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Study 021 - The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth (Patreon)

Published:
2022-12-08 21:39:57
Imported:
2026-06
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Join us as we breach The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth by Lord Dunsany!

Special thanks to Greig Johnson - check out his Etsy shop and nab something up for the holidays!

And check out these tracks from the show by musical guest Rags Ov Light:

Hymns Wreathed in Quiet Ruin 

An Ordinary Haunting 

The God Machine Oracle 

The House at the Edge of the Woods 

To Bargain With the Devil 

The Quiet Valley 

A Gathering of Weird Sisters 

Next Up: The Sea and Little Fishes by Terry Pratchett

Comments

Beanz

Listening to this a second time... it would be a great children's fantasy movie. It's giving me Jim Henson's Labyrinth and Dark Crystal vibes. (Your music overlay at the end added to this. Perfect combo.)

Drix

I gotta say, I really loved this story. It's so over indulgently metal, I had to read it twice. On the first read, as soon as I read that Gaznak lives on a comet, doom metal started playing in my head for the rest of the story. So on the second read, I slapped on some Electric Wizard and let the riffs carry me through the vanquishing. It's certainly easy to imagine Dunsany sitting down to write this after a few pulls on the old Wong Bongerok. If ever there was a story ripe to become a doom metal concept album, this is it.

Erik Gordon

Just a bit of yackety sacxhoth. Waldreron and belldirerac music plays. Doors upon doors

Erik Gordon

The origin of yackety sachs

Jeff C. Carter

I bet Dunsany had the sickest painted van.

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Funny coincidence but I just read this story earlier this week, since I am currently working my way through Brian Murphy's Flame and Crimson: A History of Sword-and-Sorcery (2020), a scholarly but very readable history of the genre. Murphy maintains that the first true Sword & Sorcery story is Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom" but points to Dunsany's "Sacnoth" and "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller" as important precursors of the genre. Moreover to weight in on your discussion about what defines a Sword & Sorcery story, Murphy offers a lot of suggestions as oppose to a binding definition, but what makes the most sense to me is that Sword & Sorcery is amoral fantasy. In other words not Lord of the Rings where everyone in the Fellowship is acting in the service of the greater good. If Conan had been at the Council of Elrond and was asked to travel to Mt. Doom to destroy the One Ring he would have wanted to know how much he's getting paid and when he gets a turn ravishing Arwen before they leave. And if the answer to either of those questions is no then you better hope that Saruman isn't offering a more lucrative deal.

Jason Thompson

Thank you so much! LOVE Dunsany and love this story. As you point out it’s obviously a little tongue in cheek…but idk, I think the balance of epic and crazy is just right… (his earlier work is much more pompous, and his later work is much more tongue-in-cheek). it’s not like it has “jokes” it’s just sort of ridicuserious. I was 12 when I read it first but that can’t be Dunsany’s core audience can it???

Sam Harris

More doors? Look at him simply walking into more doors. I love Dunsany, and this is one that I always come back to.

Aaron La Vene

Is it sad I also remember the exact episode number to Day of the dragon? It is my go to episode to show people when I introduce them to this show. I don’t think I’ll ever forget my wife and I cracking up in this tiny bungalow off the road in the middle of the mountains in Thailand listening to this episode. Thankfully no one was in the bungalow next to us because at multiple times we were cackling.

Professor Murder

Was I the only one that feels this story helped to inspire the film Krull? Fantasy setting with a threat from space, prophesied weapon, giant spider, and even the fantasy temptation sequence. Good stuff.

Ethan Cordray

Dunsany's horde-of-pawns chess variant is intriguing. But I don't know if you've heard of his *other* chess variant? In that one, the Black side starts with only a single pawn -- but whenever that pawn says that it has the sword Sacnoth, it immediately wins the game.

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

The Village People were peaceful? Weren't they all in the navy? Anyway, I was half hoping the sword would turn out to be nothing particularly special (despite its croco-dragon origin), and the fact that its legend made all the evil minions run away, leaving Gaznak defenseless, would be its real power. Lastly, this story is in an anthology called "Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons," edited by Peter Bebergal [edit: name corrected 3 weeks later] and distributed in the US by MIT Press. I briefly confused it in my mind when I saw the title of this episode with the first story in that anthology, Lin Carter's "How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zaremm," which should of course not be confused with Lovecrafts's "The Doom that Came to Sarnath," also in that volume. Sacnoth, Sargoth, Sarnath, whatever. (Other stories include such past friends of the show as "Empire of the Necromancers," "Tower of the Elephant," and "Black God's Kiss," plus a Manly Wade Wellman story called "Straggler from Atlantis" I'm looking forward to reading. But first I need to get all my end-of-semester grading done and finish Zelazny so I can listen to the last two episodes from October.)

Karlandos

It’s weird. His stories from when you guys covered them kind of annoyed me but this i find kind of enjoyable especially the ending where he self criticized that it could be nothing more then a fever dream or story he found. It has a quality similar to the Legend of Zelda games where Link is merely one aspect of a fated event meant to happen so all the things he needs are given to him and then goes to set the world right again.

Squirrely_Wrath

Thank you Chad for not letting the village people line slip by without comment. My head went immediately to the same place and I laughed (to my co-workers seemingly for no reason) and would have felt extra embarrassed if you hadn't said something.

Mistress Frieren

I wonder if Miyazaki read Dunsany? Leothric made me think of Lothric from the Dark Souls series. Not sure of the origin.

Long time hater

I'm with Professor Murder on the Krull connection, first thing I thought when the castle disappeared leaving him in the Marsh (as the fortress moves location in the film...I imagined the same level of visual sophistication). Follow-up question, were there any listeners who heard Chris say 'more doors, a lot more doors' that didn't think 'one does not simply walk into more doors/mordor(s)?

Jerome Arnold

I fully expect Greig to make a replica of Sacnoth for his Etsy store, even if only as a letter opener—albeit of actual sword size, of course. ⚔️

Hayden Orr

Man, great story, and that “Monster” Johnson always rocks my world..with his readings!

superkeaton

Fine, I'll say it, Castledunsania

Aaron La Vene

This story was awesome . I wanna play this video game

Steve

The only word I know that rhymes with wasp is knosp, an unopened flower bud, usually as a decoration in architecture.

Michael Cunliffe

Maybe it’s just from listening to your light hearted take on this one, but I wonder if Dunsany is making a bit of a jab at his critics (or his fellow rich writers) with this one? Flagging the link between Sword and Sorcery and Myth as you have, I would argue that the former is seen as a juvenile version of the latter - a respectable gentlemen shouldn’t be messing around with childish fairy stories, but it is perfectly respectable to read the Odyssey or Edda. In addition to being somewhat self-deprecating, this story also seems to poke fun at classical myth. How often has Hercules or Thor succeeded in a quest because they were told the exact thing they needed to do, or a mortal been undone by doing the exact thing they were told not to? Why not skip the Phoricides and just call Medusa ‘Medusa who you need to look into a reflection to kill’ and be done with it? You know from the start that Perseus is going to succeed, and how is that any less ridiculous than fairies and Welsh snake people?

Leigh Candalino

Maybe I’m putting too much thought into this but could the Sword & Sorcery genre be defined as a story with at least one sword and some sorcery? If so, a story with a magic sword fits the bill!

King Dinosaur

Thank you for covering a Dunsany story. I've been having trouble sleeping, lately. Zzzz...

Харитонский Виталий

Such a wonderful bag of nonsense. What I thought could "improve" a story is when Gaznak is killed the fortress which holds the world also collapses and the world dies slowly and everyone blames Leothric. Kinda mirrors everyday life tragedy: some parts of humanity must suffer and the suffering cannot be resolved through conflict because of the fear of greater tragedy.

Matt Shank

I refuse to believe this isn't someone's DnD one-shot. What a delightful pile of nonsense. Clearly Sacnoth is just a sweet sentient magic item that gives you advantage on Intimidation checks and can cast Find Traps.

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

This is good clean fun. And also the sort of thing I could imagine a precocious 10-year-old coming up with. Which is fine. I like talking with precocious 10-year-olds.

Erik Sieurin

I have no problem with people recognizing Sacnoth. A sword literally consisting of the whole spine of a giant-dragon-crocodile, like some huge Final Fantasy weapon, with a huge eye at the end, that its wearer obviously cannot really sheathe - he need only point out it, and there can be no other sword, and then I'd run too. These prototype-Saruman henchmonsters are genre savvy!

Matthew Alderman

So many names. The sword Shazbot, and isn’t Gaznak the bad guy from the Smurfs?

Matthew Alderman

In one of Dunsany’s more unabashedly mythopoetic works, he has a supreme deity Māna-Yood-Sushāї whose dreams are reality and whose waking will signal the end of the world. Reminded me of Gaznak’s dreams.

Mark K

I read this earlier in the year as part of the Peter Babergal's Appendix N collection, and it had me chuckling all the way through. By the time they got to the 200 manservants running away sequentially, I was on the floor. Listening to the podcast I started thinking about it like a Bosch painting, where it's just a million really weird things happening, and mundane things like the order of events or logic just don't matter. Is there a link to the Dunsany chess article mentioned in the 'cast?