Short Story:Rincemangle, The Gnome of Even Moor

Rincemangle, The Gnome of Even Moor is a short story written by Terry Pratchett in 1973 for the Bucks Free Press. The plot of this short story would later serve as the template for Truckers. It was later reprinted in A Blink of the Screen and The Witch's Vacuum Cleaner.

Plot

Rincemangle is a lonely Gnome living out in the "strange and mysterious" Even Moor north of Blackbury. One day he hops onto a truck and arrives at a large department store where he discovers other Gnomes. Unfortunately Rincemangle discovers that the humans who own the store now know something is living under their floorboards; they've brought in a cat and rat poison and will surely soon find and exterminate them. With inspiration from a book, Rincemangle helps the store Gnomes to steal a lorry and escape back to his home in Even Moor.

Annotations

• Similar to "Tales of the Carpet People", which would be expanded into The Carpet People, this short story is, in Pratchett's own words in A Blink of the Screen, "an earlier and shorter version of what would become Truckers."
• Rincemangle - who fulfils the story role of Masklin in the later work, but doesn't much resemble him in personality - has his name changed and repurposed for a certain wizzard (Pratchett refers to him as an "echo" of this story's protagonist).
• These Gnomes use the more traditional spelling, rather than "Nome" as in the Bromeliad. The latter change might have been because those Nomes have a very non-traditional origin, whereas Rincemangle and his friends seem to be of the common (but not garden) variety.