There is little I like more than a fucked up fairy. This is my mother’s fault. I have a distinct memory of being five or six, bored at the library book about fairies with butterfly wings sleeping in flowers my mom was reading to my sister, and my mother stopping, looking at me and saying: “You know, real fairies are scary.” And I blinked said “What?” And she said “In the old stories, fairies steal babies.” And I said “What?” And she said “Go ask the librarian to find you books about changelings.” And I scurried away out of her hair and into a lifelong folklore obsession.
Which is to say: of course I like this story. The best burglar in the world decides to venture into an enchanted forest and rob some creepy fairies. The tone and language Dunsany uses are very reminiscent of that in the old folklore collections I used to cart around as a kid. And I propose that ‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’, henceforth stylized as ‘Nuth’ , is fairytale as weird fiction.
The ‘weird’ comes in here through three doors. First: the way the story meanders. In the anthology, it is a three page story, and it is only at the bottom of the second page that we hear about Nuth’s plan with the gnoles. This is very much in line with old folklore, where we will spend several pages of backstory on a king getting married, only for the actual action to start 2/3s of the way through a story. This sort of structure is rare in modern works, and even by 1912 had been largely abandoned by writers. So I propose: the Weird dwells, in part, in the story structure itself, by destabilizing a reader’s expectations for when a story ‘starts.’
Second: the weird comes from what is Not Spoken. Our unnamed narrator is an insider in the world of burglary, and their narration assumes we either are, or would find the details superfluous. The narrator is always saying things like “The details of the likely lad’s apprenticeship I do not propose to give; for those that are in the business know those details already, and those that are in other businesses care only for their own…(69).” So we know details are left out, that there is more to this story, to the shadowy world of burglars with names like Nuth and Slith, who take apprentices and try to rob fairy folk. And as always, it is the things unsaid that make a story Weird. And so when the story reaches: “And where they took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say (70).” The details we can imagine are far more unsettling than any concrete Truth Dunsany could provide. And that is where the Weird dwells: in the knowledge that the Unknown is far more unsettling than any Known could be.
The third element of the Weird, and something that warmed my poet’s heart, was the language used to describe the gnole’s domain. Lines like “the sunset flared full of omens (70)”, “there was that look in the sky that was worse than a spoken doom (70)”, and “the silence that, though ominous, was earthly, became unearthly like the touch of a ghoul (70)”, creates unusual imagery that both makes it clear that Nuth and Tommy Tonker had passed into their normal world into one that operates on new rules, also makes the story compulsively readible.
I also greatly appreciate that Dunsay does not describe the gnoles. We know they hoard giant emeralds that are worthless until they pass out of the enchanted woods. We know they live in a “lean, high house (70)”. We know they watch people “through knavish holes that they bore in the trunks of trees (70)”. But we do not know what they look like. All we know is Nuth, a perhaps sociopathic burglar, looks on with “mild surprise (70)” as the gnoles do unspeakable things to his apprentice.
And I do find that refreshing. I think modern horror is too tied to showing you a creature. And I won’t pretend that I don’t ooo and aaah at very good creature design. But sometimes, seeing the creature ruins things. Especially in a short piece. Sometimes seeing the creature deflates the atmosphere of carefully constructed Dread. Dunsany understands us. We don’t need to see the gnoles, we don’t even need to know what they’re capable of. All we need to understand, really, is Tommy Tonker’s screams.
I think this one is tied with ‘Sredni Vashtar’ for me. I really found it delightful. It is absolutely worth reading, and one I am going to come back to over and over again. I know creepy fairies are en vouge among a certain kind of nerd, and if you’re that kind of nerd you should absolutely read this as an early entry into the genre. Simply delightful.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 