‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ – Lord Dunsany

I don’t know if I’m looking in all the wrong places (probably) but I can’t seem to find anything by Lord Dunsany on the shelves at the moment; this is all the more annoying as I’ve never read any of his works up until now. I’d really love to get hold of a copy of ‘The King of Elfland’s Daughter’…
Luckily for me then, I found ‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ hidden within the depths of Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s ‘The Weird’, an anthology so large that I will never be able to review it all in one go. The plan is then to take bite sized chunks out of the book and feature them here every now and again. ‘How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon The Gnoles’ is the first such chunk…

‘Despite the advertisements of rival firms, it is probable that every tradesman knows that nobody in business at the present time has a position equal to Mr. Nuth.’

Mr. Nuth is… well, a master burglar with no rivals that even come close to his prowess. If you want something then Nuth is the man to get it for you even though there may be a price to pay later on; that price is worth it though. The story is only three pages long and at least a third of it is telling the reader how great Nuth is at his trade.

So far so… well, not really that weird at all. We’ve basically been shown a portrait of a man who is very good at his trade although the moment where he surprises visitors is a little unsettling…

‘For a long while they waited, and then there was a smell of pipe tobacco, and there was Nuth standing quite close to them.’

The weirdness is still to come and there is no doubt that Dunsany delivers on this score. Nuth and his young apprentice set out to steal emeralds from the Gnoles and Dunsay uses the plot to show us just how far outside human understanding the realm of Faerie is as well as how dangerous it can be.

‘The nearest village was some miles away with the backs of all it’s houses turned to the wood, and without one window at all facing in that direction.’

‘They saw the skeleton of some early Georgian poacher nailed to a door in an oak tree; sometimes they saw a fairy scuttle away from them…’

Dunsany shows us very clearly (but not too clearly as that would defeat the point) that there is a world just outside or view that operates on rules that we would be mad to try and understand. It is weird and we are right to be a little nervous and afraid as we follow Nuth and his apprentice into the wood.

In a setting like this, the only possible outcome to the job is the one that Dunsany gives us and he makes it all the more frightening by refusing to divulge the fate of the apprentice. Nuth escapes though and this reader was left wondering if Nuth had a little Faerie blood in him…
An excellent tale and I will put a lot more effort into searching out Lord Dunsany’s works on the strength of it. 'Weird' is definitely the word to describe it.