Dunsany, Lord (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany) (1878– 1957).
Irish author of fantasy tales. Author of many stories of imaginary-world fantasy, including The Gods ofPegāna(1905), Time and the Gods(1906), The Sword of Welleran(1908), A Dreamer’s Tales (1910), The Book of Wonder(1912), Fifty-one Tales(1915), The Last Book of Wonder(1916), and Tales of Three Hemispheres(1919); also plays, including Five Plays(1914) and Plays of Gods and Men(1917). HPL first read A Dreamer’s Talesin late 1919 from a recommendation by amateur journalist Alice Hamlet; he attended a lecture given by Dunsany in Boston on October 20, 1919 (see SL1.91–93). Many of HPL’s early tales—“The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1919), “The White Ship” (1919), “The Cats of Ulthar” (1920), “Celephaïs” (1920), “The Quest of Iranon” (1921), “The Tree” (1921), “The Other Gods” (1921)—are clear imitations of Dunsany. Later stories such as “The Silver Key” (1926) and “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926) refine the Dunsanian influence. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath(1926–27) ap
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pears to be a tribute to Dunsany, but may be a kind of repudiation of him in Randolph Carter’s abandonment of otherworldly fantasy for memories of his youth. See entries on these stories for discussions of works by Dunsany that may have influenced them.
In “Some Notes on a Nonentity” (1933) HPL states that he “got the idea of the artificial pantheon and myth-background represented by ‘Cthulhu’, ‘YogSothoth’, ‘Yuggoth’, etc.” from Dunsany, who in TheGodsofPegānaand Time and the Gods(and in those volumes alone) wrote a linked series of tales involving an invented pantheon in the imaginary realm of Pegāna. HPL wrote a lecture read before an amateur journalists’ group, “Lord Dunsany and His Work” (1922); Dunsany is also discussed in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927). HPL did not seem to care for Dunsany’s later work, even though much of it—beginning with The Curse of the Wise Woman(1933)—parallels HPL’s in its use of topographical realism.
Late in life Dunsany came across HPL’s stories and noted that “in the few tales of his I have read I found that he was writing in my style, entirely originally & without in any way borrowing from me, & yet with my style & largely my material” (letter to August Derleth, March 28, 1952; quoted in LSNo. 14 [Spring 1987]: 38).
See T.E.D.Klein, “Some Notes on the Fantasy Tales of H.P.Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany,” Honors thesis: Brown University, 1969; Mark Amory, Biography of Lord Dunsany(Collins, 1972); Darrell Schweitzer, “Lovecraft and Lord Dunsany,” in Essays Lovecraftian,ed. Darrell Schweitzer (1976; rev. ed. as Discovering H.P.Lovecraft[Starmont House, 1987]); Robert M.Price, “Dunsanian Influence on Lovecraft Outside His ‘Dunsanian’ Tales,” CryptNo. 76 (Hallowmas 1990): 3–5; S.T.Joshi and Darrell Schweitzer, Lord Dunsany: A Bibliography(Scarecrow Press, 1993); S.T.Joshi, Lord Dunsany: Master of the Anglo-Irish Imagination(Greenwood Press, 1995).
Dunwich.
Fictitious city in Massachusetts invented by HPL.
Dunwich was created for “The Dunwich Horror” (1928) and is cited only in that tale and in the poem “The Ancient Track” (1929). It was based roughly upon the area in south-central Massachusetts around the towns of Wilbraham, Monson, and Hampden (see SL3.432–33), which HPL had seen in the two weeks he had spent with Edith Miniter in Wilbraham just prior to writing the story in the summer of 1928. Some parts of the locale were, however, imported from north-central Massachusetts, specifically the area around Athol (Sentinel Hill in the story seems derived, at least in name, from a Sentinel Elm Farm in Athol), including the Bear’s Den, a wooded ravine that HPL’s friend H.Warner Munn showed him.
HPL presumably derived the name Dunwich from the decaying town on the southeast coast of England. The town is the basis of a poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne, “By the North Sea” (although Dunwich is not mentioned in the poem); Dunwich is also mentioned in Arthur Machen’s short novel The Terror(1917), which HPL is known to have read (see SL1.304, 310). Oddly enough, the English Dunwich seems more similar in character to HPL’s Innsmouth. For the English town see Rowland Parker, Men of Dunwich(1978).
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“Dunwich Horror, The.”
Novelette (17,590 words); written in August 1928. First published in WT(April 1929); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An1and TD.
In the seedy area of Dunwich in “north central Massachusetts” live a number of backwoods farmers. One family, the Whateleys, has been the source of particular suspicion ever since the birth, on Candlemas 1913, of Wilbur Whateley, the offspring of an albino woman and an unknown father. Lavinia’s father, Old Whateley, shortly after the birth makes an ominous prediction: “some day yew folks‘ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!”Wilbur grows anomalously fast, and by age thirteen is nearly seven feet tall. He is intellectually precocious, having been educated by the books in Old Whateley’s shabby library. In 1924 Old Whateley dies, but manages to instruct his grandson to consult “page 751 of the complete edition” of some book so that he can “open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth.” Two years later Lavinia disappears and is never seen again. In the winter of 1927 Wilbur makes his first trip out of Dunwich, to consult the Latin edition of the Necronomiconat the Miskatonic University Library; but when he asks to borrow the volume, he is denied by the old librarian Henry Armitage. He tries to do the same at Harvard but is similarly rebuffed. Then, in the late spring of 1928, Wilbur breaks into the Miskatonic library to steal the book, but is killed by the vicious guard-dog. His death is very repulsive: “…it is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.”