A-Z SHORT STORIES

The Interlopers was first published three years after Munro’s death in a book called The Toys of Peace and Other Papers. An interesting question is just who or what are the “Interlopers” referred to in the title of the story.

Georg uses the term to describe two different groups of external characters who could be classed as interlopers. First he talks about people who are trying to stop the fighting between the two families:

We fight this quarrel out to the death, you and I and our foresters, with no cursed interlopers to come between us.

Later he refers to other people who would try to stop them if they wanted to make peace:

And if we choose to make peace among our people there is none other to interfere, no interlopers from outside.

It could be said that these human interlopers are mirrored in the story by two interlopers from nature. First, the falling tree comes between the two men and stops them fighting to the death. Then the wolves arrive, seemingly preventing the families from making a lasting peace.

I like to think that there may also be another set of interlopers: Ulrich and Georg themselves. They disturb the natural order of things by bringing their feud into the forest. Munro uses personification to give the storm and the forest an almost human quality:

the whistling and skirling of the wind and the restless beating of the branches… a fierce shriek of the storm… the weary screeching of the wind… where the trees can’t even stand upright in a breath of wind… with the wind tearing in fitful gusts through the naked branches and whistling round the tree trunks…

Could it be that the death of the two men is nature’s way of punishing them for being interlopers?

Or could there be a deeper meaning in the story? It is likely that the story was written between 1914 and 1916 during the period that Munro served in the British army in World War One. Although officially too old at 43, he had volunteered for service and was sent to France where he fought and wrote between battles. It has been suggested that The Interlopers is an allegory about the war. Two families (groups of countries) are fighting over a number of unimportant issues. There are outsiders who try to stop the war, and others who oppose them. The men doing fighting on both sides, who in other circumstances could have become good friends, suffer and die together. We will never know the answer to this question because Munro was killed during the war.