THE DEEP ONES: "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" by Lord Dunsany

"How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" by Lord Dunsany

Discussion begins September 26.

First published in the newspaper The Sketch on February 15, 1911 and in The Book of Wonder, A Chronicle of Little Adventures at the Edge of the World in 1912.


(1916 ed. pictured)

ONLINE VERSIONS

http://www.sff.net/people/doylemacdonald/d_nuth.htm
http://tinyurl.com/bn7dlsu

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63202

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Beyond the Fields We Know
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
The Wizards of Odd

MISCELLANY

http://www.dunsany.net/18th.htm
http://tinyurl.com/cq8oybj
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnoll
http://tinyurl.com/dx2y5tj
http://www.hplovecraft.com/life/interest/authors.asp

I'll be reading this one online.

I'm going to read it out of The Weird -- after making sure my couch has been reinforced to take the weight of that tome.

Online for me - love the title, btw.

It's been a while since I read this one -- based on the title, I initially thought this was the one about the rope salesman who went to try and peddle his wares to the gnomes (or whatever they were called).

>5 Petroglyph: The Weird has a Margaret St. Clair story "The Man Who Sold Rope to the Gnoles". Maybe that's the story you're thinking of.

A Brief History of Gnolls (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/89228/A-Brief-History-of-Gnolls%3A-Anthropophagy-and-Emeralds-from-Wales-to-Wisconsin-and-Beyond-%28revised-and-expanded-2nd-edition%29 ) has both stories in it, as well as some discussion of their context before and afterward.

>6 RandyStafford: Of course! I read that one in The Fantasy Hall of Fame edited by Robert Silverberg. For some reason, I'd misremembered it as one of Lord Dunsany's. Huh.

OK, so it's 00:03hrs on September 26th where I am.

I enjoyed this very short story. While the first few paragraphs contain much rambling prose typical of the time when it was written, I thought the fourth paragraph from the end was excellent at building the heights of discomfort and fear on the foundation of hints of horror sprinkled through the preceding paragraphs.

Interestingly enough, the current Baron Dunsay (The 21st Baron), the writer’s great grandson, is involved in the making of films, some of them horror films, and on occasion uses the family home, Dunsany Castle, as a location.

I liked this gentleman thief story which suddenly takes a bizarre turn when we first hear about burgling the gnoles. Though, as per >9 pgmcc:, it starts to get strange when we get a hint that Nuth has almost supernatural qualities of stealth. I also liked Slith being the name of the best known burglar -- and the vague mention of the his doom which we, of course, are said to know all about.

I also liked the touch with Tonker's screams coming faster and faster.

The bit about Slith reminded me of something that JRRT wrote (it's somewhere in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien - I'm not a position to dig out the exact reference right now) about the best stories always being the untold ones, but you still have to tell a story to allude to the untold ones.

I read "How Nuth" in Swedish translation long ago, so long ago that only the vaguest flickers of recollation surfaced when reading it now again. I recall more of other stories in the collection (The Book of Wonder), but it's probably high time I re-read them all.

What a fine, light soufflé of a story!

Concerning the bizarre turn (#10) I think it occurs later than the first reference to the gnoles. When we read of 'the magic circle of business' we take that as a metaphor for insiders and virtuosi, but it is a hint and may have a literal significance.

Next we do hear about 'to burgle the house of the gnoles' but only their odd name hints at what they might be. The first explicit supernatural reference is to no poacher 'snaring elves', rather than rabbits.

If Elric of Melniboné is the Eternal Champion, Nuth is the Eternal Burglar. He has it all - stealth, discretion, realibility.

I wonder who 'the old woman whose bonnet was lined with red' was? She found Nuth rather easily. Perhaps Nuth's flaw was in not checking Tonker's references enough. Or perhaps he intended Tonker to be a stalking horse to flush out the gnoles' defenses? The reference to the gnoles' 'knavish holes' is priceless: this just is not proper behavior in an intended victim.

The narrator of the story is 'on the side of Property' but he is well-informed about Nuth. This could be Nuth's blind side: that he allows strangers to know too much about his activities. Nuth is hale and hearty at the end, but one wonders for how long. Will he be wise enough to leave the gnoles alone or will he succumb to hubris and be entrapped by their next knavish trick?

>10 RandyStafford:, 12

The "bizarre turn" in this tale is a perfect example of Dunsany's signature talent of taking the reader "beyond the fields we know" into the realm of the faerie, the bizarre and the fantastic. The manner in which he does this usually surprises the reader as much as the story's (human) characters. It is so well done here that it's practically a blueprint for fantasy writers to come.

Nuth is very much the forefather of Leiber's Gray Mouser, although, as bertilak says, a little easier to locate. For such a short little tale Dunsany also nicely evokes the section of city in which it begins. Again, I was reminded more than a bit of Leiber and his famous creation, Lankhmar.

Dunsany is such a pleasure to read.

> 7

Paul Haynie's book notwithstanding, I find it hard to connect the D&D gnoll (tribal hyaena-man) to the gnoles of Dunsany's story, who seem to be a more august sort of monster that dines on fairies and the occasional apprentice thief.

> 12 I wonder who 'the old woman whose bonnet was lined with red' was? She found Nuth rather easily. Perhaps Nuth's flaw was in not checking Tonker's references enough.

This part was one of the best bits of the story to me:

And at last Nuth spoke, and very nervously the old woman explained that her son was a likely lad, and had been in business already but wanted to better himself, and she wanted Mr. Nuth to teach him a livelihood.

First of all Nuth wanted to see a business reference, and when he was shown one from a jeweller with whom he happened to be hand-in-glove the upshot of it was that he agreed to take young Tonker (for this was the surname of the likely lad) and to make him his apprentice.

Nuth (who never needed to advertise) was infamous in "the enchanted circle" of criminal pursuits (i.e. "business"), and thus the "likely lad" Tonker, already a criminal, though of uncertain proficiency, had probably named Nuth to his mother's inquiries about who might teach him to better himself at his chosen trade. The "business reference" is evidently an object stolen from the jeweller who had been a target of Nuth's before. The artfully polite way that Dunsany lays out these details is what makes this whole story such a gem.

The perfect "uh-oh" moment:

And Tonker heard his breath offending against that silence, and his heart was like mad drums in a night attack, and a string of one of his sandals went tap on a rung of a ladder, and the leaves of the forest were mute, and the breeze of the night was still; and Tonker prayed that a mouse or a mole might make any noise at all, but not a creature stirred, even Nuth was still.

That paragraph plays out so wonderfully in the reader's imagination. Kind of like a sequence in a Jeunet film.

I liked this one, too. If we use Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of short stories as our measure of success ("Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted"), then this is a great story indeed.

The best line (out of many good ones):

And where they took him it is not good to ask, and what they did with him I shall not say.

No, dude, seriously... Funny and chilling at the same time. How many other writers could pull that off?

The following line, perfectly capturing Nuth as the hardened old pro that he is, is great, too:

Nuth looked on for a while from the corner of the house with a mild surprise on his face as he rubbed his chin, for the trick of the holes in the trees was new to him; then he stole nimbly away through the dreadful wood.

Are there any further adventures of Nuth (by Eddie or anyone else)? If not, I sense a missed opportunity. :)

> 17 Further adventures by Nuth? Alas, as I feared, all did not turn out well for him:

"James Nuth, one of 150 convicts transported on the Caledonia, 19 June 1822": http://www.convictrecords.com.au/convicts/nuth/james/95252

As for related stories, Nuth seems like a distant ancestor of Matthew Hughes's gentleman burglar Luff Imbry to me.

>18 bertilak:

Actually, there appears to be no shortage of fiction concerning thieves in fantastic settings:

http://www.librarything.com/tag/fantasy,+thieves

>19 artturnerjr:

Ahh, yes... Nifft the Lean..... Another progeny of Nuth!

#7: The relation is distant and a bit tenuous, but I don't think it's all that controvertible. All from Haynie's book, who did get to interview Gary Gygax: Gary Gygax says that he based it off the 1951 Margaret St. Clair story (though not the Dunsany--the second edition of the book feels a need to elaborate on why exactly the St. Clair story is based on the Dunsany one) and the first D&D entry for gnolls, in 1974, says "A cross between Gnomes and Trolls (... perhaps, Lord Dunsany did not really make it all that clear) with + 2 morale. Otherwise they are similar to Hobgoblins, although the Gnoll King and his bodyguard of from 1 - 4 will fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power." Gygax denies writing the bit about Dunsany, but doesn't know who did; it's obvious, in any case, that someone was thinking along those lines. It's clear that the modern D&D gnoll doesn't derive much from Dunsany's gnoles, but it's pretty clear the modern D&D gnoll doesn't derive much from the OD&D gnolls, either. (A cross between gnomes and trolls? It's almost sad, yet a mark of sanity, that that quickly disappeared.)

I remember reading the Margaret St. Clair story in one of the Alfred Hitchcock anthologies; if I recall correctly the Gnoles are described as looking something like Jerusalem artichokes.

> 22

LOL.

Interesting segue to our next story: I definitely read "The Upper Berth" in Alfred Hitchcock's Ghostly Gallery.

In reply to myself @ 11, turns out that the tale of Slith actually is told, in ""The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men". I'd read it years ago, but forgotten the name of the character, and much else besides.

21 > I can't help but reflect that, in D&D, sanity is a good thing in the same sense that peace and harmony are good things in an action adventure.

> 25

Back in the days when I played D&D, we didn't have any "sanity"! That's some newfangled borrowing from the Call of Cthulhu RPG, no?

26 > I did not, and I presume prosafiles did not, mean sanity in a game-mechanical sense (which AFAIK doesn't exist in any edition of D&D). Rather, we're refering to the wealth of craziness, explicit and implied, in creature descriptions and the like. Frex, the idea that a gnoll is a cross between gnome and troll.

Of course you didn't have sanity. Otherwise you wouldn't have been playing ;-) Craziness can be your friend though.

"Sure that's just mad, Ted."

> 27
Guess I needed that winky emoticon. ;-D

> 28
'Strewth.