The Little Grey Men

Gnomes, scale, species, and posthumanism

The Little Grey Men is one of those forgotten masterpieces by naturalist, artist, and author Denys James Watkins-Pitchford, writing under the pen-name B.B. The book was published in 1942, in the midst of WWII, and won the Carnegie Medal for that year. It follows the adventures of three gnomes, Sneezewort, Baldmoney, Dodder, “the last gnomes left in England”, who embark on a journey to find their lost brother, Cloudberry.

The story is very much a there-and-back-again quest, focusing on a small (if traversed by human feet) area of Warwickshire countryside, which however becomes a long trek on foot and mostly over water for our gnomes. During their voyage, we see the gnomes interacting with small animals and birds, their friends, but also being pursued by predators, including humans. The novel offers delightful descriptions of the natural world, beautifully observed, with great attention to detail, and this effect is mostly achieved because everything is viewed from a close-to-the-ground perspective, as our gnomes are very small. So let me start with scale first.

Scale, Appearance, Species: Betwixt-and-Between

The titular “Little Grey Men” are diminutive gnomes. We don’t actually get a clear measurement of the gnomes from the text – we are left to figure this out from their environment. So, in the opening chapter, we read that the door of the gnomes’ house under the roots of an oak tree “was not more than eight inches high” (pp. 10-12). This seems to be to give an indication of their height to around six or seven inches.¹ Early on in the book we also see Baldmoney pulling a branch after him, which was “only sixteen inches long” but was “all he could manage” (p. 10). Again, we could possibly picture an 6- or 7-inch-tall creature pulling a 16-long stick.

We are given one more indication when we’re told that “Dodder did not come up to his [the Heron’s] knee-joint; the huge bird towered over him”. A heron is, on average, 40 inches tall, and its knee joint is probably a quarter of that length up, or perhaps a bit less than that, so around 8-10 inches, which works if the gnomes are 6-7 inches tall.

Still, it is interesting that the text itself doesn’t give us a specific measurement. This lack leaves some slipperiness of scale open: we find out later that the gnomes use a number of natural and man-made small objects as receptacles or tools, the accuracy of which in practice is difficult to determine with certainty. Still, being of a comparable size to their friends, small woodland animals (see Figure 1), is what matters the most here.

Figure 1: Dodder with his woodland friends, Otter, Squirrel, and Ben the Owl. Illustration by Denys James Watkins-Pitchford (B.B.)

This brings us to the question of appearance and species. The text assures us that the gnomes, “rather surprisingly”, are “extraordinarily like the pictures of gnomes in fairy books, even to the pointed skin hat and long beard”. They also seem to have some commonalities with Tolkien’s hobbits: they wear coats, waistcoats, belts and breeches, all made out of animal skins (mouse-skin, moleskin, snake-skin, etc.) but “no shoes or stockings”. They have no need of the latter:

for gnomes are hairy little folk; in summer time they sometimes dispense with clothes altogether. Their bodies are not naked like ours, but clothed in long hair, and as to their feet, if you had not worn boots or shoes since you were born, you would have no need of them either.

They actually seem to be something in-between human and animal, their physique blending a human body with animalistic elements. The first time we encounter a gnome in the text, the narrator’s voice tells us that “at first you might have thought it was a water-rat or a mouse” and, just a few lines down, “the little man ran, like a mouse”. The gnomes, then, move swiftly like mice. Later on, when we get the first detailed description of Dodder, the eldest of the gnomes, we read that:

His little red face, the colour of an old hip berry, was puckered and creased like the palm of a monkey’s hand… The tiny hands with their grubby nails were like moles’ hands, though smaller. Gnomes have large hands for their size, larger in comparison than those of a mortal. His ears were long, sharply pointed, and covered with silky hair.

The idea of larger hands in relation to the rest of their bodies (and in comparison to humans) is also applicable to Mary Norton’s Borrowers, and, significantly, we don’t find this out until the second book in the series, The Borrowers Afield, when Arrietty and her family have to face the great outdoors (I shall return to this idea in a future piece).

Gnomes also hibernate, “like dormice”, during the colder months of the year, and, even in spring, during their adventures in this novel, we see them at one point “burrowing” inside a haystack, completely naked (because they’ve been soaked) in order to get warm and sheltered during the night. The narrator’s voice adds that the gnomes prefer to be active during dusk and evening, “like rabbits and hedgehogs”, because “they were less likely to be seen, and […] their eyes were like those of cats and owls, they could see better [in the dark] then than at any other time”.

Still, they are human in ways other than their humanoid physique: Baldmoney says that “wood dogs [i.e. foxes] don’t like us; we smell too much like humans”. Also, the gnomes’ attitude to fire seems to mark them out as akin to humans: they light fires to keep warm and to cook their food (though they also eat many things raw ).

The author’s Introduction to the novel attempts to address this liminal state of the gnomes, in-between human and animal, by making an extraordinary claim. It presents the gnomes as one of many types of “Little People” (though we don’t see any other types in the novel itself), all with traditional/folkloric names, who seem to be positioned along a folklore vs. animal continuum:

If you don’t believe in the Little People, I would ask you to make yourself as small as possible (which is horribly difficult) and keep very quiet (which is more difficult still) and watch and wait by the streams and in the woods, as I have done. And suddenly you will understand that the birds and wild animals are the Little People! Such a simple fact, and yet we never realized it! (“Introduction” to The Little Grey Men)

The Introduction goes on to classify birds and small animals as cyphers (or metaphors?) for folkloric creatures:

• Birds and animals that are associated with water, such as wagtails, kingfishers, reed warblers, buntings, water-voles, and water-shrews are classed as “water sprites”.

• Land animals such as wood mice, hedgehogs, and squirrels are likened to “goblins”.

• Winged nocturnal animals such as nightjars and owls are “goblins with wings”, or “goblins of the night”

• Larger animals, such as badgers, are named “trolls”.

• Last but not least, there are “Giants” – those are, clearly, us, human beings, but I shall return to this point.

The Introduction concludes by nuancing this main point:

My gnomes are but a very short step (for the normal imagination) from the wild woodland people. They live with birds and beasts, and can never be far from water.

What we seem to have here is the use of “fairy” beings or folkloric/traditional “little people” as a metaphor for a kind of anthropomorphic creature that can sustain a symbiotic relationship with nature. There is nothing magical about these gnomes other than their mere existence: unlike the elves/fairies of folklore, they don’t have supernatural powers, they don’t grant wishes, they can’t shape-shift, and they are not immortal. They are just small humanoid beings (with some animal traits), who live among birds, insects, and small animals, nesting in trees, living by fishing, and are part of the natural circle of life. Like animals, they can be predated by “wood dogs”, i.e. foxes, but they are also minor predators themselves when the need arises, via stealing eggs sometimes², though we are told in no uncertain terms that “gnomes do not kill warm-blooded things save in self-defence; all birds and animals with the exception of stoats and foxes […] were their friends”.³ They seem, therefore, to be at the lower (but not the lowest) end of the food chain, like “the wild woodland people” of the smaller kind (see also my previous piece on Selma Lagerlöf’s The Wonderful Adventures of Nils for something very similar happening to the protagonist, Nils Holgersson, when he shrinks to “tomte” size).

These gnomes, therefore, are aligned with small birds and animals, or, as the Introduction claims, are perhaps some sort of personification/symbolic humanoid representation of woodland and countryside fauna. A personification that allows the child reader to empathize with nature in an imaginative way that hybridises us with the animal “other”. Indeed, the text also describes the gnomes as being “halfway between the animals and our unhappy selves”.

And scale is absolutely crucial in making this point: getting us to follow humanoid beings that are the size of small animals and birds, allow us to adopt this close-to-the-ground view of the natural world, to pay attention to the detail of the beauties and dangers of nature, and to gain significant insight into complex ecosystems we usually don’t participate in. Indeed, in these books humans are “giants” and - perhaps in a shocking plot-line for a children’s book given today’s expectations - happily expendable! (I shall return to that point below). The novel actually makes a distinction between human children vs. grown-ups, claiming that the latter cannot really see the gnomes, while children can:

Grown-up people, it is safe to say, hardly ever see them [i.e. the gnomes]. Why? you will ask, quite naturally. And I should answer, it is because they have grown up. Their heads are higher, like the tops of trees, whereas when we are small we are close to the ground and can see things more easily.

Here we have the Romantic idea of childhood innocence that inherently links the child with nature, in a way that excludes adults, who have given up innocence for experience, and who mostly ignore/exploit the natural world. But, importantly, size/scale has a role to play in this too: children are closer to nature because they are literally closer to the ground.

Posthumanism: Giant Grum is dead!

Posthumanism is a critical/theoretical discourse that questions anthropocentrism, especially when it challenges the boundaries between human and non-human. In her monograph Children’s Literature and the Posthuman (Routledge, 2015) Zoe Jaques has argued that children’s literature, and particularly children’s fantasy, is very successful in opening up such questions and exploring their implications. She examines a series of well-known children’s fantasy texts (including Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, and many others) arguing that such texts “offer a neglected resource for understanding cultures of the human and non-human”, often questioning “the nature, parameters and dominion of humanity”, and moving us towards “postanthropocentricism” (pp. 6, 11).

I think that the gnomes of The Little Grey Men perform exactly this function, and, as I noted above, scale is key to achieving this. As we saw, the gnomes are liminal creatures, somewhere in-between the human and the animal (so questioning these boundaries by their mere existence), encouraging the child reader to think beyond “us” and “them”.

But this extraordinary text engages with the posthuman and moves us towards “postanthropocentricism” in more radical ways too. As I discussed above, if different animals are figured as “gnomes” and other traditional “Little People”, then humans, and Grown-ups specifically, are figured as “giants”. And such a “giant” is the main antagonist and arch-villain of this story.

“Giant Grum” is a gamekeeper who kills any animal that enters his wood, Crow Wood, a deadly place, too silent because the majority of fauna that used to live there have been exterminated or have been driven into hiding. Giant Grum kills animals indiscriminately and avidly, and displays their rotting bodies in a horrifying gibbet. When, in a heart-breaking sequence, he kills Otter, one of the gnomes’ closest friends, Dodder, the eldest of the gnomes, summons the great god Pan. In an awe-inspiring scene, somewhat reminiscent of the arrival of Pan in The Wind in the Willows, the nature god appears to a gathering of gnomes and all the animals and birds of Crow Wood and asks them what they desire. Dodder isn’t taking any prisoners, responding with: ‘We want […] this one thing, O good god Pan, that Giant Grum should die.’

And, indeed, and perhaps disturbingly for a children’s book, the giant does die - he gets his comeuppance when Dodder, following Pan’s instructions/inspiration, causes Giant Grum’s gun to backfire and kill him. The text itself only hints at the mechanics of achieving this, but an “Author’s Note” at the end of the the relevant chapter (chapter 10") explains that: “It is not generally known that a slight obstruction, if some inches from the muzzle of a gun barrel, is sufficient to burst it when the cartridge is fired, especially if the gun is much worn.” When I first read the novel, I was rather dumbfounded when I reached that point in the story. Killing a man as revenge is not really the kind of ethics we expect from a 1940s children’s book, and doesn’t fit with our ideas of a middle-grade novel, which I guess is the category we’d classify this text in if it was being published today.

But if we follow the text’s posthuman, postanthropocentric ethics to its natural conclusion, then the disposal of a human hostile to nature, and the elimination of a constant threat to a complex but vulnerable ecosystem, perhaps makes sense. All the way through the text we have been encourage to take the perspective of the birds and animals, via the perspective of the gnomes, who bridge our human selves with the non-human/animal “others”. For the child reader, the Grown-up who dies is a fairy-tale villain, a giant, a force that dominates by sheer size. The reversal of power is achieved by a very old trope, the little person defeating the impossibly huge opponent, David vs. Goliath. There is also a lot to be said about the motif of Pan as a nature god, a very popular transformation of the classical deity during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, adding another strand of posthumanism to the story: Pan, of course, is himself betwixt-and-between, a hybrid human-animal figure.

There is still much more to discuss in this book - not least the huge amount of tree, flower and other plant species it mentions, let alone the types of animals, birds and insects. It’s a naturalist’s heaven! And there is a lot more I am still thinking about when it comes to the materialities of the gnomes, especially how they combine natural materials with the debris of human material culture. I hope to return to some of these themes and topics in future posts. Let me finish by noting that The Little Grey Men was followed by a sequel, Down the Bright Stream (1948) and later by a third book about a different gnome community in Ireland, The Forest of Boland Light Railway (1955). These books too engage in complex ways with the human vs. animal dichotomy, bringing into the equation human technology (and the way it enables the gnomes to transcend their limitations), and other human activities that the gnomes can’t escape (war, pollution, etc.) For now, let me finish with B.B.’s motto (found as an opening epigraph in all his books):

The wonder of the world, the beauty and the power, the shapes of things, their colours, lights and shades; these I saw. Look ye also while life lasts.

Figure 2: illustration for The Little Grey Men, by B.B.

1. For reasons that I am hoping to explain in a different piece, I am leaning towards 6 inches for these gnomes, which is a pretty standard measurement for other “little people” in fantasies of miniature peoples and worlds, e.g. the Borrowers in Mary Norton’s books, the Littles in John Peterson’s books, etc.

2. For example, in chapter 4 we read that: “It was not often [the gnomes] had the chance of a fresh egg, for the birds were their friends and the gnomes did not like robbing their nests, though I’m afraid they sometimes did so when the birds were absent”. We do get two specific instances of egg theft by the gnomes in the plot of the novel, once in chapter 5, when they’re starving and raid a willow warbler’s nest (is starvation justifying their actions?) and another, in chapter 9, when they steal pheasant eggs (but this is meant to be a punishment - again, is this a justification? Lots of ethical questions to ponder!).

3. And so it’s Ben the owl that provides the gnomes with skins from which they make their clothes and other items.