Character guide

Unknown

major

Also known as myself, yer

This first-person presence drifts through Dunsany's tales as witness, petitioner, and eavesdropper — praying to a snout-faced idol, overhearing Mother Earth murmur of dreams and battles, and watching the beasts quarrel over a race. He is less a personality than a sensibility: curious, compassionate, faintly melancholy, always arriving where mortals and immortals collide. His wanderings give the collection its connective tissue, letting each fable open like something he stumbled into by night.

Death

major

Also known as Death Death

Death moves through these tales as a figure of wounded pride rather than simple menace, sulking in Olympian courts where Love laughs at him and scheming to prove himself. He appears at restaurant tables, in the courts of gods, and at the side of dying women, always drawn to the moment when beauty or bravado falters. His grudge against being laughed at drives him toward Odysseus, and his quiet presence at human quarrels makes him the collection's most persistent shadow.

Pan

major

Also known as Horned Pan, memorable Pan, O Pan

Pan is the collection's great absent presence, the old god whose death the modern world commemorates with a carved tomb and self-congratulation. Builders raise his monument, some weep for him and others revile him, and the enlightened gather to deplore his wicked age. But he slips out of the forest like a shadow, sees the tomb, and laughs — a tension between official mourning and living survival that haunts the tales of flowers and cities.

Odysseus

supporting

Odysseus appears late in life, white-locked and bent over a hearth, when Death comes to frighten him and finds instead a man who once made him work around Ilion. Their exchange is the collection's sharpest reversal: the trickster-hero treats the terror of the gods as a familiar, slightly tiresome subordinate. His brief scene matters because it shows what mortal cunning looks like when it has outlived its own legends.

Charon

supporting

Also known as Charon Charon

Charon belongs to the collection's underworld machinery, the silent boatman whose presence marks the threshold between one state and another. He is less a personality than a function — the one who carries souls across — and his tale gives Dunsany room to meditate on what passage costs and who pays it. In a book obsessed with endings and afterlives, he is the quiet figure at the water's edge.

The Hare

supporting

Also known as Hare

The Hare enters the fable as the presumed champion, backed by partisans who insist his ears guarantee victory, yet he meets the whole affair with scratching indifference and open scorn for his rival. His supporters desert and return as the catchphrases shift, and his own arrogance keeps pulling him off the track to sit and scratch. He embodies the collection's suspicion of natural advantage and public confidence, and his race becomes a satire of how crowds manufacture certainties.

The Tortoise

supporting

Also known as damned Tortoise

In the beasts' long quarrel over whether the Hare or the Tortoise ran swifter, the Tortoise alone welcomed the decisive contest and never shirked it. When the race was run and the Hare lay sleeping, the Tortoise crossed the line and told his friends it was 'a glorious victory for the forces of swiftness'—a phrase the snails still repeat. But when the forest-fire came by night, the beasts chose the Tortoise as their messenger to warn the woods, and his slowness becomes the tale's quiet, terrible hinge.

Winter

supporting

Once he rode into the city with prancing winds and glittering icicles; now he sits huddled in a grey battered cloak, a little wind at the corner like a hungry dog. Hearing Spring approach, he warns her that she can do nothing here, yet rises and strides away, growing kinglier with every league until he passes through his ice barriers that never knew the sun. His retreat is the tale's whole weather: the old season's dignity, its stubbornness, and the world's quiet handing-over to someone younger.

Spring

supporting

Spring arrives to find Winter huddled inglorious at a street corner and simply says, 'Begone'—then sets about the city he abandoned. She sings a dejected dog into gambolling, whispers to trees until green buds peep out like stars, wakes the maternal earth into crocus and grass, and tells the air to be joyous. Buttonholes appear on young men's coats; children discover daisies in unfrequented corners. Her work is small, patient, and complete, and it matters because it shows what gentleness can do that force cannot.

The North Wind

minor

Personified wind, appears in wind and fog tale.

Mother Earth

supporting

Also known as Mother

Returning late from roaming among the stars, the poet finds Mother Earth sitting dark in Space, murmuring tales of her children. He recites humanity's marvels—machinery, politics, science, steam, electricity, even Parliament—and she remembers none of it, repeating only 'Dreams and battles.' She croons of poets and heroes and ancient wars while her son tries to make her proud of the modern age. Her forgetfulness is the story's judgment: what the world calls progress, the oldest witness does not even bother to recall.

Time

supporting

Also known as Great clumsy Time

Time has spared no painted face in all the world except the Sphinx's, and there he lies in the sand with his foolish hair spread about her paws, smiting cities when he should be smiting her. The narrator dreams of blinding him, shutting him in the Pyramid of Cheops, and making him ripen corn and do menial work—if only the Sphinx will betray his secret. But the same dream fears that in his ultimate anguish Time may blindly pull down the House of Man. He is the tale's tyrant and its fool, and the tension between those two is the whole story.

Fame

minor

Also known as Lovely Fame

Personification of fame, appears as a character.

Notoriety

minor

Personification of notoriety, appears alongside fame.

Helen of Troy

minor

Also known as Helen

The legendary beauty, appears in a tale.

Puritan

minor

A Puritan figure, appears as a character in a tale.

Thlūnrāna

minor

A mysterious entity or place, appears in a tale of enemy arrival.

The Devil

minor

The devil, appears briefly in a tale.

Furrow-Maker

minor

A personified figure, appears in his own tale.

The High Muses

minor

Also known as the Muses

The mythological muses, invoked or appearing in tales.

King Seti

minor

Ancient Egyptian pharaoh, appears in a tale.

Pegasus

minor

The winged horse, appears in a tale.