Leothric, the son of the local lord vows to obtain it: the yet unmade sword, to be forged from the rod protecting the spine of the metallic dragon-crocodile Tharagavverug.
Inside he encounters camel-riders armed with scimitars, a giant spider spinning obstructive ropes, queens and princes dining, and dream spirits that resemble beautiful women but have fire in their eye sockets.
Dunsany's greatest strength as a short story writer was his evocative power; plot and character were in the service of image and atmosphere,[1] and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" makes full use of this ability.
[1] "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" was first published in Dunsany's collection The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories, printed by George Allen & Sons in 1908.
[4][6] "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" has been called one of Dunsany's best stories,[7] "his first indisputable masterpiece",[1] and "one of the finest short pieces of its type in English".
[2] The story was a major influence and inspiration for writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, and Jack Vance, but Dunsany was unaware of this until nearly the end of his life.
It has been called "perhaps the first sword and sorcery story ever written", with almost all the usual elements of the type present,[1][8] and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy states that it "almost singlehandedly created the Sword and Sorcery genre";[5] in his introduction to In the Land of Time, and Other Fantasy Tales, S. T. Joshi noted it as one of several of Dunsany's stories which might be said to have created the subgenre.