In his 1998 preface to the Del Rey edition of Lord Dunsany's The Kind of Elfland's Daughter, Neil Gaiman wrote:
[Refering to an assertion that such excellent English literature as that of Shakespeare must have been written by members of the British aristocracy] And this is chiefly a source of puzzlement to me because the British aristocracy, while it has produced more than its share of hunters, eccentrics, farmers, warriors, diplomats, con men, heroes, robbers, politicians, and monsters, has never been noted in any century or era for the production of great writers.
Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett (1878-1957) was a hunter, a warrior, a chess champion, and a playwright, a teacher, and many another things besides, and he was a member of a family that could trace its lineage back to before the Norman Conquest; he was the eighteenth Baron Dunsany, and he is one of the rare exceptions.
Lord Dunsany wrote small tales of imaginary gods and thieves and heroes in distant kingdoms; he wrote tall stories based in the here and now and retold, by Mr. Joseph Jorkens, for whiskey in London clubs; he wrote autobiographies; he wrote fine poems and more than forty plays (at one point, reputedly, he had five plays being staged simultaneously on Broadway); he wrote novels of a vanished and magical Spain that never was; and he wrote The King of Elfland's Daughter, a fine, strange, almost forgotten novel, as too much of Dunsany's unique work is forgotten. If this book alone were all he had written, it would have been enough.
To begin with, the writing is beautiful. Dunsany wrote his books, we are told, with a quill pen, dipping and scritching and flowing his prose over sheets of paper, and his words sing, like those of a poet who got drunk on the prose of the King James Bible, and who has still not yet become sober.
Today, fantasy is, for better or for worse, just another genre, a place in a bookshop to find books that, too often, remind one of far too many other books (and many writers today would have less to say had Dunsany not said it first); it is an irony, and not entirely a pleasant one, that what should be, by definition, the most imaginative of all types of literature has become so staid, and, too often, downright unimaginative. The King of Elfland's Daughter, on the other hand, is a tale of pure imagination (and "bricks without straw," as Dunsany himself pointed out, "are more easily made than imagination without memories"). Perhaps this book should come with a warning: it is not a reassuring, by-the-numbers fantasy novel, like most of the books with elves, princes, trolls, and unicorns "between their covers." This is the real thing. It's a rich red wine, which may come as a shock if all one has had so far has been cola. So trust the book. Trust the poetry and the strangeness, and the magic of the ink, and drink it slowly.
Don Rodriguez was Dunsany's first novel. He had been writing shorter pieces, mostly fiction, for about twenty years. In his memoir entitled While Sirens Slept, he remembered writing Don Rodriguez:
Personally, it appears to me that in a page of a short story there must be more art than in a page of a three-volume novel, just as in a square inch of an ivory-carving there is more art than in a square inch of a wall of a palace: everything in fact in a short story must be fairly intense, as in a play, whereas there is room for a certain amount of rambling in a novel. However it be, I preferred the short story, dominated all the way by its plot and ornamented by good prose, but I now got to work on a novel called The Chronicles of Rodriguez. It was about a young man who sets out with one attendant, during the Golden Age in Spain, to look for the wars, and comes to the sort of inn that Doré used to draw, and meets the professor who held the Chair of Magic at the University of Saragossa, and finds a house in the forest so splendid that "it was there that Pedro the Magnificent in his cups gave Africa one spring night to his sister's son," and other castles in Spain. I wrote a good deal of it in February and March at Cannes, where we stayed with my wife's mother, Lady Jersey, in a hotel. Cannes was a very pleasant place in which to write, especially when one was writing of the warm south; and, besides that, I had the sight of the Esterels, always a ruddy purple in the evening, and far beyond them great mountains, which I used to go up to look at about sunset from a raised platform on the highest point above Cannes. [chap 8]
All the summer of 1921, in Kent and in Ireland, I went on with The Chronicles of Rodriguez, finishing it on 4th August. [chap 9]
The setting was Spain, probably for reasons suggested in this other memoir note. He had joined the army after finishing the British equivalent of West Point, and was sent to Gibralter in 1899:
From the hot Rock, with the cloud of the Levanter shut down on it like a lid, I used to ride into Spain [on horseback] in the afternoon...Thus I saw enough of Andalusia to have a landscape all ready in my mind when I came to write a novel, if novel be the right word for it, called The Chronicles of Rodriquez [also published as Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley]. [Patches of Sunlight, chap 13]
But a very great deal had happened between 1899 and 1921, when Dunsany wrote Rodriguez. The First World War began in August 1914, and despite claims at the time that it would be over by Christmas of that year, the true end came in an armistice in 1918, after millions had died and the European social fabric had been severely damaged.
Long retired from military service, Dunsany sought to rejoin, after the disastrous year of 1914 showed that this would be no small war, but for a variety of reasons he did not see action until 1917, a year he spent mostly in combat situations. I have read somewhere that he wrote the first chapter of Rodriguez during his Army service through 1918. Most of his writing during these years were short pieces based upon his experiences and observations (Tales of War).
By the time he was demobilized, Ireland (the lands upon which his wealth and title were based) was in revolt against England, and no clear authority was established in Ireland until the years after the completion of Rodriguez. In background and spirit, Dunsany always stood with England in the controversies engendered by that conflict, and there is reason to suspect that the "bad guys" in Rodriguez (known as La Garda) represent authority alien to Dunsany.
But the chief influence obvious upon the detail of this tale of fantasy was his experience of modern warfare. The evil nature of "machines" would remain a theme in Dunsany's writing for the rest of his life, a feeling certainly generated by seeing the machine gun in action during WWI, and then the tank, developed to counter the machine gun, and on and on.
It was Paul Fussell who wrote a marvelous book—The Great War and Modern Memory—on the meaning of WWI, at least in so far as its effect on culture. He points out that the British soldier had come into the Army with a background of heroic novels, such as William Morris' The Well at World's End, and most fully expected that their experience in warfare would somewhat mirror the swords and lances of such tales. Instead, they spent months in trenches ankle-deep with water, and with body parts scattered all around, unburiable because the enemy trenches were just yards across the mud.
In his 2006 essay "Lord Dunsany and the Great War: Don Rodriguez and the rebirth of romance," David Carlson argues that Dunsany deliberately sought to restore some of the spirit of that time before the Great War. That Rodriguez can be seen to be as "romantic" as Morris' novels is clear and is quite deliberate, but there are also many references to WWI within the novel, and several absurd statements reflecting the "war to end all wars" mantra that came in the aftermath to the armistice. For example, during the single battle (of what appears to have been a single-battle war), the soldiers line up and fire at one another with muskets, quickly switching to swords as the gunfire proves ineffective. Oh, and the battle only begins when both sides signal that they're ready. I do not read these passages as satirical but rather as lamenting that war could no longer be the gentlemanly, chivalric affair that was described so beautifully in the many boys books in pre-war England.
A very similar chain of events led J.R.R.Tolkien to begin writing stories.
He went to fight in WWI, spent four months on the Western Front and then got trench fever and was sent home to recover. All but one of his friends from the T.C.B.S. literary group were killed in the war, and to honor them and also to help work through his own awful war experiences, he decided to write down some stories. They were stories about elves and gnomes, but they were not cheery fairy tales—they were filled with war and violence and trenches dug under battlefields. [A Writer's Almanac]
In Dunsany's first book, there is also romantic 'romance', as well, as our hero finds his love (with a simple glance from a balcony). True to the spirit of early books, he must then prove himself worthy of her love. One could argue that, in the end, he hasn't done much worthwhile at all, and that all he ends up with is given to him, but then there are reasons for those gifts, as the story shows so well.
This is not a great novel. Dunsany exercised too much the qualities of a novel he notes above (a certain amount of rambling), almost certainly because he had a lot of rambling he wanted to express, and it would take a novel to justify it. But the story is generally fine, and the language often gorgeous. And there's humor to balance any excess of seriousness.