The Snark | Myth, Mayhem, and the Narwhal Tusk

When Real Life Outplots Fiction | “There is a Narwhal tusk on the wall. It will come into play.”

No, that’s not a deleted line from Game of Thrones – it’s real life. London, November 2019. A terrorist stabs two people to death at Fishmongers’ Hall and charges out onto London Bridge, wearing a fake suicide vest and a snarl. And then – because the universe sometimes takes a hallucinogenic – it happens: a group of bystanders fights him off with a fire extinguisher, a wooden chair, and… a narwhal tusk.Yes. A narwhal tusk. From the wall of the historic Fishmongers’ Hall. In the words of every fiction editor ever: “This is brilliant. But totally implausible. No reader would buy it.”

Fishmongers’ Hall: The Scene of the Sublime and Absurd

Let’s set the scene. Fishmongers’ Hall is no gastropub. It’s the ancestral HQ of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, one of London’s ancient livery guilds. Founded in 1272, rebuilt after the Great Fire, bombed during the Blitz, and currently nestled beside London Bridge like a Georgian sea captain’s fever dream.

Inside? Oil portraits. Silver trays. Crests. Anchors. And on the wall – because of course – a narwhal tusk, likely hung in the 18th or 19th century when imperial Britain collected everything it didn’t invent. Once called “unicorn horns” and sold as cure-alls to gullible royalty, narwhal tusks were literal symbols of rarity, power, and mystery. Today? Mostly symbols of "what the hell is that doing here?"Until the day someone needed it.

Enter: The Civil Servant with a Plan

When the attack began, Darryn Frost, a Ministry of Justice worker, saw the tusk. He didn’t just see it – he weaponized it. He broke it off the wall, handed it to Steve Gallant (a convicted prisoner released from jail for just that one day and attending the event for rehabilitation, just to make this even more narratively satisfying), and together they chased the attacker onto London Bridge. You’re picturing this correctly: two men, one armed with a marine mammal's spiral fang, sprinting toward a terrorist. Khan was subdued. Frost who had used a fire extinguisher inside the building to spray and hit the attacker later switched tactics to wielding a chair. Gallant kept up the fight until police arrived and fatally shot the attacker.

Additional Strange Details

Part of what makes the Fishmongers’ Hall attack so surreal is the jumble of weapons and the muddle of memory afterward. Was it Steve Gallant or Darryn Frost who carried the narwhal tusk? (It was Frost, though Gallant got wrongly credited in early reports.) Who had the fire extinguisher – Frost, or John Crilly, another ex-offender at the event? Lukasz Koczocik (a porter) definitely had used an ornamental spear, but by then he’d been stabbed three times and was still forcing the attacker out of the hall. The scene reads less like a carefully choreographed act of heroism and more like a tragic farce: civilians grabbing whatever came to hand – tusk, spear, extinguisher, chair – in a deadly improv play where even the cast couldn’t keep the props straight afterward.

And yet, the ending is almost mythic. Several of those who fought back were honored with civilian gallantry awards, the final such citations signed by Queen Elizabeth II before her death. Frost received one for wielding the tusk, Crilly and Gallant were honored too, and Koczocik was recognized for his bravery with the spear. Which means this extraordinary clash of narwhal tusk, ornamental spear, and fire extinguisher isn’t just a viral headline – it’s literally written into the last chapter of the Queen’s honors, a bizarre collision of medieval imagery, modern terror, and royal recognition.

And Steve Gallant’s story didn’t end on London Bridge. Gallant was widely praised for his bravery and the British government granted him a Royal Prerogative of Mercy, a rare recognition that reduced his sentence, and he was released on parole in 2021 after serving 16 years of a life term. Even more remarkable, the family of the man he had killed years earlier supported his early release, saying his actions showed genuine change. From prisoner to unlikely hero, Gallant’s redemption arc is so narratively perfect it feels scripted – the kind of character turn fiction often struggles to pull off convincingly, but reality handed us for free.

Writers, Take Note: Reality Just Smoked Your Plot

This story has everything:- A tusk likely hundreds of years old – once mistaken for a unicorn horn- A civil servant turned action hero- A convicted felon redeeming himself with real-world valor- A terrorist attack interrupted not by guns or gadgets – but by medieval wall decor.

This is not a Marvel film. This is not Neil Gaiman’s latest novel. This is the actual news, from an actual city, where real people made snap decisions with absurd tools and rewrote the expected ending. If you're a writer and you ever hesitated about making your story “too weird”… shame on you. The world already is too weird. Lean in.

What Fiction Can Learn from the Tusk

1. Even in tragedy, the surreal sneaks in. A tusk on a wall becomes Chekhov’s harpoon.

2. The world is cluttered with mythic objects masquerading as decor. Use them.

3. Heroism is messy. It’s not always cloaked and choreographed – it’s instinct, panic, absurd improvisation.

4. Let your characters surprise you. Civil servant with a fishy lance? More plausible than you’d think.

Final Thoughts (and They’re Pointy)

Somewhere in Fishmongers’ Hall, for decades, a tusk hung silently above ceremonies and dinners, likely dusted by someone with no idea what it might someday become. On that day in 2019, it became a spear. A symbol. A punchline to a very serious story.

Yes, it’s easy to marvel at the props – the narwhal tusk, the ornamental spear, the fire extinguisher, the chair – as if this were some surreal stage play. But it wasn’t. It was a brutal terrorist attack in which Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt were killed, and others were injured. The civilians who fought back weren’t actors improvising with odd weapons; they were people staring down real horror, risking their lives to save others. The strangeness of the objects shouldn’t obscure the courage of the people who wielded them. Still, if you’re looking for meaning in chaos, try this: Sometimes the strange thing on the wall is exactly what you’ll need when the world breaks open. So write the impossible. And if it feels too much, too weird, too unlikely?

Just whisper to yourself: “Remember the narwhal tusk.”

The Snark