language encompasses everything from simple metaphors and
capitalised abstract nouns armed with active verbs, to personifications that
become protagonists of extended parables and allegories in their own
right. In the former case, even capitalisation can be surplus to require-
ments; abstract concepts are simply endowed with physical, frequently
human, properties and effects. It is impossible to overstate Dunsany’s
reliance on this device, which becomes a kind of reflex or second-nature,
the primary stylistic hallmark of his work. In just a handful of passages
taken at random from a couple of texts that postdate by two decades the
high tide of his personifying enthusiasm, the reader encounters ‘inspira-
tions’ that ‘trouble the hills in Spring’; ‘ages’ that ‘beat upon’ a woman’s
‘frame’; ‘centuries’ that ‘batter’ and ‘darken’ the walls of a castle on its
‘journey through the long … years’; the ‘rhythms’ of ‘words … danc[ing]
down the ages’, and ‘hopes’ or ‘memories’ ‘lit’ to shine ‘down vistas of
years’ (CS, 183, 23, 192, 190; CR, 311, 202). In the latter example,
28 A. VANINSKAYA
two abstract concepts are combined with two physical ones to make a
particularly rich metaphor—a first step on a road to ever more intricate
elaboration which ultimately transforms grammatical personifications into
characters with individualised traits, situates them in a web of relations
with other characters (themselves either personifications or representa-
tives of humanity and Dunsany’s various pantheons), and sets storylines
in motion.
Not just in Fifty-One Tales , but throughout Dunsany’s fictional and
non-fictional writing, we can observe this process at work. In the ‘fanta-
sy’ texts proper, kings and their armies go out to ‘conquer’ the enemy
Time and besiege his castle: Time the giant who destroys what men have
built, who maims their physical forms and steals their memories, leaving
his symbols of rust, dust, cobwebs, ivy, weeds and crumbling ruin in his
wake. They go out to retrieve the hours, days and years he has stolen, and
Time joins in the battle, sending ‘the triumphant years’ as missiles against
his assailants. The Kings and armies fail: humanity cannot win the ‘war
with Time’ (‘In the Land of Time’, TG, 80; see also ‘The South Wind’,
‘Carcassonne’). But art sometimes can. The harps to whose ‘strings have
clung like dust some seconds out of the forgotten hours’ (‘The Cave of
Kai’, TG, 37), the ‘rafts’ of poetry that keep from foundering in the ocean
of ‘Oblivion’ certain ‘names and a phrase or two’ (‘The Raft-Builders’,
FOT, 15), the ‘olden tune[s]’ that ‘saved Agamemnon’ from forgetful-
ness (‘The Giant Poppy’, FOT, 40), build up a fragile show of resistance
to ‘inexorable Time’ (‘In the Land of Time’, TG, 75). The saviours are
not kings or prophets, but poets, harpers, singers, and wielders of ink,
‘the magical fluid, the stuff that rules the world and hinders time … that
which, when poets play, is mirth for ever and ever’ (CR, 47), that ‘can
mark a dead man’s thought for the wonder of later years, and tell of hap-
penings that are gone clean away, and be a voice for us out of the dark of
time, and save many a fragile thing from the pounding of heavy ages; or
carry to us, over the rolling centuries, even a song from lips long dead on
forgotten hills’ (KED, 105). Aside from nature’s earthly and romance’s
unearthly magic, ink (and all the practices of artistic remembrance that it
represents) is the only defence against the ravages of time. But even this
defence proves uncertain.
In Dunsany’s autobiographical account of his experience of the Great
War, poetic personifications step horrifyingly from the page into reality7 :
I saw a great deal in those days; I saw for instance more ruin than any
traveller would see in the whole of Egypt; and indeed the cathedral of
Arras and the streets of Bapaume gave rise in my mind to a comparison
with Egypt and Pompeii, so that Ruin seemed to have come out of History,
and with a long stride through the ages, appeared in our own day … That
plain with regular rows of shell-holes where there had been village streets,
through which Disaster had gone with even strides, and where wreckage
of peace and war were mingled in one desolation… (PS, 295, 298)
In the War, men do the work of Time, and create ruins with a zest hardly
rivalled by the bloodiest of Dunsany’s personifications. Instead of ‘Rats,
damp, and wood-worm, and other servants of time’ (CS, 154), their ser-
vants are machines, themselves destined to be whelmed in the total ruin:
‘tanks were lying like monstrous beasts of the Miocene, slain in the cat-
aclysm that had overthrown their era’ (PS, 289). The vocabulary—‘ru-
ined’, ‘crumbling’ and ‘vanishing’—intentionally echoes that of the pre-
War wonder tales, and the metaphors hitherto employed to describe time
are redeployed to show the effects of war: ‘Between the tides of war that
swept over the Somme this graveyard was now at peace. When I came
there a year later … war had come again to that very grave and receded,
leaving no trace of the boulder’ (290); ‘far away in front of me our guns
were firing and shells were bursting, like foam at the edge of a sea that
was already ebbing fast’ (296). The sea of time becomes the sea of war,
and both in their ebbing leave behind dereliction, emptiness, gaping holes
and the detritus of human beings: ‘the neglected dead lying with wasted
wire and fragments of shells’ (296).
3 Time’s Tradition
Where does this emphasis on Time’s active enmity—to men, to cities, to
gods—come from? On one level, the answer is obvious: the personifica-
tion of Time as a destroyer (and his close cousin Death) is one of the
most basic constants of Western culture.8 Most of Dunsany’s metaphors
and symbolic attributes are, in that sense, profoundly unoriginal—repe-
titions again, except not ones unique to his own oeuvre, but common
to the familiar patterns of a broader literary history. Any number of ran-
domly picked cultural artefacts from the last thousand years will display
the same verbal and figurative rhythms. There is no particular reason to
suppose that Dunsany was an admirer of Petrarch, for instance, but the
30 A. VANINSKAYA
latter’s The Triumph of Time (Triumphus Temporis )—the poem itself, as

much as the widely studied iconography of its illustrations—appears like a
ready-made conceptual and linguistic counterpart to Dunsany’s practice.
The poem focuses on the brevity of human life and the impermanence of
human Fame in the face of Time’s swiftness: ‘I saw Time such booty bear
away’ (e vidi il Tempo rimenar tal prede); ‘Time in his avarice steals so
much away’ (Tutto vince e ritoglie il Tempo avaro); ‘What dark abyss of
blind oblivion / Awaits these slight and tender human flowers!’ (In questi
umani, a dir proprio, ligustri, / di cieca oblivïon che ‘scuri abissi!)—even
those who are ‘Free from the fear of Time and of his rage, / Historians
and poets guarding them’ (senza temer di Tempo o di sua rabbia, / ché
gli avea in guardia istorico o poeta); ‘For days and hours and years and
months fly on’ (ché volan l’ore, e’ giorni, e gli anni, e’ mesi) (Petrarch
100, 101, 99, 98). Every one of these lines, down to each individual
word, could have come directly out of Dunsany’s ‘The Cave of Kai’ or
‘In the Land of Time’. The same (with slight reservations) may be said of
the Saturnine Time of Petrarch’s Renaissance illustrators. He is different
from the fleeting Sun-follower of the poem: a bearded elder who comes
accompanied by familiar icons such as scythes, clocks and hour-glasses
that Dunsany for the most part eschews, but also by ruins and personi-
fied seasons which have a prominent place in the landscape of Dunsany’s
imagination.
The choice of Petrarch as a comparator is arbitrary, so one can turn
instead to a writer Dunsany definitely knew and loved. Shakespeare’s son-
nets, read through the lens of Dunsany’s style, yield the same patterns:
the ‘forty winters [that] shall besiege thy brow, / And dig deep trenches
in thy beauty’s field’ of Sonnet 2, or the ‘Devouring time’ of Sonnet 19,
who ‘carve[s]’ the ‘love’s fair brow’ with his ‘hours’, and ‘draw[s]’ ‘lines
there with [his] antique pen’, which the pen of the poet reverses, in whose
‘verse’ the love ‘ever live[s] young’ (Sonnets , 115, 149).9 All this is pure
Dunsany—metaphor and vocabulary and personification—though Dun-
sany’s foe Time is more violent still: ‘And the first day they met a woman
with her face furrowed and lined, who told them that she had been beau-
tiful and that Time had smitten her in the face with his five claws’ (‘In the
Land of Time’, TG, 76); ‘Once Time as he prowled the world, his hair
grey not with weakness but with dust of the ruin of cities … turned the
man’s hair white and bent his back and put some furrows in his … face’
(‘Time and the Tradesman’, FOT, 27).
This kind of search for poetic patterns, if undertaken in earnest, would

lead one on a never-ending journey through the centuries, all the way
back to the Greek god of time Chronos and his child-devouring alter-
ego Kronos. Undoubtedly, fascinating parallels could also be unearthed
between Dunsany’s figures and classical personifications of the Hours,10
and it is evident that not only the Old Testament of the King James Bible
(with which Dunsany was intimately familiar and which he plundered at
will) but the Greek classics (which he claimed not to know very well
due to the curtailment of his classical education) were important influ-
ences. One could also take the search forward, closer to Dunsany’s own
time and place, to those writers he read or knew personally, including
Milton, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Poe, Longfel-
low, Kipling, Morris, Yeats, AE, and even Ivan Turgenev, whose prose
poem ‘How Fresh, How Fair Were the Roses’ (1879), about the death
of loved ones and the irretrievability of the past, Dunsany translated from
the French. It is easy to see why Turgenev’s prose poem—with its insistent
verbal refrain of a fragment of a forgotten poem, its flower symbolism, its
contrasts of summer and winter and youth and age—would have appealed
to Dunsany’s sensibility.11 The reason for Poe’s appeal is even more evi-
dent; while Tennyson, one of Dunsany’s favourite poets, offers rich pick-
ings for anyone looking to see how the younger writer picked up on the
poetic rhythms of the past. Within a single poem, Tennyson can mod-
ulate, like Dunsany, from conventional metaphor: ‘The days and hours
are ever glancing by, / And seem to flicker past thro’ sun and shade’, to
full-blown semi-allegorical personification:
What Power but the Years that make

And break the vase of clay,
And stir the sleeping earth, and wake
The bloom that fades away?
What rulers but the Days and Hours
That cancel weal with woe,
And wind the front of youth with flowers,
And cap our age with snow? …
The years that when my youth began
Had set the lily and rose
By all my ways where’er they ran,
Have ended mortal foes;
My rose of love for ever gone,
My lily of truth and trust –
32 A. VANINSKAYA
They made her lily and rose in one,

And changed her into dust.12
(‘The Ancient Sage’ in Tennyson 544–5, 546)
The days and hours and years as foes and rulers—wherever one looks
in nineteenth-century poetry, one finds them. They are there in the writ-
ings of Tennyson’s French contemporary and well-known translator of
Poe, Charles Baudelaire: in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) as well as Le Spleen
de Paris: Petits Poèmes en Prose (1869). In fact, both W. B. Yeats and
H. P. Lovecraft likened Dunsany’s style to that of ‘Baudelaire in the
Prose Poems’, a comparison that works particularly well for Fifty-One
Tales , which share their number (Baudelaire had fifty), their first-person
artist-poet-dreamer perspective, and even their implacable immortals with
Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose.13 But the resemblance goes beyond
such superficial correspondences, to an underlying obsession with death
and with the personification of Time.14 Baudelaire’s old captain Death
(‘Mort, vieux capitaine’), and especially his Time, the vigilant and fate-
ful enemy (‘l’ennemi vigilant et funeste, / Le Temps’) (‘Le Voyage’,
Fleurs, 246, 245), the ‘Time’ whose ‘horrible burden’ ‘crushes’ the shoul-
ders of its ‘martyred slaves’ (‘Enivrez-vous’, Petits Poèmes, 150–1), the
‘Time [that] reigns a sovereign’ with ‘brutal mastery’, and ‘his demoni-
acal cortege of Memories [and] Regrets’ (‘La Chambre Double’, Petits
Poèmes, 17–18),15 are reborn in the tyrant Time of Dunsany’s wonder
tales, plays and romances. He is the enemy monarch who reigns over ‘the
fields we know’ just as his counterpart and opposite, the King of Elfland,
rules over his timeless land in The King of Elfland’s Daughter. In that
romance, Dunsany’s Time exercises his ‘dominion’ just like Baudelaire’s
does his dictature; he is a ‘ruler’ to whom ‘allegiance’ is due (cf. ‘Car-
cassonne’, TG, 311); and he is ‘pitiless’, ‘furious’, ‘destructive’, ‘raging’,
‘withering’. He ‘wastes’ and attacks living creatures, causing ‘turmoil’,
‘fret’ and ‘hurt’, creating ‘vast and ceaseless ruin’, with Earth his ‘helpless
prey … evanescent and brief’ (KED, 157, 169).
Of course, Dunsany is not a straightforward disciple of Baudelaire, any
more than he is of any of the other poets referenced above. There is no
whiff in his work of the Baudelairian atmosphere of disgust and world-
weariness, his cities are not Baudelaire’s Paris, and Baudelairian women
are nowhere in sight; nor is Dunsany’s death-obsession akin to that of
the French Decadents who followed Baudelaire. In fact, a less ‘decadent’
figure than the conventional Tory sportsman Dunsany could hardly be
found. Nevertheless, this is the cultural moment in which it makes most

sense to look for the closest literary correspondences, the most telling
repetitions. It is not an accident that contemporary critics routinely placed
Dunsany with the Symbolists, with Wilde, Yeats and Maeterlinck, and
that modern critics continue to do so.16 Dunsany’s relation to the Celtic
Revival was oblique to say the least—a cause of some grief to Yeats—but
if he had an Irish forebear, it was surely Oscar Wilde. Dunsany owned a
rare first edition of Wilde’s fairy-tale collection A House of Pomegranates
(1891), and Wilde’s Biblical prose poems, his art for art’s sake philosophy
in which the artistic creation of beauty is the highest value, his indulgence
in ornate exoticism at the level of description, even his use of fin-de-siècle
motifs such as Sphinxes, all look forward directly to Dunsany’s work a
few decades later. Some of Dunsany’s books were printed by private arts
and crafts presses, both in England and in Ireland (Sheffield School of
Art Press, Yeats’s Cuala Press), and by publishers such as Elkin Mathews,
of Yellow Book and other 1890s fame. There is, in short, much traction in
the idea that Dunsany was a belated aesthete, and though Baudelaire was
probably not a direct influence, his counterpart in the English tradition—
Algernon Charles Swinburne—almost certainly was.
Turning to Dunsany himself for explicit confirmation of Swinburne’s
impact will yield little of use. Dunsany mentions in the first volume of
his autobiography that he owed the particular form of words ‘Time and
the Gods are at strife’ to a line of Swinburne’s that he had supposedly
heard from an acquaintance, forgotten and then unconsciously reused,
but does not otherwise acknowledge any debt to the poet. This kind of
unconscious, or unacknowledged, recycling seems to have been typical of
Dunsany’s practice. He makes no mention of Tennyson’s ‘My paths are in
the fields I know, / And thine in undiscovered lands’, for instance, when
describing the origin of his much-repeated trademark phrase ‘beyond the
fields we know’, even though the line occurs in In Memoriam (1850),
Tennyson’s most famous work. It apparently ‘flashed into [Dunsany’s]
mind’ one day as part of a verse:
Like little cottages that stand

Midway between the fields we know
And where through windows dimly show
The hills and dales of Fairyland
And elfin mountains tipped with snow. (PS, 144)
34 A. VANINSKAYA
He reused it later in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) in the story ‘Idle Days

on the Yann’, and many years later again—to very impressive effect—in
The King of Elfland’s Daughter. There, Tennyson’s juxtaposition between
the ‘undiscovered lands’ of death and the familiar fields of earthly life is
reworked into an analogous opposition between Elfland (whose ‘horns’
Dunsany also borrowed from Tennyson) and Erl, whose ‘fields … are
mapped and known’ (KED, 21). Something similar must have happened
with Swinburne too, for the external evidence leaves little doubt that
Dunsany knew his work and rated it highly.17 And Swinburne serves bet-
ter than most other nineteenth-century predecessors to illustrate Dun-
sany’s transposition of the concerns and language of previous generations
into his newly invented worlds, and of already common poetic metaphors
into prose narrative, especially in his first two Edwardian volumes, The
Gods of Pegāna and Time and the Gods .
4 Dying Gods
Dunsany’s first two volumes are worth dwelling on because of their tonal
uniformity, their focus on cosmogonic and theogonic myth, and because
unlike the succeeding collections, they create an entirely alternative and
self-contained reality. The commerce between some version of the real
world and the enchanted world of romance, myth or dream that is such a
characteristic feature of Dunsany’s later fantasy is here conspicuous by its
absence. An allegorical personification of Time, the ravager and destroyer,
is a central figure of the new theogony, especially in the second volume.
The ‘Hours’ nearly always conquer in these stories, and no work of gods
or men can withstand them. What lies beyond the pale remains a mys-
tery. The mood of universal pessimism, the fixation on precariousness and
loss rule out any engagement with time’s paradoxical dualism that would
become so crucial to the portrayal of ‘the fields we know’ in The King
of Elfland’s Daughter twenty years later. There is no place in Dunsany’s
new pagan pantheon for time as an ouroboros biting its tail, a symbol of
eternal renewal, fertility and generation; Kronos devouring his children is
the sole patron saint of the tales, and he devours gods and men indiscrim-
inately.
The title words of Dunsany’s second volume, ‘Time and the Gods’,
come from Swinburne’s ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ (1866), a poem about the
transience of systems of faith, and the passing of the old pagan gods.
‘[T]he old faiths loosen and fall, the new years ruin and rend’; ‘O Gods
dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out in a day!’:
All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;

Ye are Gods, and behold, ye shall die, and the waves be upon you at last.
In the darkness of time, in the deeps of the years, in the changes of things,
Ye shall sleep as a slain man sleeps, and the world shall forget you for kings.
(Swinburne 58, 59)
In fact, the fate of the gods and the fate of human beings are analogous:
‘Nay, for a little we live, and life hath mutable wings. / A little while
and we die’, ‘For there is no God found stronger than death’ (58, 61).
Already all the Dunsanian hallmarks are visible: the violence of the per-
sonified years, the forgetfulness of oblivion symbolised by the sea, the
gods’ weakness before the strength of death and time. Swinburne’s ‘The
Last Oracle’ (1878), a dirge for and paean to Apollo, the god of sun and
song, is even more explicit:
Years have risen and fallen in darkness or in twilight,

Ages waxed and waned that knew not thee nor thine …
Since the sad last pilgrim left thy dark mid shrine.
Dark the shrine and dumb the fount of song thence welling …
Not a cell is left the God, no roof, no cover … (138–9; original italics)
But for the speaker of Swinburne’s poem, Apollo is not just a superseded
pagan deity but, simultaneously, a personification of the mythopoeic, or
rather, god-making quality in man. As such, despite his seeming eclipse,
he is destined to outlast all the smaller gods, including the God of Chris-
tianity. This is a daring reversal of the traditional portrayal of Christ as
the banisher of the old pagan gods, and an uncharacteristically sanguine
endorsement of the endurance of the human spirit, but it only serves
to reinforce the same underlying message about divine vulnerability. The
extent of Dunsany’s adherence to this Swinburnean model of the death
of the gods can only be appreciated when Swinburne is read in full, and
the direct echoes are allowed to reverberate and overpower:
36 A. VANINSKAYA
And before thee the Gods that bow

Take life at thine hands and death.
For these are as ghosts that wane,
That are gone in an age or twain;
Harsh, merciful, passionate, pure,
They perish, but thou shalt endure;
Be their flight with the swan or the swallow,
They pass as the flight of a year. …
Old and younger Gods are buried or begotten

From uprising to downsetting of thy sun,
Risen from eastward, fallen to westward and forgotten,
And their springs are many, but their end is one.
Divers births of godheads find one death appointed,
As the soul whence each was born makes room for each;
God by God goes out, discrowned and disanointed,
But the soul stands fast that gave them shape and speech. …
Time again is risen with mightier word of warning,

Change hath blown again a blast of louder breath;
Clothed with clouds and stars and dreams that melt in morning,
Lo, the Gods that ruled by grace of sin and death!
They are conquered, they break, they are stricken,
Whose might made the whole world pale;
They are dust that shall rise not or quicken
Though the world for their death’s sake wail.
As a hound on a wild beast’s trace,
So time has their godhead in chase;
As wolves when the hunt makes head,
They are scattered, they fly, they are fled… (140–1)
The movement from Swinburne’s poetry to Dunsany’s prose is nearly

seamless. Time personified as a hound giving chase to the gods; young
gods and ‘gods of Old’ (‘The Journey of the King’, TG, 102); forsaken
temples whence prayers no longer rise; gods ‘wrought by the hands of
men’ in man’s image (‘The Men of Yarnith’, TG, 52): they are all there in
Dunsany’s first two volumes. As is the one end appointed, when they shall
become ‘gods of nothing, where nothing is … And far away … shall bay
their old hound Time, that shall seek to rend his masters’ (‘The River’,
TG, 582). In one Dunsany parable or prose poem after another the gods
die or tremble with foreboding at their coming end (‘The Vengeance of
Men’; ‘The Journey of the King V’), or they leave the earth and their
‘carven shrines’ (‘The Relenting of Sarnidac’, TG, 83), or they ‘sl[i]nk’

away from their thrones, leaving them empty (‘The Jest of the Gods’, TG,
86). Time is not invariably a hound and it appears in various guises in
different parables, but its nature remains the same. ‘Time and the Gods’,
as per Swinburne, are always ‘at strife’: ‘Suddenly the swart figure of Time
stood up before the gods, with both hands dripping with blood and a red
sword dangling idly from his fingers’. He has overthrown the gods’ ideal
city, and ‘the gods feared with a new fear that he that had overthrown
Their city would one day slay the gods’ (‘Time and the Gods’, TG, 5).
And ‘poietic’ humanity, just as in Swinburne’s ‘The Last Oracle’, bears
witness to their demise. In one of ‘The Dreams of a Prophet’, the poet
takes the prophet to a ‘waste valley’ in a ‘desert’, where
like fallen moons, I saw vast ribs that stood up white out of the sand,
higher than the hills of the desert. And here and there lay the enormous
shapes of skulls like the white marble domes of palaces built for tyrannous
kings a long while since by armies of driven slaves. Also there lay in the
desert other bones, the bones of vast legs and arms, against which the
desert, like a besieging sea, ever advanced and already had half drowned.
And as I gazed in wonder at these colossal things the poet said to me:
‘The gods are dead’. (TG, 88)
Of course, it is not just Swinburne that we see here and in the other
tales, in their imagery and their message, but numerous other Dunsany
favourites or contemporaries. Shelley and the Romantics loom large, in
the echoes of the hound imagery from Prometheus Unbound:
Once the hungry Hours were hounds

Which chased the Day, like a bleeding deer
And it limped and stumbled with many wounds
Through the nightly dells of the desart year. (Shelley 272)
and in depictions of the desert remains of ruined ancientry, of which

Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (1818) is merely the most famous.18 Nietzsche
is clearly present—Dunsany had been reading Thus Spake Zarathustra in
190419 —and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung hovers in the distance. Even
Kipling’s time-travel fantasy Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), published the
same year as Time and the Gods , offers an interesting parallel, depicting
in a comic rather than a tragic register the passing of the gods: ‘They
dropped off, one by one, through the centuries. … After a while, men
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561. So Jesus says (p. 230, Copt.) of “the man who receives and
accomplishes the Mystery of the Ineffable One”; “he is a man
in the Cosmos, but he will reign with me in my kingdom; he is
a man in the Cosmos, but he is a king in the light; he is a man
in the Cosmos, but he is not of the Cosmos, and verily I say
unto you, that man is I, and I am that man.”
562. p. 246, Copt.
563. See last note and n. 5, p. 147 supra.
564. Hatch, op. cit. p. 302 and note.
565. pp. 236, 237, Copt.
566. Loc. cit. Or they may cover a kind of allegory, as we might say
that Agape or Love makes Faith, Hope, and Charity. But I
believe it to be more likely that the “12 mysteries” are letters in
a word. So in the Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος it is said of the
“Dragon of the Outer Darkness,” which is in fact the worst of
all the hells described in that book: “And the Dragon of the
Outer Darkness hath twelve true (αὐθέντη) names which are
in his gates, a name according to each gate of the torture-
chambers. And these names differ one from the other, but
they belong to each of the twelve, so that he who saith one
name, saith all the names. And these I will tell you in the
Emanation of the Universe”—(p. 323, Copt.). If this be thought
too trivial an explanation, Irenaeus tells us that the 18 Aeons
remaining after deducting the Decad or Dodecad (as the case
may be) from the rest of the Pleroma were, according to the
Valentinians, signified by the two first letters of the name of
Jesus: ἀλλὰ καὶ διὰ τῶν προηγουμένων τοῦ ὀνόματος αὐτοῦ
δύο γραμμάτων, τοῦ τε ἰῶτα καὶ τοῦ ἦτα, τοὺς δεκαοκτὼ
Αἰῶνας εὐσήμως μηνύεσθαι, Irenaeus, Βk I. c. 1, § 5, p. 26,
Harvey. Equally absurd according to modern ideas are the
words of the Epistle of Barnabas (c. X., pp. 23, 24,
Hilgenfeld), where after quoting a verse in Genesis about
Abraham circumcising 318 of his slaves (cf. Gen. xiv. 14), the
author says “What then is the knowledge (γνῶσις) given
therein? Learn that the 18 were first, and then after a pause,
he says 300. (In) the 18, I = 10, H = 8, thou hast Jesus
(Ἰησοῦν). And because the Cross was meant to have grace in
the T, he says also 300. He expresses therefore Jesus by two
letters and the Cross by one. He knows who has placed in us
the ungrafted gift of teaching. None has learned from me a
more genuine word. But I know that ye are worthy.”
567. “The True Word” or the Word of the Place of Truth. The latter
expression is constantly used in other parts of the book, and
seems to refer to the χώρημα or “receptacle,” that is the
heaven, of the Aeon Ἀλήθεια, that is the Decad. Cf. especially
the Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος (pp. 377, 378, Copt.), where it is
said that certain baptisms and a “spiritual chrism” will lead the
souls of the disciples “into the Places of Truth and Goodness,
to the Place of the Holy of all Holies, to the Place in which
there is neither female, nor male, nor shape in that Place, but
there is Light, everlasting, ineffable.”
568. These ἀποτάγματα are set out in detail in the Μέρος τευχῶν
Σωτῆρος (pp. 255 sqq. Copt.), where the disciples are
ordered to “preach to the whole world ... renounce
(ἀποτασσετε) the whole world and all the matter which is
therein, and all its cares and all its sins, and in a word all its
conversation (ὁμιλιαι) which is therein, that ye may be worthy
of the mysteries of the Light, that ye may be preserved from
all the punishments which are in the judgments” and so on. It
should be noted that these are only required of the psychics
or animal men.
569. No doubt in the Greek original the actual seal was here
figured. For examples, see the Bruce Papyrus, passim. The
idea is typically Egyptian. As M. Maspero says in his essay on
“La Table d’Offrandes,” R.H.R. t. xxxv. No. 3 (1897), p. 325:
no spell was in the view of the ancient Egyptians efficacious
unless accompanied by a talisman or amulet which acted as a
material support to it, as the body to the soul.
570. p. 238, Copt.
571. Hatch, op. cit. p. 296, n. 1, for references.
572. 1 Cor. xv. 29. The practice of “baptizing for the dead,” as the
A. V. has it, evidently continued into Tertullian’s time. See
Tertull. de Resurrectione Carnis, c. XLVIII. p. 530, Oehler.
573. Döllinger, First Age, p. 327.
574. Hatch, op. cit. p. 307. The Emperor Constantine, who was
baptized on his deathbed, was a case in point. The same
story was told later about the Cathars or Manichaeans of
Languedoc. The motive seems in all these cases to have
been the same: as baptism washed away all sin, it was as
well to delay it until the recipient could sin no more.
575. Hatch, op. cit. p. 295 and note, for references.
576. p. 236, Copt.
577. See n. 2, p. 166 supra.
578. Döllinger, First Age, pp. 234, 235.
579. Ibid. p. 235. Rom. vi. 4; Gal. iii. 27, 29, are quoted in support.
580. Ibid. p. 235. Rom. vii. 22; 1 Cor. vi. 14; Eph. iii. 16 and v. 30
are quoted in support.
581. Hatch, op. cit. p. 342.
582. p. 228, Copt.
583. pp. 230, 231, Copt.

584. The Pistis Sophia proper comes to an end twenty pages later.
585. Döllinger, First Age, p. 239. 1 Cor. x. 16 sqq.; Eph. v. 30,

quoted in support.
586. Justin Martyr was probably born 114, and martyred 165 A.D.
For the passage quoted in text, see his First Apology, c. LXVI.,
where he mentions among other things that the devils set on
the worshippers of Mithras to imitate the Christian Eucharist
by celebrating a ceremony with bread and a cup of water.
587. Hatch, op. cit. p. 308. This visible change of the contents of
the cup of water to the semblance of blood is described in the
Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος (p. 377, Copt.), and with more detail
in the Bruce Papyrus. Cf. p. 183 infra.
588. Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος, p. 354, Copt.
589. Whether the author of the Pistis Sophia really intended to

describe them may be doubted; but it is to be noted that the
sacraments which Jesus is represented as celebrating in the
Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος can hardly be they, although Jesus
calls them in one place (p. 374, Copt.), “the mysteries of the
light which remit sins, which themselves are appellations and
names of light.” These are administered to the twelve
disciples without distinction, and it is evident that the author of
these books is quite unacquainted with any division into
pneumatic and psychic, and knows nothing of the higher
mysteries called in the Pistis Sophia proper “the mysteries of
the Ineffable One” and “the mysteries of the First Mystery.”
We should get over many difficulties if we supposed the two
later books to be Marcosian in origin, but in any event they
are later than the Pistis Sophia.
590. p. 246, Copt. So in the Manichaean text described in Chapter

XIII, Jesus is Himself called “the Tree of Knowledge.”
591. So Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, § 11, pp. 58, 54, Harvey:
Ἐπαιδεύθησαν γὰρ τὰ ψυχικὰ οἱ ψυχικοὶ ἄνθρωποι, οἱ δι’
ἔργων καὶ πίστεως ψιλῆς βεβαιούμενοι, καὶ μὴ τὴν τελείαν
γνῶσιν ἔχοντες· εἶναι δὲ τούτους ἀπὸ τῆς Ἐκκλησίας ἡμᾶς
λέγουσι· διὸ καὶ ἡμῖν μὲν ἀναγκαῖον εἶναι τὴν ἀγαθὴν πρᾶξιν
ἀποφαίνονται· ἄλλως γὰρ ἀδύνατον σωθῆναι. Αὐτοὺς δὲ μὴ
διὰ πράξεως, ἀλλὰ διὰ τὸ φύσει πνευματικοὺς εἶναι, πάντῃ τε
καὶ πάντως σωθήσεσθαι δογματίζουσιν. “For the psychic
(animal) men are taught psychic things, they being made safe
by works and by mere faith, and not having perfect
knowledge. And they say that we of the Church are these
people. Wherefore they declare that good deeds are
necessary for us: for otherwise we could not be saved. But
they decree that they themselves are entirely and in every
thing saved, not by works, but because they are pneumatic
(spiritual) by nature.”
592. p. 249, Copt.
593. p. 250, Copt. It is to be observed that these “cleansing

mysteries” will only admit their recipients to the light of the
Kingdom of Jesus—not to that of the First Mystery or of the
Ineffable One.
594. As did perhaps the Manichaeans afterwards. See J.R.A.S. for

January, 1913, and Chap. XIII infra.
595. So Charles Kingsley in Hypatia. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol.

IV. c. 60, n. 15, quotes a statement of Rufinus that there were
nearly as many monks living in the deserts as citizens in the
towns.
596. Mallet, Le Culte de Neit à Saïs, p. 200, points out that the God
Nu described in the 18th Chapter of the Book of the Dead is
“the infinite abyss, the Βυθός, the πατὴρ ἄγνωστος of the
Gnostics.” So Maspero in Rev. Critique, 30 Sept. 1909, p. 13,
who declares that the author of the Pistis Sophia was
influenced directly or indirectly by Osirian beliefs.
597. Moret, Le verbe créateur et révélateur, p. 286, for references.
598. Maspero, Ét. Égyptol. t. II. p. 187: “L’ogdoade est une

conception hermopolitaine qui s’est répandue plus tard sur
toute l’Égypte à côté de l’ennéade d’Heliopolis. Les
théologiens d’Hermopolis avaient adopté le concept de la
neuvaine, seulement ils avaient amoindri les huit dieux qui
formaient le corps du dieu principal. Ils les avaient reduits à
n’être plus que des êtres presque abstraits nommés d’après
la fonction qu’on leur assignait, en agissant en masse sur
l’ordre et d’après l’impulsion du dieu chef. Leur ennéade se
composait donc d’un dieu tout-puissant et d’une ogdoade.”
599. “Son origine (l’ogdoade hermopolitaine subordonné à un

corps monade) est fort ancienne: on trouve quelques-unes
des divinités qui la composent mentionnées déjà dans les
textes des Pyramides.” Maspero, op. cit. t. II. p. 383. As he
says later the actual number of gods in the Ennead or
Ogdoad was a matter of indifference to the ancient Egyptian:
“les dieux comptaient toujours pour neuf, quand même ils
étaient treize ou quinze,” ibid. p. 387. Cf. Amélineau, Gnost.
Ég. pp. 294, 295.
600. See n. 5, p. 175 supra, and Maspero, “Hypogées Royaux,” Ét.

Égyptol. II. p. 130, n. 2.
601. See n. 2, p. 153 supra.
602. Maspero, “Hypogées Royaux,” t. II. p. 121.
603. Maspero, Rev. Crit. 30 Sept. 1909, p. 13.
604. Maspero, “Hypogées Royaux,” t. II. p. 118. Cf. Pistis Sophia,

p. 84, Copt. and elsewhere.
605. Maspero, “La Table d’Offrandes,” R.H.R. t. XXXV. (1897) p.

325. As has been said, in the Ascensio Isaiae, anyone
passing from one heaven to another has to give a password,
but not to exhibit a seal.
606. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 196; Schmidt, Koptisch-Gnostische

Schriften, Bd I. p. xiii.
607. It is so used in the Excerpta Theodoti, and in the Papyrus

Bruce. See p. 190, infra.
608. Jean Reville, Le Quatrième Évangile, Paris, 1901, p. 321. Mgr

Duchesne, Early Christian Church, pp. 102, 192, says in
effect that St John’s Gospel appeared after the Apostle’s
death and was not accepted without opposition. He thinks
Tatian and Irenaeus the first writers who quoted from it with
acknowledgement of its authorship. If we put the date of
Tatian’s birth at 120 (see Dict. Christian Biog. s.h.n.) and allow
a sufficient period for the initiation into heathen mysteries
which he mentions, for his conversion and for his becoming a
teacher, we do not get a much earlier date than 170 for his
acceptance of the Fourth Gospel. Irenaeus was, of course,
later in date than Tatian.
609. Tertullian, Adv. Valentinianos, c. 2.
610. Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 180.
611. Tertullian, de Carne Christi, c. 20.
612. E.g. p. 47, Copt. Cf. also ibid. pp. 147, 170, 176.
613. Tertullian, adv. Val. c. v.
614. Op. cit. c. 9.
615. Op. cit. c. 18.
616. Op. cit. c. 20.
617. Op. cit. c. 25.

618. Tertullian, de Carne Christi, c. 9. Irenaeus, Bk II. c. 7, § 1, p.
270, Harvey, seems to have known both of Barbelo and of the
Virgin of Light, since he speaks of corpora sursum ... spiritalia
et lucida, “spiritual and translucent bodies on high” casting a
shadow below in quam Matrem suam descendisse dicunt
“into which they allege their Mother descended.”
619. ⲞⲨ ⲘⲈⲢⲞⲤ ⲎⲦⲈ Ⲏ ⲦⲈⲨⲬⲞⲤ Ⲙ ⲎⲤⲰⲦⲎⲢ, or (in Greek) Μέρος

τευχῶν Σωτῆρος.
620. “This I say to you in paradigm, and likeness and similitude,

but not in truth of shape, nor have I revealed the word in
truth,” p. 253, Copt. So in the next page (p. 254, Copt.), Jesus
says of the perfect initiate that “He also has found the words
of the Mysteries, those which I have written to you according
to similitude—the same are the members of the Ineffable
One.” From His mention of “writing,” one would imagine that
the reference here is to documents such as the Bruce
Papyrus which gives the pictures of “seals” together with
cryptographically written words.
621. p. 357, Copt. This opening sentence could not have been
written by one of the Valentinians of Hadrian’s time, who, as
has been said above, “did not choose to call Jesus, Lord,”
Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 1, I. p. 12, Harvey.
622. In the address of Jesus beginning “O my Father, Father of

every Fatherhood, boundless light” with which this part of the
Μ. τ. σ. opens, we can, with a little good will, identify nearly
every word of the “galimatias” which at first sight seems mere
gibberish. Thus, the whole invocation reads: αεηιουω, ϊαω,
αωϊ, οϊαψινωθερ, θερ[ι]νοψ, νωψιθερ, ζαγουρη, παγουρη,
νεθμομαωθ, νεψιομαωθ, μαραχαχθα, θωβαρραβαυ,
θαρναχαχαν, ζοροκοθορα Ιεου Σαβαωθ. The seven vowels to
which many mystical interpretations have been assigned, and
which have even been taken for a primitive system of musical
notation (C. E. Ruelle, “Le Chant des Sept Voyelles
Grecques,” Rev. des Ét. Grecques, Paris, 1889, t. II. p. 43,
and pp. 393-395), probably express the sound to Greek ears
of the Jewish pronunciation of Yahweh or Jehovah. The word
Iao we have before met with many times both as a name of
Dionysos and otherwise, and is here written anagrammatically
from the difficulty which the Greeks found in dealing with
Semitic languages written the reverse way to their own. The
word ψινωθερ which follows and is also written as an
anagram is evidently an attempt to transcribe in Greek letters
the Egyptian words P, Shai, neter (P = Def. article, Shai = the
Egyptian God of Fate whose name Revillout, Rev. Égyptol.
Paris, 1892, pp. 29-38, thinks means “The Highest,” and neter
or nuter the determinative for “god”), the whole reading “Most
High God.” The words ζαγουρη παγουρη (better, πατουρη)
are from the Hebrew roots ‫ סגר פטר‬and seem to be the “he
that openeth and no man shutteth; and shutteth and no man
openeth” of Rev. iii. 7. Νεθμομαωθ, which is often found in the
Magic Papyri, is reminiscent of the Egyptian neb maat “Lord
of Truth,” the following νεψιομαωθ being probably a variant by
a scribe who was uncertain of the orthography. Μαραχαχθα I
can make nothing of, although as the phrase νεφθομαωθ
μαραχαχθα appears in the Magic Papyrus of Leyden
generally called W (Leemans, Papyri Graeci, etc. t. II. p. 154)
in a spell there said to be written by “Thphe the
Hierogrammateus” for “Ochus the king,” it is evidently
intended for Egyptian. In the same spell appear the words
θαρνμαχαχ ζοροκοθορα and θωβαρραβαυ which are evidently
the same as those in the Μ. τ. σ., and of which I will only say
that, while Mr King supposes ζοροκοθορα to mean “light-
gatherer,” θωβαρραβαυ is in the leaden tabula devotionis of
Carthage (Molinier, “Imprecation gravée sur plomb,” Mem. de
la Soc. Nat. des Antiquaires de France, série VI. t. VIII. Paris,
1897, pp. 212-216) described as τον θεὸν του τῆς
παλινγενεσιας “the god of rebirth.” The concluding words are
of course merely “Yahweh of Hosts.”
623. The description of the moon-chariot drawn by two white oxen
is found in Claudian’s Proserpine. According to Cumont
(Textes et Monuments relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra, t. I. p.
126 and note) it was not until Hadrian’s time that this
conception, which seems to have been Persian in origin,
became fixed in the West.
624. This “Middle Way” has nothing to do with the τόπος or “place”
of the middle, where are set in the Pistis Sophia proper the
powers who preside over incarnation. It is below the visible
sphere (p. 364, Copt.) and is met with in Rabbinic lore. See
Kohler, op. cit. p. 587.
625. This division of the Twelve Aeons into two halves seems at
first sight inconsistent with the description in the Pistis Sophia
proper which always speaks of them as Twelve. Yet it is plain
that the author of the Pistis Sophia knew the legend here
given, as he makes John the Divine speak (p. 12, Copt.) of
“the rulers who belong to the Aeon of Jabraoth” and had
made peace with the mysteries of the light. These “rulers who
repented” are again mentioned on p. 195, Copt. In the other
part of the Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος (p. 356, Copt.), it is also
said that the souls of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are to be
placed in “the Place of Jabraoth and of all the rulers who
repented” until Jesus can take them with Him to the light. So
the Papyrus Bruce (Amélineau, p. 239).
626. There are seven pages missing between the descriptions of

the tortures of the Middle Way and those of Amenti and
Chaos, the gap occurring at p. 379, Copt. It is possible that
what follows after this is not from the Μέρος τευχῶν Σωτῆρος
but an extract from yet another document.
627. In the text of the Μ. τ. σ. (p. 377, Copt.), Jesus simply asks
His father for a sign, and “the sign is made which Jesus had
said.” In the Papyrus Bruce where the same ceremony is
described in almost identical words, it is said that the wine of
the offering was turned into water which leaped forth of the
vase which contained it so as to serve for baptism. Cf.
Amélineau, Gnost. Ég. p. 253. That Marcus the magician by
juggling produced similar prodigies, see Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 7, II.
pp. 116, 117, Harvey.
628. The name of Jaldabaoth, which in the whole of the rest of the
MS. is spelt ⲒⲀⲖⲆⲀⲂⲀⲰⲐ, appears on p. 380 immediately
after the lacuna of seven pages as ⲒⲀⲖⲦⲀⲂⲀⲰⲐ, Ialtabaoth,
which supports the theory of another author.
629. This is also briefly mentioned in the part of the Μέρος τευχῶν
Σωτῆρος just described. See pp. 386, sqq., Copt.
630. This appears to contradict the Pistis Sophia proper, where it is

said that the Virgin of Light gives the soul, and the Great Iao
the Good the power.
631. Cf. the speech of the crocodile in the tale of the Predestined
Prince: “Ah, moi, je suis ton destin qui te poursuit; quoi que tu
fasses, tu seras ramené sur mon chemin.” Maspero, Contes
Populaires de l’Égypte Ancienne, 3rd ed. Paris, n. d. p. 175.
632. Evidently the Egyptian ka or double. Cf. the “Heart Amulet”

described by Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, pp. 142,
143, where the dead says to his heart: “Oh heart that I have
from my mother! Oh heart that belongs to my spirit, do not
appear against me as witness, provide no opposition against
me before the judges, do not contradict me before him who
governs the balance, thou art my spirit that is in my body....”
This seems to be a transcription of the 30th Chapter of the
Book of the Dead, of which there are several variants, none of
which however directly suggest that the heart is the accuser
to be dreaded. See Budge, Book of the Dead, 1909, vol. II. pp.
146-152.
633. Thus the Μ. τ. σ. says (p. 355, Copt.) “For this I despoiled
myself (i.e. laid aside my heavenly nature) to bring the
mysteries into the Cosmos, for all are under [the yoke of] sin,
and all lack the gifts of the mysteries.... Verily, verily I say unto
you: until I came into the Cosmos, no soul entered into the
light.” Contrast this with the words of the Pistis Sophia proper
(p. 250, Copt.): “Those who are of the light have no need of
the mysteries, because they are pure light,” which are made
the “interpretation” of the text: “They that are whole have no
need of a physician, but they that are sick.” See also the Pistis
Sophia, p. 246, Copt., where it is said of the mysteries
promised by Jesus that “they lead every race of men inwards
into the highest places according to the χωρημα of the
inheritance, so that ye have no need of the rest of the lower
mysteries, but you will find them in the two books of Jeû which
Enoch wrote etc.”
634. p. 280, Copt.
635. Μ. τ. σ. p. 388, Copt., where it is said that the soul of the

righteous but uninitiated man is after death taken into Amenti
and afterwards into the Middle Way, being shown the tortures
in each place, “but the breath of the flame of the punishments
shall only afflict him a little.” Afterwards he is taken to the
Virgin of Light, who sets him before the Little Sabaoth the
Good until the Sphere be turned round so that Zeus (♃) and
Aphrodite ( ♀ ) come into aspect with the Virgin of Light and
Kronos (♄) and Ares (♂) come after them. She then puts the
soul into a righteous body, which she plainly could not do
unless under the favourable influence of the “benefics” ♃ and
♀ . This seems also to be the dominant idea of the Excerpta
Theodoti, q.v. Compare this, however, with the words of the
Pistis Sophia proper (pp. 27, 28, Copt.) where Mary
Magdalene explains that the alteration made by Jesus in the
course of the stars was effected in order to baffle those skilled
in the mysteries taught by the angels “who came down” (as in
the Book of Enoch), from predicting the future by astrology
and magic arts learned from the sinning angels.
636. p. 361, Copt.

637. That is the Sphere of Destiny acting through its emissary the
Moira or Fate described above, p. 184 supra.
638. It is a curious example of the fossilizing, so to speak, of

ancient names in magic that Shakespeare should preserve for
us in the Tempest and Macbeth the names of Ariel and
Hecate which we find in the Μ. τ. σ. No doubt both were taken
by him from mediaeval grimoires which themselves copied
directly from the Graeco-Egyptian Magic Papyri mentioned in
Chap. III supra. Cf. the use of Greek “names of God” like
ischiros (sic!) athanatos, etc. in Reginald Scot’s Discovery of
Witchcraft, passim.
639. So that it could not profit by the knowledge of the awful

punishments prepared for sinners. I do not know that this idea
occurs elsewhere.
640. p. 380, Copt.
641. The Marcosian authorship of the whole MS. is asserted by

Bunsen, Hippolytus and his Age, vol. I. p. 47. Köstlin, Über
das gnostische System des Buch Pistis Sophia in the
Theologische Jahrbücher of Baur and Zeller, Tübingen, 1854,
will have none of it, and declares the Pistis Sophia to be an
Ophite work. In this, the first commentator on the book is
followed by Grüber, Der Ophiten, Würzburg, 1864, p. 5, §§ 3,
4.
642. Clem. Alex. Strom. Bk I. c. 19.
643. Thus, according to Marcus (Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 8, § 11, pp. 145,

146, Harvey), “that name of the Saviour which may be
pronounced, i.e. Jesus, is composed of six letters, but His
ineffable name of 24.” The cryptogram in the Pistis Sophia is
in these words (p. 125, Copt.): “These are the names which I
will give thee from the Boundless One downwards. Write them
with a sign that the sons of God may show them forth of this
place. This is the name of the Deathless One ααα ωωω, and
this is the name of the word by which the Perfect Man is
moved: ιιι. These are the interpretations of the names of the
mysteries. The first is ααα, the interpretation of which is φφφ.
The second which is μμμ or which is ωωω, its interpretation is
ααα. The third is ψψψ, its interpretation is οοο. The fourth is
φφφ, its interpretation is ννν. The fifth is δδδ, its interpretation
is ααα, which above the throne is ααα. This is the
interpretation of the second αααα, αααα, αααα, which is the
interpretation of the whole name.” The line drawn above the
three Alphas and Omegas is used in the body of the text to
denote words in a foreign (i.e. non-Egyptian) language such
as Hebrew; but in the Papyrus Bruce about to be described,
the same letters without any line above are given as the name
of “the Father of the Pleroma.” See Amélineau’s text, p. 113.
The “moving” of the image (πλάσμα) of the Perfect Man is
referred to in Hippolytus (op. cit. p. 144, Cruice). That the
Tetragrammaton was sometimes written by Jewish magicians
with three Jods or i.i.i. see Gaster, The Oldest Version of
Midrash Megillah, in Kohut’s Semitic Studies, Berlin, 1897, p.
172. So on a magic cup in the Berlin Museum, conjuration is
made “in the name of Jahve the God of Israel who is
enthroned upon the cherubim ... and in the name A A A A”
(Stübe, Judisch-Babylonische Zaubertexte, Halle, 1895, pp.
23-27). For the meaning of the words “above the throne,” see
Franck, La Kabbale, p. 45, n. 2.
644. The opening words of the invocation βασεμὰ χαμοσσὴ

βαιανορὰ μισταδία ῥουαδὰ κουστὰ βαβοφὸρ καλαχθεῖ which
Irenaeus (Bk I. c. 14, § 2, pp. 183, 184, Harvey) quotes in this
connection from Marcus certainly read, as Renan (L’Église
Chrétienne, p. 154, n. 3) points out, “In the name of
Achamoth” (i.e. Sophia).
645. See n. 3, p. 180, supra. In the Pistis Sophia proper Jesus is

never spoken of save as “the Saviour” or as “the First
Mystery.”
646. Cf. Maspero, Hypogées Royaux, passim, esp. pp. 157 and
163.
647. Schmidt’s study of the Bruce Papyrus with a full text and
translation was published in the Texte und Untersuchungen of
von Gebhardt and Harnack under the title Gnostische
Schriften in Koptischer Sprache aus dem Codex Brucianus,
Leipzig, 1892. He republished the translation of this together
with one of the Pistis Sophia in the series of early Greek
Christian literature undertaken by the Patristic Committee of
the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences under the title
Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, Bd I. Leipzig, 1905. His
arrangement of the papyrus leaves makes much better sense
than that of Amélineau, but it is only arrived at by eliminating
all passages which seem to be inconsequent and attributing
them to separate works. The fragments which he
distinguishes as A and B and describes as “gnostischen
Gebetes,” certainly appear to form part of those which he
describes as the two “books of Jeû.”
648. Amélineau, “Notice sur le Papyrus gnostique Bruce,” Notices

et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibl. Nat. etc. Paris, 1891, p. 106.
This would seem to make matter the creation of God, but the
author gets out of the dilemma by affirming (op. cit. p. 126)
that “that which was not was the evil which is manifested in
matter” and that while that which exists is called αἰώνιος,
“everlasting,” that which does not exist is called ὕλη, “matter.”
649. Amélineau, op. cit. p. 231.
650. This word arrangement (οἰκονομία) occurs constantly in the

Pistis Sophia, as when we read (p. 193, Copt.) that the last
παραστάτης by the command of the First Mystery placed Jeû,
Melchisedek, and four other powers in the τόπος of those who
belong to the right hand πρός οἰκονομίας of the Assembly of
the Light. There, as here, it doubtless means that they were
arranged in the same order as the powers above them in
pursuance of the principle that “that which is above is like that
which is below,” or, in other words, of the doctrine of
correspondences. From the Gnostics the word found its way
into Catholic theology, as when Tertullian (adv. Praxean, c. 3)
says that the majority of simple-minded Christians “not
understanding that though God be one, he must yet be
believed to exist with his οἰκονομία, were frightened.” Cf.
Hatch, H.L. p. 324.
651. Perhaps the House or Place of Ἀλήθεια or Truth many times
alluded to in the Μ. τ. σ.
652. Aerôdios is shortly after spoken of as a person or power, so

that here, as elsewhere, in this literature, the place is called
by the name of its ruler.
653. This word constantly occurs in the Magic Papyri, generally

with another word prefixed, as σεσενγεν βαρφαραγγης
(Papyrus Mimaut, l. 12, Wessely’s Griechische Zauberpapyri,
p. 116), which C. W. King (Gnostics and their Remains, 2nd
ed. p. 289) would translate “they who stand before the mount
of Paradise” or in other words the Angels of the Presence.
Amélineau (Notices, etc. p. 144, n. 2) will have Barpharanges
to be “a hybrid word, part Chaldean and part Greek” meaning
“Son of the Abyss”—which is as unlikely as the other
interpretation.
654. p. 143, Amélineau (Notices, etc.); p. 361, Schmidt, K.-G.S.
655. According to Amélineau, op. cit., “The Book of the Great Word
in Every Mystery.”
656. pp. 188-199, Amélineau, op. cit.; Schmidt, K.-G.S. pp. 308-
314.
657. pp. 219, 220, Amélineau, op. cit.; Schmidt, K.-G.S. p. 226.
She seems to be here called “the Great Virgin of the Spirit.”
Cf. the Ὑπέθεντο γὰρ Αἰῶνα τινὰ ἀνώλεθρον ἐν παρθενικῷ
διάγοντι πνεύματι, ὁ βαρβηλὼθ ὀνομάζουσι, “For [some of
them] suppose a certain indestructible Aeon continuing in a
Virgin spirit whom they call Barbelo” of Irenaeus, Bk I. c. 27, §
1, p. 222, Harvey.
658. The powers named are thus called in both the Pistis Sophia
and the Bruce Papyrus. See Pistis Sophia, pp. 248, 252
Copt.; Amélineau, op. cit. p. 177.
659. According to the Pistis Sophia (p. 1, Copt.), 11 years elapsed
between the Crucifixion and the descent of the “Vestures”
upon Jesus on the Mount of Olives. We may imagine another
year to have been consumed by the revelations made in the
book.
660. If the “Books of Jeû” were ever written we should expect them
to bear the name of Enoch, who is said to have taken them
down in Paradise at the dictation of Jesus. See p. 147, n. 5,
supra. Very possibly the expression really does refer to some
of the mass of literature once passing under the name of
Enoch and now lost to us.
661. Amélineau, op. cit. p. 72.
662. Schmidt, K.-G.S. p. 26.
663. Amélineau, op. cit. p. 211; Schmidt, K.-G.S. p. 322. The West
or Amenti is the Egyptian name for Hades.
664. Maspero, “Egyptian Souls and their Worlds,” Ét. Égyptol. t. I.

p. 395.
665. Maspero, “Hypogées Royaux,” Ét. Égyptol. t. II. pp. 148, 165.
666. Ibid. pp. 178, 179.
667. Ibid. p. 31.
668. Ibid. pp. 14-15.
669. Ibid. p. 166. To make things more difficult, the guardian

sometimes had a different name for every hour. Cf. ibid. p.
168.
670. Ibid. pp. 124, n. 2, 163. For the talismans or amulets, see
Maspero, “La Table d’Offrandes,” R.H.R. t. XXXV. (1897), p.
325.
671. Maspero, “Hyp. Roy.” pp. 113, 118.
672. Ibid. pp. 162, 163.
673. Ibid. pp. 41, 163.
674. Ibid. p. 178.
675. Ibid. p. 179.
676. The kings, according to a belief which was evidently very old
in the time of the Pyramid-Builders, were supposed to
possess immortality as being gods even in their lifetime. Later,
the gift was extended to rulers of nomes and other rich men,
and finally to all those who could purchase the spells that
would assure it. In Maspero’s words “La vie d’au delà n’était
pas un droit pour l’Égyptien: il pouvait la gagner par la vertu
des formules et des pratiques, mais il pouvait aussi bien la
perdre, et s’il était pauvre ou isolé, les chances étaient qu’il la
perdit à bref délai” (op. cit. p. 174).
677. p. 254, Copt.
678. de Faye (Intro. etc. p. 110) shows clearly, not only that the
aims and methods of the school of Valentinus changed
materially after its founder’s death, but that it was only then
that the Catholic Church perceived the danger of them, and
set to work to combat them systematically.
679. To thinkers like Dean Inge (Christian Mysticism, 1899, p. 82)

this was the natural and appointed end of Gnosticism, which
according to him was “rotten before it was ripe.” “It presents,”
he says, “all the features which we shall find to be
characteristic of degenerate mysticism. Not to speak of its
oscillations between fanatical austerities and scandalous
licence, and its belief in magic and other absurdities, we
seem, when we read Irenaeus’ description of a Valentinian
heretic, to hear the voice of Luther venting his contempt upon
some Geisterer of the sixteenth century.” It may be so; yet,
after all, Gnosticism in its later developments lasted for a
longer time than the doctrines of Luther have done,
particularly in the land of their birth.
680. Cf. Maspero, Life in Ancient Egypt and Assyria, Eng. ed.
1892, pp. 90-92, for the distaste of the Egyptians of
Ramesside times for the life of a soldier and their delight in
that of a scribe.
681. All these, especially alchemy, are illustrated in the Magic

Papyrus of Leyden known as W. See Leemans, Pap. Gr. t. II.
pp. 83 sqq.
682. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. III. p. 214, Bury’s ed.
683. Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, pp. 154, 155, and authorities

there quoted. Cf. Hatch, H. L. pp. 129, 130, 293, 307-309.
684. Harnack, What is Christianity? p. 210; Duchesne, Early

Christian Church, p. 32.
685. Chap. IX. p. 118 supra.
686. Renan, Marc Aurèle, p. 49. Cf. Dill, Nero to Marcus, pp. 473-
477.
687. Renan, L’Église Chrétienne, pp. 31-33, and Hadrian’s letter

there quoted.
688. Of the defences mentioned in the text the Apology of

Quadratus is the only one still lost to us. Justin Martyr’s two
Apologies are among the best known of patristic works. That
of Aristides was found by Dr Rendel Harris in a Syriac MS. in
1889. For the identification of this by Dean Armitage Robinson
with the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, see Cambridge Texts
and Studies, vol. 1. No. 1.

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Fantasies Of Time And Death: Dunsany,

Eddison, Tolkien 1st Edition Edition

“This important book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the

“This is an important piece of scholarship that offers much-needed critical explo-

ISBN 978-1-137-51837-8 ISBN 978-1-137-51838-5 (eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

1 Introduction: The Game of Life and Death 1

2 Lord Dunsany: The Conquering Hours 23

3 E. R. Eddison: Bearing Witness to the Eternal 69

4 J. R. R. Tolkien: More Than Memory 153

Introduction: The Game of Life and Death

Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?

© The Author(s) 2020 1

as much the creation of literary gatekeepers as of creative writers (‘Fantasy

on—an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, a high-ranking civil servant in the Depart-

nature of their work; the second, to its shared thematic preoccupation.

2 Scope, Nature and Theme

The passage provides an illustration of literal cosmopoiesis that perfectly

into eternity or nothingness, into death-as-state. For the human individ-

no sooner do we begin to live in this dying body, than we begin to move

Life in time, in other words, is but the process of dying.

kinship ties, struggle against oppression and, if necessary, honourable

he resorted again to secondary-world fantasy in order to explicitly con-

an old ox dragging the plough’ (Mirrlees 116). Nathaniel must learn to

the centuries of literature—The Wanderer’s Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær

But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade

With this Shakespearean sonnet, sung by the immortal Queen Sophon-

Everything dies that lives – everything dies;

Sweet Tuberose, adieu! you fade too fast!

Who’d stay to muse if Death could never wither?

Truly your city, O men, hath no abiding!

But fashion’d in the mirage of a dream,

unfortunately, rather rare. Exceptions may be found in other ‘niche’ fields,

publisher-created adult fantasy canon. For an interesting recent approach

beginning with Shippey’s seminal Road to Middle-Earth, but by a stream

Lord Dunsany: The Conquering Hours

[E]nnemi vigilant et funeste, / Le Temps

© The Author(s) 2020 23

2 The Figure in the Pattern

Within the parameters of this pattern, the reader encounters profound

latter’s The Triumph of Time (Triumphus Temporis )—the poem itself, as

This kind of search for poetic patterns, if undertaken in earnest, would

What Power but the Years that make

They made her lily and rose in one,

found. Nevertheless, this is the cultural moment in which it makes most

Like little cottages that stand

He reused it later in A Dreamer’s Tales (1910) in the story ‘Idle Days

All ye as a wind shall go by, as a fire shall ye pass and be past;

Years have risen and fallen in darkness or in twilight,

And before thee the Gods that bow

Old and younger Gods are buried or begotten

Time again is risen with mightier word of warning,

The movement from Swinburne’s poetry to Dunsany’s prose is nearly

‘carven shrines’ (‘The Relenting of Sarnidac’, TG, 83), or they ‘sl[i]nk’

Once the hungry Hours were hounds

and in depictions of the desert remains of ruined ancientry, of which

562. p. 246, Copt.

563. See last note and n. 5, p. 147 supra.

564. Hatch, op. cit. p. 302 and note.

565. pp. 236, 237, Copt.

570. p. 238, Copt.

571. Hatch, op. cit. p. 296, n. 1, for references.

573. Döllinger, First Age, p. 327.