Lord Dunsany and the Great War: Don Rodriguez and the Rebirth of Romance (Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett Dunsany's Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In his classic cultural history of the First World War, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell reminds his readers that "[i]rony is the attendant of hope, and the fuel of hope is innocence" (18). Fussell goes on to point out that the greatest casualty of four years of carnage at places like Ypres was precisely this spirit of innocence. The "Great War," as those who lived through the conflict came to call it, became "a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated public consciousness for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress" (8). Of course, attempts were made at the time (as they still are) to perpetuate the kind of romantic views of warfare that held sway during the glory days of European imperialism. Such idealism proved difficult to sustain, though, especially when confronted with the recent memory of thousands of miles of muddy graves in France and Belgium. The result was that much of the greatest English writing of the time came to reflect a profound sense of loss and disillusionment. Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" eulogized English patriotism with a quiet and dignified pathos. In Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves offered up a representative autobiography of declension and cynicism. Finally, just a few years after the war, T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land claimed its preeminence as the greatest poetic lament for the chaotic implosion which the modern age had just experienced. In Great Britain, certainly, spiritual malaise, cultural fragmentation, and a profound skepticism about the old "heroic" ideals seem to have been the defining characteristics of the literary age. On the surface, this particular zeitgeist would seem to offer the most inauspicious of all backdrops for the development of modern fantasy literature, especially heroic fantasy. Yet as some critics have begun to point out, the Great War seems in fact to have spawned some of the most seminal works of the 20th century--texts that would go on to define the shape of the genre of fantasy for decades to come. The relationship between these works and the war varies, of course, but one common thread seems to be an attempt to resuscitate some form of faith in heroic idealism. E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros (1922), for example, speaks quite directly to the First World War's legacy of brutal futility. In Eddison's romance, the endless struggle between the opposing forces of Demonland and King Gorice is presented as noble, albeit tragic. This tale of a perpetual cycle of violence (the ouroboric circle suggested by the book's title) becomes, in the end, a story of heroic grandeur, suggesting that a sense of higher purpose in life might be found through martial valor. To take another example, the influence of World War I on the imagination and subsequent writings of J.R.R. Tolkien has been well-documented by a number of writers (including Humphrey Carpenter, Tom Shippey, Jane Chance, and Janet Croft). While Tolkien's Lord of the Rings offers a less laudatory vision of heroic death than Eddison's romance, it nevertheless does seem to stress the potential for meaningful sacrifice in the context of war. The moral clarity of Tolkien's Middle-earth provides the kind of structure, the ethos, that was missing in such struggles in 1917.