Dunsany

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The Irish fantasy writer and playwright Edward Plunkett, an eighteenth-generation peer of Irish nobility ; a small rural village in County Meath in eastern Ireland
2. An Irish author of imaginative fantasy tales and plays, known by his peerage title ; a little settlement in County Meath in the east of Ireland
3. The Anglo-Irish peer and fantasy writer Edward Plunkett ; a tiny village located in County Meath, Republic of Ireland

Etymology: Edward Plunkett, the 18th Baron Dunsany, was an Irish writer whose title came from a place: Dunsany is a small village in County Meath, in the Irish midlands, and the family took its name from the estate there. The name itself is an Anglicised form of the Irish "Dún Sanctáin," meaning roughly "fort of Sanctán," a personal name that gives the place its character as a settlement built around a defended site. The Plunketts held the barony from 1439, so the title predates the family's literary fame by several centuries. Lord Dunsany (1878–1957) became famous for fantasy stories and plays that shaped the genre, with invented gods, dreamlike realms and a prose style that influenced writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and J. R. R. Tolkien. The name therefore now belongs to two things at once: a quiet Meath village and the writer who made the title famous far beyond Ireland.