The Annotated Glimmung

 

Chapter Sixteen

“There would always be Glimmung; there would always be werjes and trobes and, most awful of all, the father-things.”

    Nick is under the understandable impression that Glimmung has lost the battle but not the war. With One Summer Day back in his possession, Glimmung may, despite his wound, rally his allies for a counterattack as the spiddle had supposed in the last chapter. Assuming Glimmung is forever disadvantaged he seems the sort not to easily give up the fight no matter how fruitless his future attacks might be.

    From here on, Glimmung, if he chooses to continue hostilities, is fighting a defensive war.

“‘Nunks are harmless.’”

    As they had been seen in chapter thirteen, the earlier assumption about nunks made back in chapter three, which seems to have been based upon Glimmung’s The Last and Final War, is incorrect. That book appears to be, as the spiddles had said in chapter eight, merely propaganda attempting to dissuade newly arriving human settlers from siding with The Grand Four.

Chapter Seventeen

“...it made him choke.”

    It seems the less habitable air of the mountains that Nick is climbing may be why no one can reach Glimmung in his lair.

“...holding Horace in its arms...”

    Horace has become convinced that the Nick-thing is Nick, explaining his earlier apprehension upon seeing the real Nick. 

    It seems the Nick-thing has treated Horace with some level of care if not tenderness. This leads into the next observation.

“Then it turned and walked away.”

    With the Nick-thing giving back Horace instead of attacking Nick, it did have the opportunity as they were out of the sight of the party at the foot of the mountain, it makes one consider this notion: if this Nick-thing could choose to do what it did then it must have a conscience of some sort. So, is it possible that father-things are capable of good and are not inherently evil and violent as the spiddles claimed they were in chapter eleven? If this is true, as the actions of the Nick-thing suggests, then The Grand Four must also have propaganda of their own just as Glimmung has his.

    If the father-things had been unwilling instruments of Glimmung’s for all his time on Plowman’s Planet, then maybe his now wounded and weakened state freed the Nick-thing to be kind to Nick?

“And so it was.”

    For where the history of Nick’s adventures on Plowman’s Planet concludes, it appears to be a happy ending.