Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien by Anna Vaninskaya (review)

Anna Vaninskaya's Fantasies of Time and Death: Dunsany, Eddison, Tolkien brings together three major writers of fantasy and studies their treatment of temporality and mortality. This book is about our ongoing conversation regarding time and death and the unique ability for fantasy to tackle these biggest of subjects. If writers have long envisioned time as a river and death as the sea, for instance, what Vaninskaya's new book discusses is how fantasy allows us, through the use of impossible creations and new metaphors, to imagine new ways of understanding our ontological trap. The genre attempts to try to see the world as one of the gods creating it, or to understand time as the eternal burden of the elves; we may see mortality afresh after conversing with the immortal. Vaninskaya's study focuses on Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and J. R. R. Tolkien, three early to mid-twentieth-century fantasy writers. These three authors, she contends, are constantly writing about "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" (14).

Vaninskaya groups these three authors together first due to the immense scale and the scope of their works. All three built huge worlds, but worlds that were not standalone; they had broader "cosmopoietic" catalogs (3–4). More important to this book, however, their worlds "are characterised by an obsession with temporality, mortality and eternity" (7). Vaninskaya thus put their works in conversation with each other, as well as in conversation with themselves. She examines how Dunsany's Elfland relates to Tolkien's Lothlorien, for instance, but also how Dunsany's own relationship with temporality evolves through his writing. A key focus is on the role of the writers' acknowledged influences on their philosophy and art: those earlier voices in this ongoing conversation or meditation on time and death. What there is far less of in Vaninskaya's book is an attempt to bring these writers into conversation with their own genre contemporaries (such as Hope Mirrlees, say). What there is almost none of is a critical engagement with contemporary writing on fantasy. This methodology is addressed early on in the text. Vaninskaya has chosen three authors writing before the formation of "fantasy" as a commercial and literary genre. Given this, she asserts, treating these authors as all connected as part of a fantasy canon can become a "straightjacket" to scholarship (3). This book puts these authors in the context of their own time, within their own "wider literary contexts," rather than, as Vaninskaya would have it, anachronizing them as purely members of the school of fantasy writing.

We begin with Lord Dunsany, as Vaninskaya contends there is more "insistence and frequency" on time and death in his writing than in any other author considered here (23). Particularly in his work The King of Elfland's Daughter, temporality is a consuming preoccupation, forming "an extended meditation on the glories and ravages of time-as-process and timelessness-as-state" (23). Despite the enormous scope of his work, however, Vaninskaya identifies him as foremost a rhythm maker rather than a world builder. Dunsany, a poet as well as a writer of fiction, expresses his themes directly through the language and imagery; it is in his continual patterning that he weaves with time. Vaninskaya reads Dunsany's work as containing qualities of flatness and unoriginality, but does not necessarily see these as criticisms. The surface is crucial to Dunsany's writing; his works make up "many individual patches into one quilt without beginning or end," and they can be approached as an "expression of a repeated poetic pattern, point and counterpoint, not just at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, but of metaphor and narrative form" (25). His writing also continually reuses familiar personifications of abstract concepts: "Death...