The Witches of Appendix N: Lord Dunsany

 In my coverage of the Witches of Appendix N, I have shown you Robert E. Howard’s decadent sorceresses, Lin Carter's dangerous enchantresses and Fritz Leiber’s suburban witches. They think of ambition, forbidden knowledge, demon bargains, and spell-casting as spectacle.

But Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, aka Lord Dunsany gives us something older.

Dunsany’s witches are not conquerors. They are not queens of abyssal realms. They do not hurl lightning from towers. They live in fields, beside willows, at the edges of villages. They speak quietly. And they are feared.

For this entry, I am looking at three works:

• The King of Elfland's Daughter (1924)
• The Witch of the Willows (in The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens) (1931)
• The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933)

You could almost describe these as “pre-Pulp.”

Ziroonderel - The Witch of Erl

In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, we meet Ziroonderel, a witch who lives on a thunder-haunted hill at the edge of Erl.

She is the most fully realized witch in Dunsany’s work.

Alveric seeks her out to make him a magic sword so that he may reach Elfland. She first reveals to him her “true, hideous form,” a withered shape. When he does not recoil, she grants him something rare: gratitude that “may not be bought, nor won by any charms that Christians know.”

That line matters.

Ziroonderel does not operate on commerce. She operates on dignity. Courtesy is repaid with loyalty. Magic here is personal, not transactional.

She occupies a liminal position:

• Outside the human community of Erl
• Outside Christian respectability
• Outside Elfland

She belongs fully to none of them.

Later, she becomes the infant Orion’s nursemaid. This is not incidental. Dunsany entrusts her with the child who bridges mortal and fairy worlds. The witch becomes caretaker of the future.

She is ancient, knowledgeable about both mortal and fairy realms, yet not omniscient. In one of the most fascinating moments of the novel, she speaks at length with Lirazel about matters beyond mortal knowledge, and it is the fairy princess who teaches her. For all her hundred years of wisdom, Ziroonderel can still learn.

She may even have feelings for Alveric. Yet she nonetheless aids him in his pursuit of Lirazel. Devotion does not curdle into spite.

When the Parliament of Erl later asks her for a “spell against magic,” she refuses flatly. She will not participate in a project of disenchantment.

Compared to the Christian friar who opposes her, Ziroonderel is morally richer and more generous. She is old, hideous in her true form, benevolent in her function, fiercely independent, and capable of loyalty.

For Appendix N, she is the hedge witch elevated to myth. Not a villain. Not a demon’s bride. A guardian of thresholds.

Mrs. Marlin, The Wise Woman of the Bog

In The Curse of the Wise Woman, Dunsany gives us Mrs. Marlin.

She is called a “wise woman,” but we eventually see the truth: she is a witch.

Unlike Ziroonderel, Mrs. Marlin exists in a recognizable, semi-autobiographical rural Ireland of the 1880s. She is not part of high fantasy. She is embedded in peasant life. Her nature is revealed gradually.

She is extraordinarily attuned to the workings of nature. She can foresee events. She is the self-appointed guardian of the bog.

And the bog matters.

When an English corporation arrives, intent on draining and industrializing the land, only one force stands in the way: the old witch whose curses the English workers do not believe in.

Their skepticism is central. Mrs. Marlin operates in a world that is trying to explain her away.

She communes with nature. When workmen tunnel for peat beneath the bog, she sets her arts to work. The climax pits ancient powers against industrial machinery.

Whether what happens is supernatural or natural is left deliberately ambiguous. Dunsany refuses to settle the matter cleanly.

Where Ziroonderel lives in a world where magic is acknowledged, Mrs. Marlin lives in a world that no longer wishes to acknowledge it. She is less a sorceress casting spells than a personification of the bog itself. Old Ireland embodied in a human form.

Magic here is not about power. It is about land. It is about memory. It is about resistance to modernity.

The Witch of the Willows

“The Witch of the Willows,” the 13th Chapter and final story in The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens, presents the most archetypal and yet the most devastating of Dunsany’s witches.

She is never named. But Dunsany makes sure we know exactly what she looks like.

An old woman in a black cloak and high black hat. A black stick in her hand. Grey ringlets. A black cat at her side. A broomstick leaning against the wall of her cottage. Jorkens himself notes the completeness of the iconography with a wry comparison: she dresses like a witch and acts like one, so he calls her one.

Dunsany is playing the archetype, the stereotype even, completely straight and clearly enjoying it.

She lives deep in Merlinswood, at the end of a path so faint it resembles a rabbit track. Her cottage has thick bottle-glass windows. Earthenware jars of cowslip and briar rose line the interior. It is an utterly traditional witch’s dwelling.

But she is far more than folklore. She is a prophetess of decline.

Over the fire she speaks of humanity losing its hold, of machinery, of people becoming more fit for machines and less fit for men. She reads the future in the coals and refuses to tell Jorkens what she sees because such knowledge “is the affair of the witches.” She is not a distributor of secrets. She is their keeper.

More than that, she is the guardian of the old magic itself.

The mystery of the marsh and wood moves with her. It radiates from her presence and recedes when she withdraws. When Jorkens refuses her proposal and walks away, the disenchantment of the forest is immediate and total. The magic does not merely leave her cottage. It leaves the world around her.

She does not wield magic as a tool. She is magic.

The turning point of the story is her proposal. “I suppose you wouldn’t marry an old, old woman,” she says. Every fairy tale warns us what this means. The loathly lady who becomes radiant. The enchantress in disguise. The swan maiden. The enchanted bride motif is firmly in place.

And Jorkens fails.

He knows full well what the tradition promises. Yet he chooses antimacassars and convention over enchantment. The witch is not cruel. She is not predatory. She offers entry into wonder, and he declines.

There is a flash of anger in her eyes, but she does not curse him.

She simply leaves.

And with her departure, the magic of the wood goes too.

Thirty years later, Jorkens knows it was the mistake of his life.

This witch is melancholy rather than malevolent. She sighs over the fire. She offers tea. She speaks with sorrow about humanity’s direction. She wants companionship, not conquest.

In her, Dunsany crystallizes a theme that runs through his entire body of work: magic is not destroyed by force. It is lost by refusal.

Dunsany’s Witches

Seen together, Dunsany’s witches form a progression.

• Ziroonderel stands at the boundary between mortal and fairy, dignified and principled, neither villain nor saint.
• Mrs. Marlin stands against industrial modernity, rooted in land and old Ireland, her powers entangled with ambiguity and resistance.
• The Witch of the Willows stands at the brink of disenchantment itself. She is not fighting priests or corporations. She is confronting indifference.

What the three witches share is significant: none is evil in any simple sense. All three are forces connected to something old, natural, or otherworldly that exists in tension with a more mundane or rational order. Dunsany consistently treats his witch figures with sympathy and complexity.

But they differ greatly in register. Ziroonderel belongs to high, lyrical fantasy and is fully visible as a witch from the start. Mrs. Marlin belongs to a grounded, realistic Irish novel where her nature is hinted at and debated. The witch of the willows seems, from what can be confirmed, to belong to the more melancholy and ambiguous register of the Jorkens tales, where wonder is usually tinged with loss.

There is also a progression in how magic is challenged.

• In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, magic is challenged by Christian piety.
• In The Curse of the Wise Woman, it is challenged by industrial capitalism.
• In “The Witch of the Willows,” it is undone by personal choice and cultural gravity.

In many ways, Dunsany’s witches feel closer to the folklore that later informed Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis than to pulp sorcery. They are remnants of something ancient, local, and very pagan.

So, yes, Howard gives us the witch-queens, and Carter and Leiber gave us the dangerous enchantress. 

D&D inherited witches from pulp spectacle and demonic sorcery. But it also inherited them from Dunsany’s countryside, from the woman in the black cloak at the end of a rabbit path, from the old guardian of the bog, from the witch who offered enchantment and was turned away.

And for Appendix N, that matters. For me, it matters.

This shows the witch as a liminal figure. A figure on the hedge. These are the witches that most folks will know.