| Grues | |
|---|---|
 Fire Grue artwork under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives Works 3.0 License | |
|
Real Name |
Grues |
|
First Appearance |
The Waif Woman (1916) |
|
Original Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
|
Created by |
Robert Louis Stevenson |
Origin[]
The first ever instance of the word "grue" being mentioned on a work of fiction was in Robert Louis Stevenson's short story "The Waif Woman" (1916). In the story, as a covetous woman lay in bed, reveling in the luxurious garments she had unjustly taken from a recently deceased woman, "a grue took hold upon her flesh… and the terror of death upon her soul". However, Jack Vance was the first to use the word specifically as a name for a fictional species.
The word "grue" is an old Middle English and Scots word meaning "to shiver" or "feel terror", making the creature a stock character and thus public domain.
Notes[]
- In Jack Vance's Dying Earth series (and later popularized by the text adventure game series Zork), grues are man-eating creatures that hide in the darkness in hopes of catching their unsuspecting prey, and are warded off by any source of light. Dying Earth's grues are described as part "ocular bat", part "unusual hoon" and part man.
- The original 3 Zork games, which popularised the grue, have been released under an MIT license.