Lord Dunsany Review: The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth

In The Sword of Welleran, Dunsany followed the short works “The Whirlpool” and “The Hurricane” with the much longer “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth.” It follows the meandering course of actual folklore and sounds sounds like a lost work of the Grimm Brothers.

When the villainous sorcerer Gaznak returned to Earth on his great comet, he began corrupting the people of Allarhurion with dreams of Satan. To save their souls, the hero Leothric set out to defeat Gaznak in his fortress, which as the title tells us, was unvanquishable except by the sword Sacnoth.

First, Leothric needed to forge the sword from the body of the deadly metalic dragon-crocodile Tharagvverug. Slaying the monster led to task after task while he stormed Gaznak’s fortress. Finally he defeated the sorcerer and saved the souls of Allarhurion.

While “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” didn’t have a twist ending like “The Sword of Welleran,” it felt even more representative of Dunsany’s fantasy. The ending of “Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” involved the ongoing debate about the reliability of the legends of Leothric. Oftentimes real folklore broke the model of the Freytag plot pyramid to go off on a divergence like that. I think it was this sense of “authentic fantasy” that made Lovecraft such a fan of Dunsany’s storytelling.

The writing style was similar to old, pre-Disney faiey tales. This sentence is a good representative:

And the spell was a compulsive, terrible thing, having a power over evil dreams and over spirits of ill; for it was a verse of forty lines in many languages, both living and dead, and had in it the word wherewith the people of the plains are wont to curse their camels, and the shout wherewith the whalers of the north lure the whales shoreward to be killed, and the word that causes elephants to trumpet; and every one of the forty lines closed with a rhyme for “wasp.”

You don’t find single sentences like that anymore.

I liked the short works before this one in the collection but “The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth” would be my pick for the best story in The Sword of Welleran.