"Idle Days on the Yann" is a short story by the Irish writer Lord Dunsany. It takes place in the Lands of Dream and follows an Irishman's voyage down a river flanked by fantastical cities. It was published in the short story collections ''

A Dreamer's Tales ''A Dreamer's Tales'' is the fourth book by Irish fantasy writer Lord Dunsany, considered a major influence on the work of J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others. It was first published in hardcover by George Allen ...

'' (1910) and ''

Tales of Three Hemispheres ''Tales of Three Hemispheres'' is a collection of fantasy short stories by Lord Dunsany. The first edition was published in Boston by John W. Luce & Co. in November, 1919; the first British edition was published in London by T. Fisher Unwin in Ju ...

'' (1919).

Sidney Sime Sidney Herbert Sime (;1865 – 22 May 1941) — he usually signed his works as S. H. Sime — was an early 20th century English artist, mostly remembered for his fantastic and satirical artwork, especially his story illustrations for Irish f ...

illustrated the story with two images. Dunsany wrote two sequel stories, both published in 1912. H. P. Lovecraft took inspiration from "Idle Days on the Yann" for several of his stories.

Background

Like many of Dunsany's early works, "Idle Days on the Yann" is set in a dreamworld where the descriptions recall Arabia, Greece, North Africa and India. In his autobiography ''Patches of Sunlight'' (1938), Dunsany explained the background to this setting as a combination of Biblical readings, an interest in Greco-Roman antiquity, having briefly seen

Tangier Tangier ( ; ; ar, طنجة, Ṭanja) is a city in northwestern Morocco. It is on the Moroccan coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar, where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel. The town is the capi ...

at the turn of the century, stories about Egypt his father had told him, the impact of

Rudyard Kipling Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( ; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)''The Times'', (London) 18 January 1936, p. 12. was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work. ...

's fiction at a young age, and experiences from South Africa during the

Second Boer War The Second Boer War ( af, Tweede Vryheidsoorlog, , 11 October 189931 May 1902), also known as the Boer War, the Anglo–Boer War, or the South African War, was a conflict fought between the British Empire and the two Boer Republics (the South ...

. "Idle Days on the Yann" in particular was written in anticipation for a trip down the Nile.

Plot summary

At the River Yann, the nameless protagonist embarks on the ship ''Bird of the River'' to travel to ''Bar-Wul-Yann'': the Gate of Yann. He says he is from Ireland, and the sailors mock him because no such place exists in the land of dreams. When everybody on board pray to their gods, the protagonist chooses the obscure and abandoned god Sheol Nugganoth. The ship makes stops at the cities Mandaroon, where the citizens sleep to prevent the gods from dying and dreaming to end, and Astahahn, where citizens use ancient rituals to prevent Time from slaying the gods. In Perdóndaris, a merchant buys the captain's cargo of ''toomarund'' carpets and smokable ''tollub''. The protagonist is impressed by Perdóndaris, but discovers a huge ivory gate made of one solid piece, and returns to the ship terrified. A couple of days later, they stop at Nen, the last city on the river. Nen is crowded with Wanderers, a strange singing and dancing tribe that descends from the mountains once every seven years. The ship finally reaches the Gate of Yann: two narrow, mountain-high, smooth and pink marble cliffs that the river flows between into the sea. Departing, the protagonist knows he will not meet the captain again, because his fancy is growing weaker.

Reception

The Gate of Yann (Idle Days on the Yann)

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival and became a pillar of the Irish liter ...

wrote: "Had I read 'The Fall of Babbulkund' or 'Idle Days on the Yann' when I was a boy, I had perhaps been changed for better or worse, and looked to that first reading as the creation of my world; for when we are young the less circumstantial, the further from common life a book is, the more does it touch our hearts and make us dream. We are idle, unhappy, exorbitant, and like the young

Blake Blake is a surname which originated from Old English. Its derivation is uncertain; it could come from "blac", a nickname for someone who had dark hair or skin, or from "blaac", a nickname for someone with pale hair or skin. Another theory, presuma ...

admit no city beautiful that is not paved with gold and silver."

Legacy

Dunsany wrote two sequels to the story: "The Shop in Go-by Street" and "The Avenger of Perdóndaris". Both were first published in 1912 and included, together with the original story, in ''

'' (1919). In the sequels, the same narrator tries to return to the Lands of Dream to revisit the crew of the ''Bird of the River'', but has trouble doing so. The stories further explore Dunsany's conception of poetic imagination as an intermediary between the ordinary world and the lands of myths and dreams, as well as the view that all these worlds are illusions. The surface plot of H. P. Lovecraft's 1919 short story " The White Ship" is modeled on "Idle Days on the Yann". Unlike Dunsany, Lovecraft made his tale allegorical and included philosophical themes. Lovecraft's "

The Cats of Ulthar "The Cats of Ulthar" is a short story written by American fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft in June 1920. In the tale, an unnamed narrator relates the story of how a law forbidding the killing of cats came to be in a town called Ulthar. As the nar ...

" (1920) also features a tribe called the Wanderers, with similarities to the one in "Idle Days on the Yann". Further,

Robert M. Price Robert McNair Price (born July 7, 1954) is an American New Testament scholar. His most notable stance is arguing in favor of the Christ myth theorythe claim that a historical Jesus did not exist. Price is the author of a number of books on bi ...

has argued that the name of Lovecraft's fictional deity

Shub-Niggurath Shub-Niggurath is a fictional deity created by writer H. P. Lovecraft. She is often associated with the phrase "The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young". The only other name by which Lovecraft referred to her was "Lord of the Wood" in ...

is likely to have been inspired by Sheol Nugganoth in Dunsany's story.

Jorge Luis Borges Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known b ...

included "Idle Days on the Yann" in his

Library of Babel "The Library of Babel" ( es, La biblioteca de Babel) is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain ...

References

Footnotes

Sources

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External links

Project Gutenberg text
* {{Lord Dunsany Short stories by Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany 1910 short stories Fantasy short stories Short stories about dreams Works set on ships