Please help me identify a short story I remember reading ten or twenty years ago. It was probably in one of the Dragonlance books (maybe in the Tales series). I don't remember much of the plot. What I do remember clearly was its unusual and creative stylistic device: the story was presented as a document written by a verbose and detail-minded chronicler—probably a Gnome—who was particularly fond of footnotes. The footnotes were notable for their great number and enormous length, and were probably also nested (that is, even the footnotes had footnotes). I imagine the typesetter must have had lots of fun with this story! I would love to get my hands on it again.
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3Footnotes inside footnotes isn't completely unusual: Terry Pratchett does it all the time, for example.– Daniel RosemanCommented Apr 12, 2013 at 8:04
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I think that this my be "Into the Heart of the Story" by Michael Williams. It was in the first Dragonlance Tales Trilogy book Kender, Gully Dwarves and Gnomes. It was told from the point of a gnome named Virum and discusses the background of some of the songs of the heroes of the War of the Lance.
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1I purchased a copy of the book and confirmed that this is the story I was thinking of. It seems my memory was somewhat faulty, though; while the footnotes are notable for their number, length, and source of humour, they aren't actually nested. Commented Apr 27, 2013 at 15:23
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1Michael Williams songs were an automatic skip for me in every book. Commented Aug 12, 2013 at 16:51