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Abstract
Contributing to the enchantment of the author’s celebrated prose, the names in Lord Dunsany’s best-known novel evoke a world of fairytale, myth, and song; ring true to the characters and places they designate; and fashion themselves into a constellation of correspondences in sound, form, and sense.
Notes
1. The title will henceforth be abbreviated as KED. All quotations are from the Del Rey reissue (1999).
2. Chassagnol discusses the influence of German Märchen on British fairy art and literature (2010: 31–46).
3. The elvish princess who attempts to seduce a young knight in Herder’s poem has more in common with the treacherous fairy of Keats’s “La Belle Dame sans Merci” than the gentle and loving Lirazel.
4. Pages numbers here and throughout refer to a pdf printout of Stitt’s commentary.
5. What Eco means by the “encyclopedia” is a broad field of knowledge and intertextuality that appeals to the cultural treasury of a people or a person (1986: 46–86). For many European intellectuals and artists at the turn of the twentieth century, Dunsany among them, this would have included narratives of sacred texts, myths and legends from around the world, together with fairy tales and medieval romances.
6. Saussure’s notes were published in Starobinski (1971).
7. According to Murat, paragrams play indifferently upon the sound and spelling of a name (10), and different types of “perturbations” may occur in their operation, including the inversion or substitution of letters (17).
8. Most readers whom I have queried pronounce the name with the short vowel /ɪ/.
9. Cassirer provides a brief but classic discussion of this belief in Language and Myth (1953: 48–55).
10. This appears to be a “cynical” pun on Dunsany’s part. Just as a British parliamentary whip keeps party members in line, Lurulu keep Orion’s hounds in line with the lashes of his whip. Coming from a member of the House of Lords, the joke appears to suggest that fellow members of British parliament are like a pack of dogs in want of discipline, if not a good whipping. In KED, the members of Erl’s parliament are characterized as rustic bumpkins and fools. For a discussion of Dunsany’s conservative political views, see Maume (2013).
11. Dunsany served with an American regiment during WWI and made several tours of the USA between 1919 and 1955 (Amory, 1972: 161, 163–168, 275–280). He thus had numerous occasions to learn American slang.
12. Despite his love for the language of the Bible, Dunsany takes a critical view of Christian dogma in KED and other works (Joshi, 1995: 25–26, 99).
13. In Kabbalistic texts this same template is also employed to construct names for God (Veenstra, 2012: 170).
14. Dunsany is alluding here to Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” Contrary to a popular misconception, Andersen’s story privileges, not so much a musical, but rather a soteriological theme.
15. My translation.
16. The correct French pronunciation is /Rule/. According to Amory, Dunsany “spoke confident inaccurate French” (1972: 83). It is thus reasonable to assume that, like most non-native speakers, the author would have Anglicized the pronunciation of French words.