"The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men" (1911)

Here we find Lord Dunsany in more typical form: a long ambiguous title, a very short story, and lots of made-up words and proper nouns: the Dubious Land (a dark forest), a creature called a mipt, an evidently dangerous geographic feature referred to as "the crack in the World," and high levels of unexpected danger everywhere. It's whimsical like Tolkien and lots of fantasy, but not Polyannaish but rather bitingly sardonic. The three literary men—Slith, the only thief with experience, with Sippy and Slorg—are intent on stealing a golden box from a powerful being in a faraway land because they believe it is filled with poetry (obviously my favorite point in this story). The writer notes that "it is lonely to sit around the camp-fire by night with no new songs." The "probable" is in the title because the adventurers never returned, having presumably failed, probably the way the story tells it. The story is from Lord Dunsany's collection The Book of Wonder, which features illustrations by his usual collaborator, Sidney Sime. In the case of this collection, however, they switched things up. Sime prepared illustrations first and then the Irish nobleman dreamed up explanations for them. The result was some of Lord Dunsany's best stories. The image above is the one Sime created for this story. Knowing the process, it's apparent the writer often labors to make things fit. You can almost feel the surge when he lands on something he thinks is working. That's most obvious in the prize, won at last (though not really), which is absurdly detailed (because, as always, everything here is merely probable):

What was their joy, even at that perilous moment, as they lurked between the guardian and the abyss, to find that the box contained fifteen peerless odes in the alcaic form, five sonnets that were by far the most beautiful in the world, nine ballads in the manner of Provence that had no equal in the treasuries of man, a poem addressed to a moth in twenty-eight perfect stanzas, a piece of blank verse of over a hundred lines on a level not yet known to have been attained by man, as well as fifteen lyrics on which no merchant would dare to set a price.

Really. You have to ask yourself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.