Sidney Sime’s illustration “How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art upon the Gnoles,” depicts black, faceless shadow creatures called Gnoles. Sime’s work is influenced by the text it was originally published in, Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder in 1912. As Dunsany discarded tales of “imaginary-world fantasy” and “gradually … yields to the real world, though still retaining elements of … the supernatural,” Sime’s artwork follows this notion (Joshi cited in House-Thomas 88). Sime’s illustration places the supernatural creatures as intruding on human space as reflected by the man standing on the left starkly contrasting these unidentifiable figures. Sime, like Dunsany’s work, creates “secondary worlds” in which human space is contaminated with dark, moving shadows that are neither human nor animal (House-Thomas 85). Sime’s illustration of the Gnoles, like the weird, creates a realm of “absolute alterity,” blurring boundaries of human and beast to establish a new, unknown horror (Luckhurst 1054).
Works Cited
House-Thomas, Alyssa. "The Wondrous Orientalism of Lord Dunsany: traditional and non-traditional Orientalist narratives in The Book of Wonder and Tales of Wonder." Mythlore, vol. 31, 2012, pp. 85–103. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A309068615/LitRC?u=ucalgary&sid=bookmark-LitRC&xid=4182c1cc.
Luckhurst, Roger. “The Weird: A Dis/Orientation.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 6, 2017, pp. 1041–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2017.1358690
Sime, Sidney. “How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art upon the Gnoles.” Internet Archive, William Heinemann, 1970, archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.470276.