Slag & Scale

It is known how the God at the Forge created the Sun: by complete accident.

When the Trickster wished to give the smith a gift to express its love for them, it did not know how, because it could not express anything. Deceit and concealment was so ingrained in its ways that it could not even tell a truth it wanted to share. So the Trickster fell back on old habits and presented to the God at the Forge a lump of the world's worst, most impure ore. The Trickster then dared the god to create anything of beauty out of it, teasing them and doubting their abilities as a child might the person they fancy.

The God at the Forge was insulted, for pride in the craft was their insurmountable nature. So they accepted the challenge, and set straight to work. They took the lump of ore to their forge and heated it a thousand-thousand times over, in a fire a thousand times brighter and hotter than the smith had ever stoked before. So bright and hot was the forge that all the other gods and creatures of the Rift shied away and fled to the twilit places- all but the Trickster, who watched the smith work in teary-eyed awe.

The Trickster beheld as the god at their bellows began to melt away the outer layers of the ore. Molten slag flowed like rivers and cooled into mountains, yet that vexing lump of ore remained undiminished; still impure. The smith's anger burned as hot as the forge, nearly melting it to the firmament. The god finally lashed out and sent the slag crashing to their feet, before stomping away and brooding over what next to do.

The Trickster also watched as some of that discarded slag began to move. Shattered crags picked themselves up and brushed off the smaller, crumbly bits of their fellows with stumpy, blunt limbs. They looked around with eyeless heads, and soon trundled or toddled away in fear at the sound of their creator's loud grumbling.

When the ore proved too stubborn, the smith pulled it out of the forge and laid it upon their anvil in the grip of their great and immovable tongs. If all the impurities would not melt out, then they would hammer them out. The smith deliberated at length, and finally took up one of their 6,842 hammers with which to begin the Great Folding.

For a length of time that would come to be called a year, the god hammered at the lump of ore. Every swing lit the Rift with showers of sparks, and shook the gulfs to their depths. The ore was beaten and shaped, tortured and purified, until the lesser metals were dragged screaming to the surface and smote.

The Trickster watched as those flakes of hammerscale rained upon the anvil like storms-yet-to-be, only to be swept away by the calloused hand of the God at the Forge. The flakes danced and shivered like black snowflakes as they fell, twisting in the heated air currents until they landed upon spindly little arms and legs. Jagged and pointy, these diminutive creatures did not flee in fear from their creator so quickly.

But just as the smith ignored the gawking Trickster, so too did they ignore the growing audience at their feet. They seized upon the progress they made, bringing the hammer down faster and harder until their arm was a blur, and their work reached a fever pitch.

When it did, they broke their hammer upon the lump of ore and ignited something deep within it. A spark unlike any other, that grew and grew to absorb the entire sphere with a brilliance that not even the smith could withstand. So they hurled it away into the darkness, where it caught in the empty void and erupted into its full glory.

At that, the little scales yipped and fled in fear. All the gods of the Rift came to look in awe at the newborn Sun. Without a doubt, it was the greatest thing of beauty the God at the Forge had ever made. Even the dust and the dregs of the Rift thought so, and began to dance around the Sun in ever greater crowds.

But the story of how the worlds were wedded together is for another time.

For now, the God at the Forge stood and basked in the warmth of their creation, and the accolades of their fellows. They waited, proud and imperious, for the Trickster to come before them and declare its challenge met. But the Trickster did not. The Trickster could not. All it could do was conceal the ache in its heart as it stole away to darker parts, where the smith's beauty did not burn so brightly, and the laughter of gods was not so loud.

There, in the dark and quiet, the Trickster found that it was not so alone. It found there, huddled and frightened, the little bits of slag and hammerscale that the smith had cast off and forgotten in their work. They were as children without a parent, in a Rift that was no longer what it once was. Yet they were sharp and rough to look upon, beautiful like lead, cruel to the touch and clumsy in all ways. The haughty gods of the Rift would never even notice them, let alone deign to welcome them in.

And so the Trickster reached out its long arms, and gathered the slag and scales up in spindly hands that could only steal the belongings of others. And then it closed its mouth so full of lies long enough to tenderly kiss them upon their jagged little heads. And then in a voice too quiet to hear it admitted that yes, the God at the Forge had made something beautiful indeed.

That, child, is why you should always treat with respect the things we might call waste: you never know when they might hold the guarded love of the Trickster.

Or perhaps that is just another lie, meant to put fidgeting children to bed. Now go to sleep.

The God of Dust

((In honor of World Rat Day, which is apparently a real thing, I thought I'd slightly tweak and then finally implement a little idea I came up with a long time ago.))

 

"Three garbs have We- dust, cobwebs, and skin of flea. Long is Our tooth, for we hide from the blinding torches of truth."
- A snatch of skitterrhyme scrawled above a waste receptacle slot in the Basilica of the Blissful Calculation (Dormitory #12).

"[...] Lastly, all members of the Dutiful Staff and Most Enlightened Faculty are encouraged to remain alert, as you doubtless have been without need for admonishment nor reminder, of the traces of queer murine totemism which have of late infiltrated the Lower Colleges..."
- Agendum 261, CMOE DIX.

"Is this what the kids are into these days? Inventing gods? Incorrigible."
- Senior Editor Onsaro Adelbramp; Provost of the Board for Historical Ordination, Associate Vice-Dean of Affairs for ITU Publishing, and clueless old dodderer.



The Ivory Tower University, despite its pledge to pursue universal "truth" is not exempt from creating its own myths, folklore, and an urban legendarium murky and tantalizing enough to keep even the most exhausted undergraduate study groups riveted during cramming season¹. There is nothing wrong with myth-making by itself. In fact, I would consider it something of a sign of a healthy community- it means that their society is still thinking, dreaming, and being creative. However, certain myths sometimes lead one to wonder just what in the world that community was dreaming about when it thought them up.

A favorite example of mine is the God of Dust & Lost Things, popular among the residents of the Lower Colleges. The God of Dust is, when dignified with the attention of our resident theogonists, designated as a "small" god- both figuratively and literally speaking.

Its influence is said to be limited to the area in and around the ITU campuses, though some especially smitten young students claim that its reach even extends into the lower city and the world beyond. It exists where dust, dead insect husks, shed skin cells, and other detritus of the ages accumulate, dwelling in shady corners and forgotten storage rooms. When it takes a physical form, it is said to be fond of appearing as a small black rat with a skeletal head and tail. In this form, it finds and steals away any small, half-interesting item which anyone has ever lost. The god's warren somewhere deep below the university is said to be snarled with enormous stacks of knickknacks, bits and bobs, odds and ends, and a veritable ocean of lost change in denominations that are no longer recognizable, let alone acceptable as legal tender.

The god is lonesome, but not lonely. It has no altars, no priests, and no proper worshipers. Only the occasional undergraduate gives lip-service and offerings to it in the desperate hope that it will bring back some item which they have lost. This is done by leaving another item of minimal but equal value in a small, dark corner somewhere and then returning to the spot a few days later. The desired item is rarely left in its place, if any at all is given. It is unclear if the god has difficulty understanding human reasoning, or if some bored individual makes the rounds at night, looting places where the skeletal rat is believed to dwell. Sometimes it does seem to work, however, and this serves to reinforce a less-than-joking belief in Ol' Dusty. Rough, sketchy, and discreet images of rat skulls denote popular sites of invocation across campus.

One side effect of the playful, surreptitious "veneration" of the god among young undergraduates is the proliferation of a form of poetry known as Skitterrhyme. Skitterrhyme was originally a type of praise poetry directed at the God of Dust. The earliest recorded ones jokingly extol its "virtues" such as doing absolutely nothing with its massive yet useless hoard, or boring holes in the walls to keep tired academics awake at night. They displayed an extremely rudimentary rhyme scheme and virtually nonexistent meter, but over time the arrhythmic style became more sophisticated and mathematical. The words themselves also began to be coded with meaning, until finally the staccato hymns began to be used to gossip and share secret messages in public. There are about a dozen different cyphers for skitterrhyme today, spread out across the various dormitory houses of the ITU.

A popular story is that the god presides over an entire court of lost and little things, some of which could be the cast-off remnants of other, forgotten gods.

It is both the creator and ruler of a race of animated dust bunnies, who hold the god in distant reverence while going about their lives collecting dander and evading the brooms of the indefatigable but woefully underfunded Custodial Corps, which is often the butt of jokes among the student body- and the faculty, for that matter. The dust bunnies are believed to know the secret of how to summon and gain the permanent favor of the god, but none have ever been found living to question.

The ultimate enemy of the God of Dust is said to be a great, desiccated sparrow corpse which was reanimated by the spirit of the wind, to blow all dust away forever. Sparrows, alongside squirrels, are a ubiquitous and often very annoying sight around the university, so it is somewhat of a natural antagonist to set against this strange underdog.

The earliest attested references to the God of Dust & Lost Things is from an encyclical reminding members of the university staff and faculty to report any and all instances of skitterrhyme or unsanctioned and/or ironic religiosity to the old Committee for Mythological Ordination. This encyclical was published a few years before the committee was disbanded in the wake of Article 921, which de-problematized certain rites in the interest of expanding minority religious freedom on campus. Because this publication dealt with an informal belief in or at least playful acceptance of the God of Dust which was so entrenched in the Lower Colleges that the excruciatingly blind upper councils took note of it, it is safe to assume that the god had existed for at least a few decades before that point, placing its origin as far back as one hundred and fifty years in the past, at the time of this writing.

I personally suspect that the legend was created, or at least greatly contributed to, by our small but consistent body of exchange students from Serminwurth. While it is presumptuous of me, I can think of no other city that affords such respect to the rat without trying to ascribe any sort of lofty, unrealistic ideals to it.



¹ Which is to say, all semester ever semester.

Tulpa.

Once, there was a person.

Little more about their identity is known than that.

They were a person, overcome by grief at the cruel nature of the world. So overcome that in their wandering, they collapsed at the foot of a gnarled old buckthorn tree. There, they vowed to lie in misery until they were released from their mortal coil.

And there they laid, slowly withering away- but they did not die. Days passed, but thirst did not kill them. Weeks went by, but their cavernous stomach brought no premature end.

At first, they raged against this too. How could life, so wretched, have sunken its claws so deep into them?

But over time, grief turned to contemplation, and then to meditation. They propped themselves up against the trunk of that old buckthorn and laid amid its itching, stinging barbs, but felt no more discomfort. Bugs and insects bit at their skin, and the elements whipped at them, but there was no more pain. Their thoughts traveled far and probed deep, fueled by their negative energy until it was burned up in full.

It was then that clarity took hold.

They were far from the first or most auspicious of the enlightened, but they too crossed that threshold nonetheless. The ultimate reality of the universe began to take shape within their mind, hardening and coming into focus until it glimmered like a brilliant, cerulean jewel within their mind's eye. And then that jewel took shape, and expanded across their entire being, encasing them in adamant as firm as steel. Enclosed within, the accidental ascetic entered a deep and profound dream-state.

The buckthorn tree overhead died, and the land all around them withered away into a desert, yet that jewel remained, fast-growing and unblemished.

Until it was not.

As the crystal expanded alongside the expansion of the dreamer's consciousness, fractures began to appear across its vertices. These cracks deepened and spiderwebbed across the jewel's surface, until at last the first shards fell from that sky-blue expanse.

When the shards landed, they took shape. Long slivers became limbs. Chunks became torsos and a surmounting head. Fragments clung together as digits and joints. Thinking, comprehending minds born of the dreamer's power of thought filled their bodies. When the shards landed, they landed on their own two feet.

They stood up then, and became the first to behold that self-same jewel. Dimly could they see within its depths, and at once did they recognize the dreamer within to be the creator of this thought-form and all of their kind. They looked upon their parent with wonder, and soon began to meditate upon its nature, as well as their own.

In short order it was found that they too possessed a creative power of their own. Things of wonder and beauty translated themselves from their crystalline minds to the physical world through their jagged fingertips. Spires like petrified forests did grow, and thrones like lotus blossoms did bloom. They spoke to one and all at once, no secrets kept hidden, everything laid bare, and from that reflecting pool rose ever-greater achievements.

They taught their meditative techniques to each generation as they cleaved off of the brilliant mother lode. Contemplation turned to gratitude, to veneration, and to reinforcement of those ideas among their peers. This was not their god--no, gods are not so different from living, dying things--but this was someone worthy of their devotion and protection.

So when the first deeper cracks began to form in the mother jewel, the angular thought-forms grew concerned. When the shards which fell from those gaping wounds laid lifeless and without animating minds, they grew alarmed. And when those among them with foresight saw the cracks reaching so deep that the dreamer itself would be threatened, they grew to fear death for the first, awful time.

They knew that they were products of that unconscious mind. If the dreamer woke, or if the dreamer died, then what hope would there be for them? They would be blown away like leaves on the wind, snuffed out like the flame of a candle. Their nascent world would come to an end, and they did not want that. So they turned their minds toward the crystal, rather than the dreamer within. They focused their every thought and effort toward its preservation, and slowly but surely, the cracks began to narrow and vanish. When shards did fall away, they rose up once more- and were promptly put to work preserving the dreamer.

A society once so wide in scope of thought and imagination now turned inward, and all else began to fall by the wayside.

It wasn't long before doubt first appeared.

Is this the true path? Do all things around us not die? Why then do we persist? Was the dreamer not born of the living and dying world? Does the dreamer, in its wisdom, not foresee the inevitable? Why should it be exempt? Why should we be exempt? What is to be feared in death? What is death to the dead? Does moksha come?

Like a nail scraping against a mirror-polished surface, these questions cut through once-uniform thought and feeling. Fear not felt since the first cracks appeared returned anew, but its edge was sharpened and honed by the knowledge that those among their number harbored its cause. At first they were ignored and marginalized as best they could be. But when those doubts grew louder, the doubters were lashed out at, beaten and driven away to the edges of that stagnating domain. When still they would not quiet, a word was given that cut across all din and dispute: begone.

Chipped and illused, these sowers of disquiet left the land of unending firmity against unstoppable erosion, and began to walk the world at large. Now, strange things in a stranger land, they seek deeper truths and insights into the ultimate meaning and meaninglessness of reality. But they have not forgotten or forsaken the home they left behind. They will return one day when their doubts have borne fruits of knowledge. They will bring them back in order to nourish the enlightenment of those whose fear drives them to cling to the static and unchanging. They will bring comfort and compassion to the woeful many, and see the artificial growth of the crystal halted.

They will greet the dreamer beneath buckthorn tree, and they will know only peace and acceptance.

For Moksha Comes.

The Tiamat-Ymir Principle.

Big creatures are vital to mythologies everywhere. They are the movers and shakers of the world, sometimes literally. They can be gods, or guardians, or monsters in need of slaying by a hero going through their standard-issue 17-point plan for greatness. And while their importance might often end with their deaths, their being dead can sometimes be of equal or greater significance to the narrative.

Sometimes the death of a Big Thing leads to the birth of much greater things. Even something as big as a world.

Mythological Context (AKA Feel-Bad Stories)

When the Babylonian goddess Tiamat discovered that her husband Apsu had been murdered by their children, the first generation of gods, she was furious. She took on the shape of a terrible sea serpent (or dragon, in her more pop-culturey depictions) and made a war of vengeance on her treacherous sons and daughters. She conjured the first dragons, and other monsters, as tools of her will. And when her son the storm god Marduk killed her, she was carved up into two halves and then mutilated.

Her eyes, still bitterly weeping even after death, were made into the sources of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Her ribs became the vault of the sky, her lower body the earth. Her tail was flung into the void to form the Milky Way. She was big enough to be made into the world that we live on, and in that way the Mother of Monsters is humanity's mother as well.

When the North Germanic giant Ymir was born from the thawing water that existed between the frozen realm of Niflheim and its fiery opposite Muspelheim, he didn't do much more than sit around sweating and drinking cow's milk straight from the tap. But from his armpit sweat and chafing thighs were born the jotun people, and from the salt lick that the cow Auðumbla tongued placidly was born Búri, ancestor of all the gods.

Eventually Odin and his brothers--all of them distant descendants of Ymir thanks to their jotun mother Bestla--came to slay him. Not because he had done anything in particular against them, though the gods did seem to think the giants were evil, even back then. They killed him because they wanted to become the rulers of earth and sky- things which did not yet exist in the yawning emptiness of Ginnungagap. So they fashioned the earth out of his flesh, mountains from his bones, trees from hair, the seas from his blood, the sky from his skullcap, storm clouds from his brains, and the entirety of the human realm of Midgard from his eyebrows.

Of course there are thousands more beings that die like this. Some of them are more benign and peaceful. I don't know of any existing term for it in proper mythography, but apparently Jungian theory calls it the Cosmic Man.

So What?

When Big Things die, they turn into bigger things. Like normal flesh-and-blood creatures they don't just vanish into the ether. They have bodies with physical pieces and parts, and just as we decay and get reused by nature, these parts can be separated and made into something else.

So what if this Tiamat-Ymir Principle™ applied to other things?

What if every significant beastie in a universe was able to turn into something upon death? And what if this process could be directed and controlled by the smaller creatures that kill them? Not just in the sense of cutting off a dragon's horns for weapons or scales for armor, but shaping an entire fortress or range of hills out of its body.

What if adventurers were less like thieving murder-hobos, and more like landscapers (but also still thieving murder-hobos)?

You get a setting where the classic pass-time of going out and killing big things has immediate, physical consequences in the world that even the least attentive party can see. The landscape can be transformed by accident or by deliberate act, either as a plot twist or as part of a plan made by any players clever enough to kill a titan.

What To Do With This

At this point I'm just throwing out whatever sounds nifty. It's not a unique idea at all obviously, but I never saw it called out and named before. Feel free to appropriate the idea however you see fit.

Landscaping- The world has always been home to colossal things and the little pests that murder them. It's a way of life. Hunt something, kill it, fashion a civilization out of its insides and then eat the rest. Monster Hunter, Salt in Wounds, etc.

But here, every landmark has a bloody, meaty history. That island in a lake was a wyrm that hit the ground so hard it formed a crater. Those mountains are actually a graveyard of stone giants being riddled with tunnels by dwarves like termites in so much rotting wood. This city was built with the fingerbones of a Hekatoncheires.

The world is defined by the monsters that live and die on it, and in attempting to master their environment the mortal species take a more hands-on approach.

The consequences of Big Thing death can be just as destructive as they are creative, of course.

Killing the monster harassing the town might make the road to the town impassable, or snarl the area in marshes, isolating the settlement from trade and travel and killing it more slowly. A wounded or naturally old being might be herded away from populated lands so it doesn't completely throw the region's topography into whack. Sending a titan running amok into enemy lands could inadvertently give them building materials for a new castle.

Maps could be made utterly useless every few years thanks to a brand new chasm or forest that definitely wasn't there before. Travel is never entirely secure. The world is living, breathing, and growing with every death, stacking up high on the literal bones of eons.

Terraforming- Space is a lot of empty, well, space. There aren't a lot of habitable worlds out there for most humanoids. But the void is home to giant things, living or dead. Think of the astral god-isles from Planescape. Most of these petrified deity remains probably occur from gods naturally losing followers and slowly decaying, but some must have been made suddenly, and by violence. Setting deicide aside for a moment, think of all the titanic alien beings that exist out in the gulfs of space, eldritch or otherwise.

If a sufficiently advanced civilization wanted to expand beyond its homeworld, but it could find no suitable planets to claim as their own, why not just make a new one?

Our "heroes" would be science-fantasy terraformers, tasked with tracking down a space Big Thing, killing it, bringing its corpse to a desired location, and then shaping its blood and bones into something that resembles home. If the creature had parasites, gestating young, or just a whole lot of gut fauna, perhaps this new world will offer unexpected competition or neighbors. This could be a process that takes centuries, or sufficiently powerful demigods could take care of it in a campaign or two.

And if the universe doesn't have the right kind of teleportation or flight magic, they're going to have to make a spaceship out of someone first.

Homegrown Gods- Paradise in all its forms has some overarching similarities, but just as many qualities are tailored to the people of a historical time and place. In many fantasy settings the gods either populate ontologically distinct planes after coming into existence, or they helped create them when they splortched this new universe out of cosmic goo.

Why not take this a step farther? In settings where gods are created by the hopes and prayers of mortals, and gods create their own planes, then are mortals not indirectly creating those heavens and hells for themselves? What if they cut out the middleman, so to speak?

Found a religion. It can be about anything, as long as it has a god or godlike being, and that being can be imagined in a body. Gain followers. Feed this blind, mindless godhead the thoughts and souls of thousands of like-minded people until it is a polished mirror reflecting back at them. Nurture your nascent deity, foster its growth and development. Teach it with ritual and scripture. Reward it with sacrifices like treats to a good child. Describe what the afterlife is like in your faith. Make your god strong enough to embody it and protect it.

And then kill it.

Butcher your god. Take its bones and craft a firmament. Shape the new land with its meat. Fill the air with its dying breath. Use its skin to line the boundaries of this new realm.

With your pandeicide complete, you and your followers may now enjoy an eternity or however many eons or kalpas your afterlife is meant to last, all to yourselves. Belief will continue to bleed into the landscape overtime, letting your infant plane grow.

Just don't let it slip to your living followers that god is dead and you killed him. Some philosopher might latch on and make a big deal of it.

Hunted- They're after you. The fiendish little upstarts. They've stopped playing with fire and digging holes in the dirt long enough to decide to kill you. Their champions are on the way, with magic potions and bright iron. Perhaps some of your kin assisted them. But it doesn't matter. All that matters is that they want to inflict that final and absolute shame upon you. They won't just kill you. They will take you apart and desecrate you. You will be devoured by lowly little things that are not even close enough to you for it to count as cannibalism.

There's no true escape. Chaos is vast, even infinite, but the hunter is tireless. They will always be right behind you. You can fight back, but they are great- greater than you, even. Your hubris would kill you before their swords did.

The best you can do is deny them their prize. Fight tooth and nail, and when those teeth and nails fall off, devour them. Allow nothing to fall into the hands of the enemy, for they will grow mightier for it. Live a perpetual fighting retreat. Leave a bloody trail across the length of the abyss.

They want a world. You will give them a battlefield.

On the Disappearance of Haraal.

It has come to my attention that nowhere in my recent writings have I actually addressed the vanishing of Haraal. And while it is my first instinct to assume that any potential readers of these mad scrawlings would be intimately familiar with the major cultural myths of the known world, assuming is exactly what I should not do. Indeed, perhaps one of you right now lives far and away from knowledge or influence of Deneroth.¹ I would be remiss in omitting anything which could contribute to a more complete understanding of the world in which I write, and the context of powers that currently be.

Haraal, unifier of the Ersuunian tribes, emperor of a burgeoning empire, living culture-hero on the receiving end of cult-like levels of reverence even before his deification, removed his crown and abdicated from his throne one day after a strange visit, leaving without a word, never to be seen or heard from again.

Of course it isn't so simple as that, but those details are all that can be agreed upon between sometimes starkly contradictory sources.

First, we are unsure of exactly how long Haraal reigned as king-chieftain. Histories of All by Yashka the Sage reports a reign of 114 years and this number is often regarded as canon, particularly in Deneroth. But Yashka wrote his chronicle several centuries after the disappearance of Haraal. Mythinterpretations of History by the late Berschut Groz offers a more conservative estimate of 70-80 years. Both theories either explicitly or implicitly support the idea that Haraal was blessed with supernatural vitality and long life, but neither gives Haraal a definite point in the timeline of history which we so enjoy using. We can relatively safely say that he reigned no earlier than 800 years before the time of Yashka however, putting Haraal no more than 2,300 years in the past.

Second, we are unsure of where Haraal disappeared from. We do know that his imperial palace-camp was somewhere in the northwest region close to the sites of his last great battles, but its exact location has remained a mystery shrouded in myth, with more than a few frontier folktales and cunningfolk assertions clouding it up further. It is assumed that the camp was located on a relatively flat area of land where the royal herds could graze comfortably, but that still leaves a very wide possible range of area. Again, we can only judge by the broadest limits, and say that the palace must have been located somewhere south of modern settlements such as Bluehill, and that it would have given the Axebite a wide berth- even Haraal was cautious of some dangers, it seems.

One day, traditionally emphasized as being just like any other with no foreshadowing or warning, Haraal was adjudicating cases brought before him in his throne room. After the third or fourth defendant graciously accepted his imminent beheading after prolonged exposure to The Presence and The Gaze, a hush suddenly fell upon the court. There was a muffled sound in the distance, outside, and it was slowly growing in clarity and volume. Haraal took notice of this after he found his servants not immediately responding to his commands, and had the doors to his court opened wide in order to better hear what the disturbance was.

It was crying.

Deep, gut-wrenching weeping, growing in volume and in voice.

Haraal waved a hand to send two of his guards out to investigate, but in a matter of moments they filed back into his throne room with limp arms, stunned expressions, and thoroughly overactive tear ducts. Again, he sent guards out to confront the issue, sending four this time. Four sobbing messes returned to him. A third time, sending six guards, Haraal was once again confounded. This almost comical mix of repetition and escalation continued for some time until Haraal had dispatched his entire royal guard, to no avail.

The other members of his court were growing concerned by this point, so Haraal rose from his throne and cast his aura upon them. Calmed somewhat, they begged their lord to go and see what this dreadful thing was. He proclaimed that he was already on his way to doing so, and then strode out into the light of day. Huge, dark-bottomed clouds were already approaching on the horizon, but his eyes fixed on something far more immediate.

At the base of the hill which his palace crowned, his people had fallen into disarray in droves. Hundreds of men, women, and children had absconded from their duties and their leisures to add to the mournful cacophony. They did not heed their lord when he commanded them to rise, to rejoice in his presence. They only bowed their heads lower in grief toward a single point in the distance. Haraal's smoldering bronze gaze tried to fix it in place, but it only continued its approach.

A small, greyish hunchback of immeasurable age was hobbling his way up the slope, one withered, useless arm clutched tightly to his side. He was weather-worn and almost hairless, with one enormous shoulder and a clubbed foot which he dragged along the ground. His scabrous, diseased-looking skin was stretched tightly across his emaciated frame clad in nothing but rags soaked in morning dew. Despite his disabilities, he moved with surprising speed, and his voice, though labored, sounded not the least bit short of breath. For the hunchback was the loudest of the crying voices- only his weeping was song.

It was wordless, lacking in any real rhyme or meter. But what it lacked in composition, it made up for in dreadful emotion. They were the sounds of raw, ageless sorrow and loss. Of grief and regret for everything that has ever happened or never happened. Of a child yearning for a mother.

And that was exactly what he asked, when at last he climbed the hill and halted before Haraal, eyes only dimly registering the man towering over him as they rose up from their naturally downcast state.

"Have you seen my mother? I was lost by her. I have not found her. Have you seen her?"

These questions were all that he interrupted his quavering song with, and he repeated them again and again as he stood pitifully before the emperor. His words were strange and rustic to Haraal's ears, like the tongue of some of his most distant Ersuunian subjects, many centuries removed. Haraal, being uncharacteristically compassionate, was able to look beyond the breach of conduct in addressing a chieftain which would have ended in a greater man being beheaded on the spot. He made an exception for the strange creature, and asked him his name.

Depending on the age or dialect of the account, the hunchback's name varies in form. But each name is generally a recognizable cognate with the others others, for his name when taken literally was "Grief".

Haraal treated with Grief then, all the while becoming increasingly suspicious of the outsider and the effect he was having upon his subjects. It seemed that the influence of Haraal was mitigated in the hunchback's presence, for he could merely quell their weeping rather than elevate them to an exultant state more pleasing to his senses. But Grief would not bend to Haraal's will. Nor did he even seem to be conscious of the effect his presence seemed to be having on the palace, as if he had spent so long in his current state that this was his 'normal'. He asked over and over for news of his mother, whoever she was, and patently ignored any of the emperor's attempts to assuage his anguish and coax him into staying and reveling at his court.

Things might have gone very differently, had Haraal decided to quit his attempts at dominating the will of the hunchback.

But there was no challenge insurmountable to the son of the pine tree, scion of the sacred peak. No individual had ever resisted him, and a hunchback would not be the first. He butted heads with the cluelessly resilient Grief until his own followers were red eyed, vomiting, and bleeding from their noses with the force of that sympathetic misery. He promised rare silks, jewels, and iron to him if he ceased his weeping. He promised him a place in his court if he told him his story, and the root of his cursed power. He promised him a mended body and thousand purebred horses to draw an army of chariots across the land in search of his mother, if he would kneel before him. All of this and more was ignored by the hunchback, who continued to whimper the wordless lullaby of his missing parent.

At last, Grief announced that he needed to find her, and turned his back on Haraal to begin ambling back down the hillside.

This is said to be what sealed the fate of Haraal.

He went after the hunchback, quickly overtaking him with his long stride full of indignant purpose. The chieftain put himself in the way of Grief several times as he tried to shuffle away, each time demanding that he halt and show him the reverence which was due. Each time, Grief slunk around and sidestepped the tall, bronze man. Finally Haraal seized the hunchback in his hands and lifted him off of the ground, shaking him violently as he commanded him to come to heel.

Grief locked eyes with Haraal for the first time, then. His song and his mourning stopped, and a silence fell over the campgrounds so heavy that it could be cut with an obscure bladed weapon of Ersuunian origin, the identity of which is still fiercely debated in some highly semantic circles.² Then, slowly and deliberately, Grief began to move his arm. Not the "good" one with its swollen shoulder joint, but the shrunken and skeletal one which had been held to his chest for the whole time. Ruined joints popped and cracked loudly as he extended his limb toward Haraal, who regarded it strangely but did not pull away, even as the bony fingertips touched him upon the cheek, and then reached around to the nape of his neck.

There shouldn't have been any observers of the event capable of seeing through unclouded eyes by this point in time, but the narrative nonetheless states that Grief appeared to grow in size suddenly, while Haraal shrank. Perhaps he also shrank back in fear, despite the long-held belief that Haraal knew no fear. The hunchback met his stature and then exceeded him, somehow standing tall and straight despite his shape remaining the same. Then his other massive arm rose up to embrace the dwarfed form of the chieftain, almost like a parent would a child.

And then he whispered something into Haraal's ear.

What was whispered is unknown, but it is one of the most highly speculated-upon pieces of history and/or mythology to day.

Whatever the hunchback's words were, in a span of seconds they broke the spell. Grief was shrunken and warped again, Haraal as tall and statuesque as he'd ever been. Grief was singing anew, and ambling down into the wilderness beyond the reach of the Haraalian camp. The wracking sobs which had plagued the palace subjects subsided at long last, much to the relief of all. But when they looked up to their lord uninhibited, they saw him turning away.

Haraal had a haunted look about him. His burning eyes were darkened and glassy, and they looked around wildly as he staggered back from the spot where the hunchback had grabbed him.

Then he screamed.

He screamed, and clutched his ears as if it were ringing in his own ears, and then he fled in a frenzy across the palace grounds before leaping atop and unbroken horse and riding beyond the horizon. As he passed by the ever-growing tapestries which lined the thoroughfare leading to his court, it is said that their intricately woven programs twisted and morphed to depict not their history and grand achievements, but a bleak future of clouds and blood. Haraal fled into reaches unknown, forsaking crown, throne, and people as the failing of his powers and the ineffable words of the hunchback shook him to his core.

Sober-minded from the catharsis of the hunchback's influence, and free of Haraal's Presence and Gaze both, his subjects are said to have promptly burned the settlement to the ground and then dispersed, the site of that short-lived capital forever lost to history.

Traditions which venerate Haraal as a deific figure tend to describe his confrontation with the hunchback as a penultimate battle against good and evil, which ended in Grief being banished at great personal cost to Haraal, who vowed to return to his people one day once all pain and decay had been driven from the land. Belief in the imminent return of Haraal has waxed and waned with the centuries, growing particularly strong during times of hardship when many such millennialist movements are taking root, but dissipating soon after it becomes apparent that the end is not nigh.

Even among less dogmatic communities across the Ersuunian Basin, where birth defects and deformities often set an individual apart as special or touched by divinity, the possession of any aspects associated with Grief is a universally dire social stigma lacking in any duality or complexity of meaning.

The streets of Porylus seem to be free of such anxieties as we pass them by, but I have heard rumor that Haraalian movements are beginning to come back into fashion with the approach of the three-hundredth year After the Rupture.





¹ If so, please tell me about this distant place so that I might move there.
² The "skirpha" referenced originally by Yashka the Sage has been variously interpreted as a sword, long knife, grain-scythe, or horseman's axe, with concessions to the theory that it was a generic term for "blade" being few and far between. Our own Professor of Fencing & Swordsmanship Berchtold Vogt claims in a footnote in the Appendices of the recently released second edition of his Manual of Masterful Martial Maneuvers that the skirpha was actually a pole weapon having more in common with an earspoon spear with a weighted, metal-capped butt. As his theory goes, the weapon was not actually meant to slice the silence at all, and Yashka's description was actually a subtle infiltration of the old Nambarish tradition of metaphysical poetry, in which the fundamental properties of poetic subjects are altered dramatically for emphasis or coded layers of meaning. Though remarkably deep and compelling compared to his usual area of... expertise, Vogt's theory has only drummed up more conflict among etymologists.

On the Other Origins of Haraal.

We all know the classic version of the story by now. Kibra says as much while prefacing the speech she is surely about to give us. We each nod our heads, but then don't really object when she goes on to describe the origin myth anyway.

Most commonly (or at least, traditionally) the culture-hero Haraal is believed to have been birthed from the trunk of an aging tree on the side of the peak known as Yorl'di. This mountain is generally considered to have been an isolated part of the southeastern Pashels. Haraal is unequivocally described as being exceptionally tall and of Ersuunian ideal, so theories that he may have been one of the Pach-Pah are quickly quashed. He fell from the mountain, injuring himself, and then he was nursed back to health by a family of herders who would become his first servants in the conquest of the whole Ersuunian Basin. Spectacular feats of strength, skill, and seemingly divine luck quickly follow, mixed in with some tribal politicking. Wrap it up with a few vague allusions to abduction and ethnic cleansing here and there, and you've got the early years of our beloved bronze god-chieftain. Plain, simple fun for the whole family at the monthly Reaffirmation of the Law.

But there is another story. Several in fact, but this fountain brings to mind one in particular.

In the Histories of All by our beloved Sage, Yashka, there is a single verse which reads that once Haraal had conquered the last of the Ersuunian holdouts in the west--specifically after he finished tightening an iron band around the skull of king Sperhel until his head exploded--he decided to "settle down and embrace the land of his birth."¹ This excerpt has three primary interpretations.

The first, generally tied with the above narrative, is that it is metaphorical, and that Haraal was decreeing that he was going to shift from conquest to administration, thereby embracing all of the land that he now claimed as his own by birthright. Thus "the land of his birth" is synonymous with every area of the Basin which he eventually claimed as part of his empire.

The second is that Haraal was specifically regarding the area where he would later found his court and capital city, styled on the palatial nomad camps of old. Following this line of logic, the area in the northwest of the Basin would have been the place where he was "born", which happened to be the farthest point in the entire empire from the purported site of Yorl'di.²

The logical conclusion of this interpretation was that Haraal was born in some other fashion, and that the mountain and tree were more symbolic than actual, historical sites. The Ersuunians of the northwest were quick to apply one of their own myths to the story, in their attempt to subsume their conqueror into their own culture, probably before those filthy mid-landers or water-drinking east-fringers could make the same claims or some such. The myth in question was one of immaculate conception.

There once was a great, nameless king among Ersuunians, said to be of the twentieth generation of nobles descended from the chieftain Gohr himself. This king had an insatiable desire for collecting wives, though for exactly what purpose was unknown: they were entirely leisured within his court, and were not made to engage in any state or domestic matters. Nor did they serve the less common but more infamous purpose of a harem, for they all remained virgins in his company, and he had no known children. The count varies from source to source, but it seems that he had several dozen such brides in gilded cages.

And one day, he decided to add one more to the bunch.

Kibra tells us that the young woman's name was Tiamis. She was the daughter of one of the king's sub-chieftains, and probably the sister of one or more women who were already the man's wives. She was brought to him in time for the spring harvest, when the chiefdom's agrarian subjects were paying their tribute of grain, animals, and leather. A great feast was held by the king to host the representatives of his vassals and bond-servants, as well as to celebrate his latest wedding. At that feast all manner of Ersuunian delicacies were to be found. Among these curiosities of semi-settled cuisine was the pasture date.

Ciudo asks our guide "what are pasture dates?" because of course he would. She seems all too happy to answer him.

"Pasture date" is a euphemism in modern speech used to refer to roasted horse testicles.

How they got that name and why anyone thought that disembodied genitals resemble pitted fruits, I cannot fathom, and I'd rather not try. But that is what they are, and that is the origin of the unusually-shaped, fist-sized globe which the statue now identified as Tiamis is reaching for.

I am not sure if I approve of this visual pun or not.

Our storyteller goes on to describe how great rows of spitted pasture dates were being roasted over trough-like fires all throughout the camp on that day. They were fresh- exceedingly so in some cases, for the stallions they'd been "harvested" from had been gelded earlier that morning. When Tiamis arrived at the banquet and saw these highly seasonal treats, she seized one at once. Unfortunately for her, the date she plucked had not been cooked sufficiently, and she did not realize how raw it was until she'd eaten more than half of it. Kibra illustrates her nonchalance at this discovery by shrugging her shoulders and mimicking downing the remainder.

I begin to consider what I will do for my lunch hour today, because none of us are going to be eating now.

Rather than becoming wretchedly food-poisoned, Tiamis felt herself become mildly bloated after her meal. Over the course of the next few days, it became apparent that she was miraculously (and severely) pregnant. Her husband was as confused as he was enraged, and chose to wait until the birth of the child to decide just what should be done. Tiamis gave birth after only forty days. Within minutes of his birth, the boy named Haraal was able to stand and speak, and warded his father away sternly. Another forty days passed, and he had grown into a fully mature young man. On the forty-first day of his life, Haraal strangled his "father" to death and assumed control of all his holdings. This story serves as an explanation for how Haraal appeared so suddenly and with such a solid power base at his disposal, once conquest of the Basin began. Tiamis and the other widows disappear from the narrative at this point, and the story quickly takes a shape resembling that of the traditional rise to greatness.

Kibra explains unsolicited that the merger of the two contradictory tales in this piece of art is meant to represent equal appreciation of all ideas, grand or small, orthodox or fringe, in the name of the greater goal of acquisition of knowledge. I am impressed- this simultaneously reaffirms Porylus' relationship with the Ivory Tower, and takes the latter to task in its approach of research in recent centuries.

Our guide turns and quits the scene now, gesturing with both hands for us to follow after her as we make our final approach to the tower of Porylus Mons.

I quietly wonder if any statues are hidden away here depicting the conflicting beliefs about the disappearance of Haraal.



¹ Verse 16,982, line 44 of the Histories of All, Yashka the Sage, 1284 BR.

² The third theory is that Yorl'di is misidentified with any of the Pashels, and that it was in fact the highest peak of the Oron'er Mountains. But this argument doesn't really come into play because the greatest proponents of it are based in Nambar, Serminwurth, and the pauper graves reserved for heretics after they've been ritually bled to death via paper cuts by priests of the Ivory Tower.

Goblin Watch, Episode 3: Mythology 2

 


Hello, and welcome back to Goblin Watch! The mini-series dedicated to the origins and iterations of everyone's favorite X and Y!

... Whoops, I didn't come up with variables for this intro.

Uh, let's see here... tricksters and knaves, no, I used that... critters and adventurer-fodder, no, that was from the time before last... This list really isn't going to last me as long as I had hoped unless I get creative. Maybe if I consult a thesaurus... Ah-hah!

Everyone's favorite sneaks and house-helpers! Yes, let's go with that.

Last episode, all the way back in the tumultuous year of 2018, we took a look at the earliest of the proto-goblins found in Classical Mythology- kobaloi, kabeiroi, kerkopes, ketcetera.

Today, we'll be moving forward by an indeterminate amount of time, and a few hundred kilomiles north to the interior of Central and Northern Europe, where the ancestors of the Germanic peoples settled during the later stages of the Indo-European migrations thousands of years ago. These peoples had a diverse set of religious beliefs and practices which fall under our umbrella of "Germanic mythology" today. Deities such as Odin/Wōtan, Thor/Donar, and Frigg/Frija figured prominently in those belief systems, and were venerated well into the Common Era before a shift toward newer religions caused a break in continuity. But other, smaller beings such as Heinzelmann,  Hödekin, and King Goldemar persisted or even came into existence as syncretized pagan outcroppings in a predominantly Christian context. What these three men have in common in modern German(ic) folklore is that they are all kobolds.

A kobold is a secretive spirit of a more domestic or artificial (in the sense of craft and artifice) persuasion than the wild or primal kobalos. They dwell in homes or the walls of mine shafts, assisting those who honor them (or at least staying out of their way), and causing a wide variety of mischief for those who anger them. They weren't just tricksters to encounter rarely in the wild or in the entourage of some greater god- in fact they seemed to factor significantly into the daily lives of mortals, albeit in an almost invisible way.

As mentioned in previous episodes, "kobold" seems to be etymologically descended from "kobalos", meaning a mischievous spirit or rogue. This etymology comes down to us from Jacob Grimm, a German mythologist as well as the elder of the famous Brothers Grimm. But that is not the only explanation for the origin of the word. Other competing etymologies look for a native Germanic origin.These include kuba-walda ("one who rules the house"), kofewalt (a cognate to Old Saxon cofgoda or "room-god"), and the contraction of the words koben and hold ("pigsty" and "stall spirit" respectively).

Interestingly, while these home, hearth, or room-related etymologies all distance the kobold from the kobaloi or kerkopes of ancient Greek and Anatolian religion, they also cause cause the kobold to resemble in function the di penates or domestic Lares of ancient Roman religion- spirits in effigy who also presided over and protected specific locations to which they were limited. There are, broadly speaking, three types of kobolds, and the above characterization fits best with the first.

House kobolds dwell in a family's home and act as house spirits--helping with chores, offering good luck, making it wealthy in gold or grain, etc-- though they are not bound to the existence of that house, nor do they originate from it. The home and the kobold seem to have completely independent ontologies. Many stories deal with how kobolds first come to live in a house of their choosing, often by announcing their presence through some ominous event and then reacting according to how the owners of the household respond. If a small, miserable creature appears at the door during a stormy night and the residents decide to take pity upon it and welcome it in, the kobold takes up residence in order to repay the favor. Or, if wood chips and cow manure are suddenly found tracked around the house and inside of the milk containers, a family who is tolerant of it will gain a kobold for being good sports. Other times a kobold has to be deliberately attracted to the home through a very specific set of events, such as bagging and speaking magic words to a bird standing on an anthill in the woods between the hours of noon and one o'clock on Saint John's Day.

I feel like that much work and planning could have more easily gone toward hiring a normal servant.

After a house acquired a kobold, it dwelt somewhere in the building, often in or around the central hearth. The occupants were expected to care for their new house spirit by leaving offerings out at night. These often took the form of food or drink, particularly beer for the subtype of house kobold called a bieresal, known to dwell in inn cellars. It appears that mortals did not generally interact with their kobolds directly. If all was as it should be, a kobold was not visible in the flesh (or whatever other form it took). Rather, they'd be represented by small effigies and statues, made in their ugly or exaggerated image and placed around the home by its owners. Kobold idols were being carved from boxwood at least as late as the 13th century, as recounted by the German poet Konrad von Würzburg, though Konrad describes the practice as mostly being "for fun" by that point in time, rather than as part of a serious ritual practice.

Heinzelmann,  Hödekin, and King Goldemar were each house kobolds, and each brought varying degrees of good fortune to their patrons. Goldemar was a great kobold in particular, being a king among kobolds with his own queen, nobles, and court in service of the human king Neveling von Hardenberg. His retribution was as terrible as his gifts were great, however. As with many kobold tales, a servant eventually tried to catch a glimpse of his invisible form by deception, and in response Goldemar killed him, chopped him up, roasted his meat, and left Castle Hardenstein after placing a curse of bad luck upon it. In fact, most of the high-profile, named kobolds in myths seem to rack up quite a body count from being angered so easily, invariably slaughtering and cannibalizing other people. Heinzelmann seems to be an exception to this, giving fair warning of his bad luck and generally acting more gentle.

Just don't ever ask him what's in the trunk of his car.

The next type is the mine kobold. These industrious workers were expert miners and metalworkers native to the shafts and tunnels of mines throughout early Renaissance-era Germany. Or rather, they lived in the stone of the shafts and tunnels. Some legends surrounding mine kobolds claim that they can actually move through solid earth the same way a human can move through open air. They seem to be more immediately malevolent toward humans than house kobolds are, with the bulk of tales about them showing them in a negative light. The sounds of kobolds working could be heard throughout otherwise quiet tunnels, and if one followed after the sounds of their drilling, shoveling, or knocking, one was liable to end up collapsing their tunnel, flooding it, or filling it with noxious fumes. Mine kobolds were also blamed for the disappearance of tools or food, or the breaking of machinery in and around the mine. But the most famous type of mine kobold trick takes a far more physical form.

They would deceive miners into prospecting what looks like rich veins of copper or silver and then mining all of the ore out, only for the miners to realize later on that the ore was worthless, devoid of precious metals, prone to causing skin irritation on contact, and sometimes possessed of a toxic gas which was released during the smelting process. These veins of junk were named after the kobolds who put them there and wisely avoided until the 18th century, when a Swedish chemist named Georg Brandt isolated a substance from it that was hitherto unknown to mineralogy. Later on in 1780, this metal was discovered to be an all new chemical element. Cobalt still bears the name of its ill-disposed creators.

Less frequently, mine kobolds were known to be benevolent, and to operate under the same system of respectful conduct and reciprocal favors as house kobolds. They were fond of such appeasements as silver and gold. In such instances, their tunnel-knocking could be interpreted as being a warning not to dig toward danger, or alternatively to dig toward hidden veins of metal. Or they could give them more poisonous cobalt. It was pretty tricky business.

This is the part where I make an aside to address the tiny, scaly elephant in the room. I believe that the classic mine kobold--a nasty interpretation of it in particular--was a partial inspiration for kobolds when they became monsters in the original release of Dungeons & Dragons. Territorial, fond of mining and traps, and antagonistic toward the subterranean creatures they lived close to (including the dwarves and gnomes whom traditional kobolds are often conflated with), these little para-goblins would go on to become an endearing and colorful part of fantasy pop-culture. I will leave the bulk of that discussion for its own episode someday, but there is one point I'd like to touch on. Oftentimes older tabletop gamers will remark at how strange it was for 3rd Edition to remake of kobolds as reptilian dragon-sycophants, but in researching for this project, I've come to wonder what inspired the "original" form of kobolds-as-adventurer-fodder to begin with. After centuries of approximately human or dwarf-like appearance, 1974 marked the date when kobolds became dog-faced goblins with scales and forehead-horns.

And let's not even get started on the Vulcan ears.

Carrying on the spirit of odd ones out, we come to the third and final major type of kobold.

The Klabautermann is the kobold of a ship, protector of sailors and giver of good fortune to fishermen of the Baltic and North Seas. Sometimes, it will even rescue people washed overboard. It takes a fairly modern appearance, seeming to be a little man with a yellow sailor's hat or coat, and smoking a pipe filled with tobacco. Rather than having figurines or effigies of the ship's kobold, its image is often carved into the mast of the ship directly. Unlike house kobolds who come and go as they please, a Klabautermann seems more strongly associated with a particular ship. For instance, they come to protect a ship by having lived in a tree used for wood in the construction of the vessel, so the ship becomes an extension of its home. A Klabautermann is also known to carry around a caulking hammer for ship repairs, lending some credence to one etymology for Klabautermann which derives from the Low German verb kalfatern, or "to caulk". But in keeping with the theme of dualism among kobolds, Klabautermann can also be responsible for accidents and pranks aboard a ship far out at sea. And rather than being punished for trying to see the kobold's physical form, he willingly reveals himself to the crew of a ship so that they know that they are doomed by a storm or some other impending terrible event. The sea-kobold even goes down with the ship in such instances.

Similar in name and shape but different in nature is the Dutch Kabouter. A Kabouter is a small creature who commonly lives in a hill, or in modern popular culture, a large mushroom house. They are more shy of humans than dedicated house spirit kobolds, but will occasionally teach a nice young Dutchman how to make wooden shoes or deep building foundations. Kabouter men typically wear long, full beards and pointed red hats. If you're noticing how similar this appearance sounds to a certain other fictional creature, you are correct: Kabouters were famously written about and richly illustrated by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet in their 1976 book series, Leven en werken van de Kabouter. In English this translates to "Life and works of the Kabouter", but when the book was translated for sale in English-speaking countries, "Kabouter" was replaced with the word "Gnome". Eight years later the Spanish animated television series David, el Gnomo was released, and the following year David the Gnome hit American audiences.

And he kept on swinging.

So here we have another example of syncretism between a member of the goblin family and something quite different. This conflation with other sprites and beings is as common for kobolds, up to and including King Goldemar whom I referenced above. In the cycle of legends surrounding Theoderic the Great (taking the mythical form of Dietrich von Bern), Goldemar is described not as a kobold but as a dwarf. This might be a case of the terms for such creatures being vague, overlapping, or even synonymous during the times they were first used, and then that convention carrying on into modern times. I believe that this is supported by the fact that his brother Elbegast was described as an Elf-king while hanging out and robbing people with Charlemagne in a Middle Dutch poem. Their other brother, the dwarf Alberich, appears in the Nibelungenlied and serves as a treasure guardian for the protagonist Siegfried. They were a pretty popular bunch.

Despite the long and storied histories of German and Dutch communities in the land that would eventually become part of the United States, I was surprised to find almost nothing in the way of kobold myths or traditions in modern North America. Perhaps because they were so often tied to certain houses, or particular families, or to the earth itself, the kobolds were largely left behind in the Old Country by emigrants. Of course, just because there's no popular tradition centered on them doesn't mean that they aren't here. A handful of kobolds have made their way to this "New World" over the ages, always keeping just out of human notice or the eyes of history in these strange new lands. When the Dutch privateer Jan Janszoon van Haarlem was captured by Barbary Pirates in 1618, you can be sure that his fleet's water-kobolds came in tow. When he became Murat Reis the Younger, Grand Admiral and Governor of the Republic of Salé, they hunkered down in those balmy ports and made an uneasy alliance with the Djinn of Morocco. And when his son Anthony Janszoon van Salee moved to the New Netherlands and became the first and largest grantee of land on Coney Island, they were right behind him, pleased to find a semblance of home at last. Certainly, Janszoon's descendants have enjoyed considerable good fortune for the past few centuries, being the Vanderbilt Dynasty and all.

Coincidence?



Next episode, we'll be moving further west, to the shores of France as well as the British Isles and Ireland, where we will finally touch upon the linguistically modern goblin and its Insular Celtic neighbors.

I want to give a special thanks to all of my donors and supporters, as well as to one Goody Mooncup. Without her letter to the editor and advice column, I wouldn't have completed my research for this episode nearly as "quickly".

I am the Furtive Goblin, this was Goblin Watch, and I thank you for listening!




Dowden, Ken. European Paganism. Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Grimm, Jacob.Teutonic Mythology, Part 2. Kessinger Publishing, 2003 [1883].

Rose, Carol. Spirits, Fairies, Leprechauns, and Goblins: An Encyclopedia. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1996.

Woeful Errands and Mighty Dooms.

The Esgodarrans of the peripheral hill and highland regions of the Ersuunian Basin are a people who have witnessed their fare share of hardship. I have written with no shortage of attitude on this subject in the past. But there is one facet of Esgodarran culture which I believe needs no opinionated foreign input in order to get the gravity of its meaning and history across. It simply need speak for itself.

I write of the cycle of myths surrounding their dozens, if not hundreds of folk-heroes and legendary ancestors. Each geographic enclave of Esgodarran clans is fairly well separated from the others in this day and age, though their legendary cycles maintain similarities and traditions well into the semi-modern generations. For that reason, the myths are treated as being different variations of a single unifying system of beliefs and epics, rather than being genuinely separate siblings descended from the same parent-culture.

In particular, this cycle is somewhat unique for the way in which these important cultural icons are treated. Generally speaking, heroes embody or come to embody a culture's highest ideals (or flirt with their most decried iniquities), while struggling against some great threat. They then tend to succeed against their greatest foe or monster, and return home to wealth, or with wealth. At the very least, they meet a just and appropriate fate which instills in the audience an appreciation of the virtues of which the hero was lacking. Esgodarran heroes, meanwhile, do not always meet such tidy bookends.

Esgodarran heroes stumble.

Esgodarran heroes die.

Esgodarran heroes lose.

Two concepts are central to the Esgodarran heroic myth; the Woeful Errand, and the Mighty Doom.

The Woeful Errand is the challenge, foe, or catastrophe which has demanded that the hero rise to the occasion. Widespread famine, earthquakes, evil magic, and other invading tribes are common causes of conflict for the people and their hero, but there are many. The hero can come from a diverse set of backgrounds, not all of them particularly well to do, and the lack of spoken grammatical gender or particularly gendered names in many Esgodarran dialects means that self-reflection on, or personalization of, a hero's identity is common among audience members of a traditional oratory performance. When the hero becomes distinguished for some reason or another, they take on the Woeful Errand of saving the land or community from danger. Completion of the errand would be success in the quest, and is what each hero strives for.

The Mighty Doom is what they end up receiving, however. It is their ultimate fate, normally at least one step removed from success, and often involving the death of the hero. The hero, recognizing their looming destruction as well as the futility of their attempts to avert it, proceed to meet as glorious an end as possible. I want to emphasis that point- they recognize the ultimate futility of their deeds. Warriors throw themselves upon an army until their bodies are like pincushions of spears and arrows, chieftains and other leaders commit ritual suicide or endure total disgrace after failing to protect their tribes from treachery, and great hunters are torn to pieces by mythical beasts who will continue to stalk human meals in the absence of their traps.

Supposedly none of it matters in the end. But they continue to act, regardless.

Like the Pem-Pah of the far southwest, these stories tell of a grim world in which loss is to be expected. But unlike the guardians of Anqoh, the loss and failure are not random events in a chaotic world governed by uncaring chance. The dignified tragedies of Esgodarran folk-heroes are treated as inevitable in the extreme, and in some cases even preordained by seers or their gods.

I say that their deeds supposedly do not matter, because that is the exact language typically used in an epic's delivery. However, the fact that they are one and all remembered and venerated despite and because of their failures is emblematic of the great importance of fatalistic struggle in modern Esgodarran narratives. Family lines have even been known to have long-running disputes over whose ancestor was greater in their defeat, based off of the qualified fierceness of the thing which finally killed them. These doomed heroes play an integral role in the way Esgodarrans regard themselves and their place in the world.

A world which they recognize their own setbacks in, but which they will not back down from.

And judging from the number of heroes whose Mighty Doom involves them being crushed beneath the hooves of a thousand horses driven by a giant with golden skin, the historical interactions between Esgodarrans and Ersuunians have not gone without comment or consideration on the part of the highland folk.

Raft People of the River Khesh.

"You think you will move all of these baskets upstream faster by land? Sit down, and my rowers will show you the strength of Sayau!"
- Headsman Olu of Handas Islet, to several southern salt traders.


Identifiers are important in many aspects of our societies. Indicators of who we are, what we are, which group we belong to, and how we would like to be recognized. These identifiers can take many forms. The way we carry ourselves when we walk. The affectation we impart our speech with. I know that styles of dress and decoration are among the most highly visible, as someone who once had to (and on occasion still do) trot around in the beige and grey robes of the Ivory Tower University.

But they can be deeper than that. Skin-deep, in a literal sense. Tattoos, piercings, and other superficial modifications to the body can achieve much the same effect, sometimes in an even more impactful manner.

And then there are those which go deeper.

The results of those sometimes lengthy and involved processes can disturb some of us, or inspire a sort of patronizing fascination in others. I will attempt to avoid both while dealing with this group.

I write of the raft-people of the River Khesh, more appropriately known as the Sayaula or Sayauans, but more commonly known by the ethnic epithet "drop-heads". I will limit my use of the term to the statement of its existence here so that I do not sully the rest of this article with it.

The Sayauans hail from the mid-to-southern Khesh River, being the primary occupants of the river and its tributaries and offshoots in between Riven-Bridge and the Deltas. They have been present in the area since the beginning of recorded history in the late Ersuunian era, but it is not known if they are an aboriginal population. For much of their history, the Sayauans have earned their livelihood by fishing or sailing along the river upon long rafts or more rarely wide, flat-bottomed boats. They typically live one nuclear family to a raft, with the entire extended family cooperating as a loose sort of clan. Clan lineage is traced patrilineally, with most families claiming descent from the folk-hero Sayau, from whom the ethnic group takes its name.

Sayauans also practice artificial skull deformation of a type which is unique to this part of the world and time period.

Ersuunian head-binding was once a common practice among the noble lineages of the old herders, in which the skull was bound at a very young age so that it was very high and "steepled", with a flattened forehead. The practice sharply declined after the ascension of Haraal, and is believed to have ceased completely by the second or third generation of his sons. However, we are left with rich accounts of the practice today, as well as more than a few mausoleums or burial mounds filled with such skulls. Sayauan head-binding, meanwhile, still flourishes among the Sayaula, with upwards of nine out of every ten adults having received some degree of binding in their infancy.

What distinguishes the two styles visually is that where Ersuunian binding raises the top, Sayauan binding pulls the skull back. The top of the head as well as both sides are squeezed into a tapered point at the back of the skull by tightly coiling rope around a cone-shaped structure made of reeds or steamed wooden boards. The desired shape results in a low forehead and a side profile which resembles somewhat the shape of a teardrop. This visual similarity is what has contributed to the obnoxious term referenced above.

The logic behind this practice is informed by the mythology of the Sayaula, who believe that Sayau was born with a head shaped perfectly like such a water droplet. Its contours, alongside his supernatural strength and agility, allowed him to swim up and down the river with no water resistance to speak of. It is not obvious whether the practice has a measurable effect on one's ability to swim or not, but the tradition is a central element of their culture regardless.

This ethnic identifier has also made it very easy for outsiders to pick Sayauans out, however, and the unusual appearance of the practice has probably contributed to past persecution of them. More than once, the heirs of Haraal based in the city now known as Riven-Bridge attempted to subjugate the Sayauans in a bid to consolidate control of the River Khesh, but Sayauan knowledge of the waterways generally ensured that they could escape most of their would-be aggressors, and wage a guerrilla war against those who followed anyway. Material support plus the occasional offer of safe harbor from the northernmost Delta dwellers displeased with the idea of Haraalians coming down from the north was also an invaluable, if clandestine asset.

Today, the sporadic warfare of the past has given way to a tense, cooperative peace in which Sayauan barges and merchant groups have flourished, relatively speaking. They primarily deal in the north-south trade which is still supported by the Independent half of Riven-Bridge, while their relationship with the Loyalists is more tepid at best. Contact with the hill-folk further inland is only occasional, but generally peaceable. Interest in the Sayauans from the central cities has increased in recent decades for other reasons, however.

While they are distinct, the two traditions of skull-shaping referenced above, in addition to the extensive history of the Sayauala in the region, has led some researchers from Deneroth and elsewhere to speculate that there is a link between them and the ancient Ersuunians. One theory is that they were once a lower caste of an Ersuunian tribe, or perhaps an entire tribe of non-Ersuunian bond-servants brought with them on their westward migration. What began as a branding or indicator of subservient status then developed into an element of culture owned and used by the Sayaula themselves, after the events which led to their independence. These theories are of course still in their extreme infancy, and it is unlikely that they will see much development until such a time comes that the rare few researchers who do brave the long journey east manage to conduct their research in a more tactful manner.¹


¹ Somewhat understandably, Sayauans are reluctant to offer comment when overdressed foreigners inquire into whether or not their ancestors once owned them.

Goblin Watch, Episode 2: Mythology 1.

((I really should devote myself to a maxim other than "promise little, deliver less" one of these days. But no matter! Goblin Watch is officially not dead, and with luck I was able to get this embedded audio player to work rather than hyperlinking to SoundCloud for every episode.

Enjoy, if you are able!))

 

Goblin Watch, Episode 02.

Hello, and welcome back to Goblin Watch! The mini-series dedicated to the origins and iterations of everyone's favorite tricksters and diminutive knaves!

Here today we have the first installment in our sub-series looking at goblins and their kin in mythology. We also have the beginnings of titular colon cancer, knowing how often I like to sub-divide and create tangents to my own work.

When we left off last, we had laid down a basic framework how this series is supposed to work. Now, we're going to see if I can't maintain that system by looking at the some of the earliest bits of information related to etymologically-linked goblins in mythology. Mind you, I won't be glossing over or ignoring all of the different goblin-like beings of other, non-European mythologies- this is just an easy way to dip one's toe into the whole thing. If there's a creature similar to (or not so similar to) a goblin in another belief system, rest assured I will try to find it. Or, if you'd like, prompt me to home in on a particular topic in a comment down below!

To recap, the word "goblin" and its equivalents are found in many Indo-European languages. English and Welsh got its goblin and coblyn from French gobelin, which existed alongside German kobold, and both of those descend from Latin cabalus. Ultimately, or at least as far as language experts can tell, that comes from Greek kobalos, plural kobaloi.

Kobaloi came in two forms in the myths of ancient Greece, as recorded by several slightly less ancient scholars. The first is as a class of spirits in service to the god Dionysus, the traits of whom they exhibited in addition to being tricksters and mischief-makers among mortals. The second is a use of kobalos in a pejorative sense, referring to a person as a kobalos because they are a knave, thief, or general rogue. This sense of the word is still informed by the meaning of the first however, because a roguish kobalos was believed to be acting like--or even invoking--the kobalos spirits. There is also a considerable amount of overlap between kobaloi spirits and two other classes of beings, called the kabeiroi and the Kerkopes. The kabeiroi were mystery cult deities of possibly non-Greek origin popular in the Anatolian peninsula, often depicted as dwarves with massive phalluses.The Kerkopes were a pair of vaguely simian forest spirit brothers and consummate tricksters. Both sets will be included in this discussion for the sake of applicability.

Perhaps the most popular mythic episode involving kobaloi comes from the exploits of Heracles, or perhaps more precisely the exploitation of Heracles, in which the Kerkopes totally yoinked his stuff while he was sleeping.

Take that, demigods!

Of course Heracles, being Heracles, soon woke up and discovered what the brothers were doing, so that he could defeat them and seize them in a heroic fashion. But the brothers had as much charm and wit as they did physical ability and sneakiness, and they made good use of their punishment when Heracles slung them both upside down from a pole laid across his shoulders.

As he walked and they swung back and forth, they started cackling at something. When Heracles finally set them down to ask what was so funny, they explained that they were laughing at his backside, which was apparently quite bare and very darkly tanned. He decided to be a good sport about it and, laughing at the jokes at the expense of his own bronzed butt, Heracles released the Kerkopes.

Speaking of butts, or at least an area not too far from it, the name Kerkopes is of significance. It means "tailed ones", and suggests that the brothers actually possessed tails like an animal. A different myth attempts to explain this name by presenting the Keropes as the result of a terrible curse. Zeus, being Zeus, for whatever frivolous reason decided to transform the brothers from their more human appearance into the first monkeys. This gives an explanation for the perceived capriciousness and trickiness of humanity's little primate cousins. It also reminds us that of the hundreds of geographic variations on goblins present throughout tabletop RPGs, Pathfinder's monkey goblins are among the least far-fetched!

... Alright, maybe still a little far-fetched.

The kabeiroi are less attested to in legends, and have more enigmatic origins. It appears as though the name is derived from a different source as kobaloi. One theory, popular since the 16th century, has been that kabeiroi (also transliterated as cabeiri, cabiri, or kabiri) is derived from the ancient Semitic root word kabir (kbr), meaning "great". Other than a few suggestions over the centuries that the word might be of Hittite, Sumerian, or Indo-Aryan origin, this theory seems to have held up until the drop in debate interest which I found while researching this topic today.

Evidently the most current and complete source on the kabeiroi and their connection with other Hellenic deities is a poorly scanned 2004 reprint of an 1877 tome written by one Robert Brown. But Brown seems to have thoroughly acknowledged and addressed earlier scholars in his two-volume work, such as preserving an earlier assertion that the kabeiroi were treated as being the same in ancient times as the kobaloi, and that they were the companions of Dionysus. This makes sense given the kobalic bent toward mischief and the phallic nature of the kabeiroi, because Dionysus, as a god of wine and revelry (among other domains) was very much involved in party antics. Brown also presents the word or name "choroimanes-aiolomorphus", which to the best of my understanding means something like the power of shape-shifting, supporting the association between kobaloi and skillful trickery. Small, sneaky shapeshifters are a feature of countless different mythologies and folklores across Eurasia to this day, including creatures which might be more readily identified as elves or dwarves.

The kabeiroi, despite being stereotyped as droll little pricks, were venerated as gods or potent spirits in their own right, thanks to a cult which had once spread outward from the islands of Samothrace and Lemnos. In a more formal setting they were associated with craftsmanship and with Hephaestus, or even made to mirror the Olympic pantheon in general. Considering that Samothrace was once Phoenician, this might be a case of early syncretism. The kabeiroi's numbers varied from depiction to depiction, and their names were hardly ever recorded in favor of being referred to as the "great gods", but there seemed to be at least two, often seven or eight, and as many as an entire race of them with varying ratios of males and females within. Sometimes they came in pairs, but other times every kabeiroi was male.

We begin to see here early hints of the surprisingly effective artifice and almost nonexistent women which would become prominent features of goblins-as-orcs in the legendarium of J. R. R. Tolkien.

As the kabeiroi cult spread, it became a part of broader Classical Mediterranean religious practice, and was gradually subsumed within Greek and later Roman traditions. The famous tragedian Aeschylus wrote a play named The Kabeiroi, which apparently involved the Argonauts becoming privy to their sacred mysteries, though it only survives in fragmentary or referential form today. The historian Herodotus was also initiated into the cult at some point. But like almost all of the mystery cults from the period, worship of the kabeiroi eventually declined in the face of newer or stronger movements in the region.

But this was not before the kobaloi were able to find a place in the mythology of other parts of the European continent. And so, perhaps in a flanderized form, the mischievous spirits survived their Aegean origins and were allowed to continue their process of transforming to suit the mythological niches which they would encounter, going forward. They would no longer be worshiped as gods, but we couldn't hog the limelight for too long, could we?

Next episode, we will look into some of those European proto-goblins more deeply.

I am the Furtive Goblin, this was Goblin Watch, and I thank you for listening! Yes, listening and not watching, as I mistakenly said last episode.

If I made any mistakes in this episode, or I didn't explain something to your satisfaction, please leave a question below and I will gladly address it.



Brown, Robert. The Greek Dionysiak Myth, Part 2. Kessinger Publishing, 2004 [1877].

Burkert, Walter. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age. Harvard University Press, 1992.