Fifty-Ones Tales

Lord Dunsany

• Editore: Books on Demand
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9782322258864
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Literature
• Categoria: Historical Fiction

Fifty-One Tales is a collection of fantasy short stories by Irish writer Lord Dunsany, considered a major influence on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula LeGuin and others. The first editions, in hardcover, were published simultaneously in London and New York by Elkin Mathews and Mitchell Kennerly, respectively, in April, 1915. The British and American editions differ in that they arrange the material slightly differently and that each includes a story the other omits; "The Poet Speaks with Earth" in the British version, and "The Mist" in the American version.The collection's significance in the history of fantasy literature was recognized by its republication (as The Food of Death: Fifty-One Tales) by the Newcastle Publishing Company as the third volume of the celebrated Newcastle Forgotten Fantasy Library in September, 1974. The Newcastle edition used the American version of the text.The book collects fifty-one short stories by the author.

Fifty-Ones Tales

1. The Assignation
2. Charon
3. The Death of Pan
4. The Sphinx at Gizeh
5. The Hen
6. Wind and Fog
7. The Raft Builders
8. The Workman
9. The Guest
10. Death and Odysseus
11. Death and the Orange
12. The Prayer of the Flowers
13. Time and the Tradesman
14. The Little City
15. The Unpasturable Fields
16. The Worm and the Angel
17. The Songless Country
18. The Latest Thing
19. The Demagogue and the Demi-Monde
20. The Giant Poppy
21. Roses
22. The Man with the Golden Ear-rings
23. The Dream of King Karna-Vootra
24. The Storm
25. A Mistaken Identity
26. The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise
27. Alone the Immortals
28. A Moral Little Tale
29. The Return of Song
30. Spring in Town
31. How the Enemy Came to Thl?nr?na
32. A Losing Game
33. Taking Up Piccadilly
34. After the Fire
35. The City
36. The Food of Death
37. The Lonely Idol
38. The Sphinx in Thebes (Massachusetts)
39. The Reward
40. The Trouble in Leafy Green Street
41. Furrow-Maker
42. Lobster Salad
43. The Return of the Exiles
44. Nature and Time
45. The Song of the Blackbird
46. The Messengers
47. The Three Tall Sons
48. Compromise
49. What We Have Come To
50. The Tomb of Pan
51. The Mist
52. Copyright

The Assignation

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Charon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon's arms.

Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.

"I am the last," he said.

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

The Death of Pan

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

And anon they saw him lying stiff and still.

Horned Pan was still and the dew was on his fur; he had not the look of a live animal. And then they said, "It is true that Pan is dead."

And, standing melancholy by that huge prone body, they looked for long at memorable Pan.

And evening came and a small star appeared.

And presently from a hamlet of some Arcadian valley, with a sound of idle song, Arcadian maidens came.

And, when they saw there, suddenly in the twilight, that old recumbent god, they stopped in their running and whispered among themselves. "How silly he looks," they said, and thereat they laughed a little.

And at the sound of their laughter Pan leaped up and the gravel flew from his hooves.

And, for as long as the travellers stood and listened, the crags and the hill-tops of Arcady rang with the sounds of pursuit.

The Sphinx at Gizeh

I saw the other day the Sphinx's painted face.

She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.

And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.

Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face.

I do not care that she is ugly, nor that she has painted her face, so that she only lure his secret from Time.

Time dallies like a fool at her feet when he should be smiting cities.

Time never wearies of her silly smile.

There are temples all about her that he has forgot...