The Scrap Goblin

Goblin by Eoghan Kerrigan

After the last frantic bustle of Narblesnard and other end-of-year holidays gives way to the slow, cold quiet of winter, goblin whelps are taught to attune their prodigious ears to the sounds of nature. They listen to the lilting wind, the crackling frost, and the dripping water of icicles and tree boughs soaked black. They listen for warning of any squirrels stirring early. But above all, they listen in rapt anticipation for any hint of the Scrap Goblin swooping down on the wind or creeping over the mud.

I won't dress the topic up in layers of mystery this time. The Scrap Goblin delivers gifts to children– specifically the gifts that they cobbled together out of what most people would consider junk. From figurines whittled out of a splintered 2x4, to musical instruments made of tin cans and spare change, to stuffed animals reborn from an old pillowcase, the Scrap Goblin's presents are as varied and clever as they are outwardly "quaint".

The Scrap Goblin is not any single, clear-cut figure in folklore. Rather, they are a nebulous concept with no set age, appearance, gender, or canon of stories. And while they are generally celebrated at around the same time every year, not even their holiday has a set date. We all grow up knowing a different Scrap Goblin. We are all left waiting and wondering at what they'll bring for us this winter, while our parents quietly stitch sackcloth together in the backroom.

But this isn't an anthropological deep-dive into mythology, and I wouldn't get very far by trying to make it one. I'm not going to share everything that the Scrap Goblin can be.

Instead, I'm going to share what they are to me.

My Scrap Goblin was always the sweetly sardonic sort. He was aware of the evil of the world, and tired beyond his years for it. But he shared it in a gentle, nurturing way through jokes and little lessons that helped prepare you for it. He loved to carve wood, and favorite among my gifts from him were a toy sword, and a hobbyhorse that I could barely drag across the floor when I was younger. He was also left-handed, giving me a much-needed role model at a time when I couldn't even operate scissors without hurting myself, and when my only other hero to look to was the blond not-elf on a friend's Nintendo 64.

He had a sad and bare childhood that he didn't want others to experience.

And in retrospect, he had a bit of a horrifying apotheosis. But we'll get to that.

The Scrap Goblin was once a fairly ordinary goblin. He came from a big family in a bigger community where most of what you did, you did with a dozen other people involved or milling around close by. They were poor, but compassionate; hardworking, but not stupid. The stories didn't push some blasé narrative about the indomitable spirit of the idyllic poor– they knew the how and the why behind their position in the world. But that's a struggle for another story.

The Scrap Goblin enjoyed being around others, and often looked after his gaggle of little niblings. But he also liked to go out on his own and scavenge around the edges of the woods and the big folk towns. He liked to tinker and toil, and create new valuables out of old refuse. And over time, he realized that other goblins liked his creations too.

So he started to give them away. At first it was a random and haphazard thing– a child's toy here, a one-of-a-kind tool there. They were appreciated gifts, but nothing special. But as winter set in, hardship found the town. Sickness and hunger came, followed soon after by the specters of more immediate danger.

The Scrap Goblin's gifts became much-needed distractions, and so his mere hobby became a full-time commitment. As parcels left his little workroom weekly, the scrapheaps shrank and shrank.

But while his trinkets offered momentary respite, they did little to fix the real problems his friends and family were facing. He turned to larger and more ambitious projects to alleviate their suffering, clothing and warming them and propping up the sick. He tore down what little he had in the way of a home and turned it into material. All but the rags on his back became scrap.

He gave, and he gave. Still, it wasn't enough.

And though he had so much giving left to do, he ran out of a medium through which to give.

So he did the only thing he could do, and gave of himself.

His hair kept a balding head warm. His nose went to a little girl who'd gotten hers bitten off by a dog. His vocal cords gave new life to the nurse who sang to his patients, albeit a weak and quavering one. His fingers went to the forest foragers who ran afoul of the squirrels. His feet were fine replacements for the frostbitten, and his legbones a fine crutch made. His eyes he gave to an old couple blinded by cataracts, so they could see their youngest child one last time at his funeral. His skin made swaddling for a newborn.

Bit by bit, he gave everything of himself, until there was no self left to give– just a leftover heart, which mourned that it had never been given to anyone as it laid there on the cold, hard ground.

As the cold deepened and the second, true snow of winter fell upon the heart, his ghost rose up in the steam that billowed off of it.

The cold spoke to him, observing that he had given his heart away a long time ago. On this, the Scrap Goblin reflected, and then hesitantly agreed. It still didn't feel like he had done enough.

It never did, the cold replied. It never would. Not in a hundred lifetimes would he feel that gnawing void filled.

The Scrap Goblin asked the cold if it was willing to bet on that.

Coolly, curiously, veiling its amusement, the cold extended him an offer. Very well– it would sweep him up in its icy winds and take him far away. But when it returned next winter, it would bring him back along with it, so he could toil and make gifts anew. But he would only have until the last of the second snow melted before being taken away to wait and to rue again.

The Scrap Goblin agreed.

His steam was whisked away by the wind then, to be buffeted and torn at until the next year when he was reformed in shape, though not in flesh– while he has new fingers to work with, he will always know the absence of the real ones. With those cold little hands he worked again, turning trash into treasure for those who had so little else.

Every year since, every generation since, he has done this.

Today he serves as an inspiration for us– and as a cautionary tale against going quite as far as he did.

I think about the Scrap Goblin a lot, even when he isn't stalking the junkheaps with cardboard and masking tape in hand. I think about what his stories mean to me, and how often I fail to listen to them.

I think about all the people who have flocked to the aesthetic subculture that bears our name. I don't begrudge them one bit for the creativity and community it provides them, but I'm always a little bemused at their raw enthusiasm for it. We don't love junk and rocks and moss because we're innately funky, chaotic, or anti-capitalist– good praxis though that last one may be. We love them because they give many of us a jolt of nostalgia for our childhoods.

For some of us, we love the Scrap Goblin because scraps are all we ever got.

Arbor Day Deforestation Special.

Everyone knows that druids and forests go together like peanut butter and jelly, trial and tribulation, death and taxes, or college and regret. Forget their deep and murky history as elite members of Insular and Continental Celtic societies at odds with the imperialistic writers of early history- trees are where it's at! That's been their thing for well over forty years of tabletop-related fantasy, and for almost four centuries of suspect Romantic scholarship.

But what about when they're not?

What about when we delve into the realm of 3rd edition splatbooks or Pathfinder class archetypes, and search for an overarching logic behind the diverse yet isolated and independent groups of druids operating in different climes and biomes? You'd probably get a wealth of different arguments and answers from actual research, but for the purposes of this post we're going to pretend there's only one answer.

Nature and its method of selection tend to promote competition between organisms and species who occupy similar or adjacent niches. No living thing is exempt from this. Environments, able to shrink or grow, possessing good or poor health, and adapting by way of the sum of all of their evolving parts, are also living things in this grand competition.  Just as "classic" druids are advocates for and protectors of the forest and all its denizens, other ecosystems can (or even must) have their own sapient defenders to ensure that they grow in strength and size and are not encroached upon by other upstart habitats.

Which brings us to peat bogs.

Swamps and other wetlands tend to get a bad rap in fiction. They are nasty and unpleasant, if not depicted as actively evil and dangerous to all outside life. Monsters, witches, and worse things abode in them, and they are the ideal place to find an ancient, sunken temple which would have been pretty difficult to build on that site to begin with. There is some logic to this, since stories tend to be told by humans who in pre-modern times were fearful of or struggled to deal with the weather, diseases, and pests found in many wetlands.

More recently we've been able to realize that they are all tremendously important to the health and diversity of our planet. Peat bogs in particular are havens for unique species of plant and animal life, and the properties of all that ancient layered dead plant matter allow a bog to eat up massive amounts of harmful free carbon in the atmosphere. They are valued to the point that, in some circumstances, it is good for the environment to cut down a forest and then flood it.

Of course the magical wardens of the bogs wouldn't be thinking about the big picture when they cut down the eves of forests or wet the edges of prairies. Just like the forest druids planting saplings or murdering farmers and loggers, and the desert druids promoting rapid aridification of grasslands, they are another force of nature given thought and reason with which to be even more wholly committed to their cause- a moving part in a great big natural machine, kept in check by the other forces opposed to it. Out of this chaotic equilibrium, we get Bog Druids.

Bog druids are believed to be the most isolationist, misanthropic druids in the world because they live so far away from other humanoids in such inhospitable places. Bog druids would counter that they are isolated because other folk are too afraid or can't be bothered to adapt to life in a more neighborly area.The misanthropic part is a little harder to argue against, given their generally sullen demeanor. You'd have one too, if you woke up before dawn every day to chant over a stagnant pool and then spent the next sixteen hours wrangling serpents, chopping up felled wood, and walking around on stilts.

Their style of dress often sets them apart from other denizens or wanderers of bogs because of how specialized it is. Besides a fondness for bronze accessories given heavily to patina, bog druids are noted for their unorthodox skill in waterproofing. Generally, the more waterproofed their clothing is, the more outlandish it looks. Overcoats of near-transparent intestine glued together with rendered bone, rigid cloth painted in tree rubber, grass or leaves woven together and thickly oiled, or plain old animal furs tend to dominate their choices in fashion, with little uniformity between groups of bog druids, or even individual members.

The potent smell of all of that aforementioned clothing tends to be the second distinction to smack outsiders in the face.

Bog druids don't generally have a strict hierarchy. More experienced members have some measure of seniority, but because each commune tends to be so small, every member is expected to be able to make and carry out decisions on their own. Group decisions tend to regard large threats to the bog, interactions with outsiders, or grand discoveries and portents gleaned from the peat. Outsiders can come to them for a variety of reasons. Most often they come to lodge a complaint about some blight or plague of insects that they think was unleashed from the bog, but other times they come to trade, pay for flood information or access to water reservoirs, or to drop off one of their own who has gotten the peculiarly wild hair up their person to study and join the commune. Most don't last very long, but those who stick around long enough are eventually considered to be new peatkeepers.

Most of the druids don't know magic, and those few who keep animal companions or perform divination generally rely upon more mundane means for both. They do have access to such a tremendous wealth of rare reagents and ingredients that their chemistry often looks like magic, however. More than a few potion-makers have risked everything in order to gain access to such reserves, even going so far as to gamble away their precious apothecary alligators.

Every bog druid is handy with a hatchet, saw, and shovel. They use them to shore up or expand the edges of their homeland, as well as to defend themselves from anyone who might have a problem with that. Bloody skirmishes between rival ecosystems are commonplace, with the dead often left feeding new growth or moldering beneath the turf for ages.

The druids of the peat are above all enigmatic, keeping much lore to themselves in their sodden lands. Why would we name them something as geopolitically inappropriate as "druid", if we knew what they prefer to be called?

Some rumors about them may be true, or nonsense, or a bit of both.

20 Things That Might Be True About Bog Druids
1	They are lobbying to either outlaw or control the construction of turf houses in the entire region.
2	Most of them are actually symbiotic hosts to a sentient fungus.
3	The latest logging campaign is the escalation of a disagreement with the nearby forest druid grove over leaving written accounts and doctrines.
4	The group is a front for a highly erotic and comically phallic snake cult.
5	Peat can be necromantically raised to create miles-wide Turf Golems.
6	The druids occasionally hire their members out to oversee sacrifices or judicial procedure.
7	A high-ranking member of the order is actually just a very lost botanist.
8	The druids have a very strong tradition of poetry and music. Just don't mistake one for a bard or filí.
9	They have no idea where that myth about scimitars and wooden armor came from.
10	Will-o'-the-wisps are a bog druid conspiracy.
11	They hate being confused with the Pyromancers of the Great Swamp.
12	The order was formed by a mystic with severe wood allergies.
13	Each bog druid cuts off a finger upon initiation and wears it with a necklace of woven hair.
14	... There is no official rule that the finger and hair have to belong to the druid.
15	The self-styled environmentalists are actually just trying to corner the market on bog butter production.
16	... They've already done so with the extraction and forging of bog iron.
17	They are the original Soggy Bottom Boys.
18	Topographic peat hags formed by soil erosion regularly come to life as literal hags and witches.
19	Layers of peat are meticulously cut out and studied by peat archivists to offer a rich history of the area's vegetation, pollen, spores, and animals.
20	The druids are guided by a reanimated peat mummy, strangled and sacrificed to the bog in the name of a long-forgotten god centuries ago.

Looking Southward and Backward, Part 5.

With this curiosity explained and my young peers at least partly satisfied with the answers, we continue onward. All around us, mounds of fresh snow are heaped at the sides of the roads by diligent locals with shovels. It all melts rapidly, but this way most of the water is diverted into the long, narrow trenches which line most of the major avenues, rather than making an unwieldy mess of mud out of the lightly paved causeways. We pass by one of the destinations of several such ditches as our caravan lumbers forward, and several of the draft animals are drawn aside so that they may briefly drink from the small step cistern, as many others are. It is as we watch this that the wind shifts to blow from behind us, and the smell of beast is suddenly overpowered. Several of us cough from the acrid smoke, far more potent than that coming from any chimney or fire pit, and we all twist around to behold the large, diffuse cloud of smoke rising up in the north, beyond the grey mass of the True City.

Ciudo mistakes the smoke for a conflagration at first, fearing that the timber buildings of the northern end of the False City are somehow on fire. But Hraela speaks up, stating that she knows the reason for the smoke, and jogging my memory of Gertisch traditions in the process.

The smoke comes from just beyond the edge of the city, you see. The northern quarter is most heavily populated by those of Gertisch descent, who typically set up camp there, close to the roads which connect Deneroth to the low-lying plains, rivers, and drowned coasts of their homeland. As such, cultural practices of those esteemed, rindy river peoples are strongest on the north side.¹ One such seasonal ritual is one of great excitement and leisure for the entire community, generally taking place sometime before or after the hibernal solstice, depending on local tradition. I speak of course of the Burning of the Children.

I will give my readers the opportunity to collect themselves and reread that last line now.

Don't worry. Contrary to popular belief, they are not real children, although their likeness can come unnervingly close at times.

It would be more accurate to say that it is the Burning of the Effigies of the Children, but that just doesn't roll off the tongue as easily, nor does the average Ersuut speaker have the glottal fortitude to properly inflect the original Gertisch name for the holiday.

In the mythology of the northerners, winter is personified as a haggard old man, bald and bedecked in the knotted ropes of a hundred sunken river pirate vessels. It is his cold and impassive hatred for all people, especially children who have the youth he envies, which brings the bitterness of winter. In the wake of his ropes, ice creeps up the rivers as he walks along the surface of each, capsizing any boats or rafts he comes across and freezing off the toes of fishwives. The only thing which can quell his cold anger is the smell and sound of a child wreathed in bedazzling flames, which soothes him and gives him ghosts to tie up in his ropes, drag away, and finally gnaw upon during the long warm months in which he sleeps. To sacrifice a child in such a way is to spare the world a long and brutal winter, and the more youths are immolated in this fashion, the faster and more magnificently spring will arrive.

By this point, Ciudo is pale with horror and Sarq seems to be on the verge of violent sickness, though that may be due to the dubious quality of the meat on a spit he bought from a vendor not long ago.

Hraela only smiles in recollection of her own childhood memories.

Understandably, the Gertisch do not actually like to sacrifice their children, nor the children of their enemies, though that is another common legend attached to the old ways of the archetypal bandy-legged river pirates of their past. Instead, the tribes take advantage of the poor sight and general stupidity of Old Man Winter, and instead construct a facsimile of the child to be "sacrificed".

I must agree with her that the Burning of the Children is quite a clever development in mythology, when you take into account how poorly other groups of people tend to respond to human sacrifice, or human sacrifice for reasons different than their own. Each effigy is a creation of carved and polished wood, sometimes painted and decorated with expensive cloth, and nested in a "throne" of wicker which keeps the figure in place when it is erected atop several poles. The effigy itself is rarely taller than four and a half feet, but the poles can add another five or six. At least one child is crafted by every family involved in the celebration- to contribute nothing is to flirt with disaster and bad luck for the rest of the year, or perhaps even the loss of a child due to the lingering magic of Winter. There is however no upward limit on the number a family can burn, assuming they have the children to copy. Particularly large and wealthy clans thus often furnish the Burning Field with dozens of effigies in a display that is sure to make them the envy of their neighbors for months to come.

This attention to detail is because each effigy is meant to resemble a specific child in features and proportions as close as humanly possible, in order to deceive Old Man Winter. Given the renowned skill of Getisch woodworkers, these lacquered clones can be uncanny indeed. The child who is represented in effigy is considered to be a hero of the whole village, and to gain a great boon of good luck. Any siblings who don't get their own double made, but who help in decorating their "chosen" family member is said to gain a bit of that luck for the next year as well. Then, once all families have come together on the appointed day and raised their progeny high into the air, they light them one by one.

The strictest interpretation of tradition calls for each child to scream as if in pain, in order to make as convincing a display as possible for Old Man Winter, but generally it is acceptable for them to simply hoop and holler, or even cheer and laugh among their friends, trying to see who can be the loudest and most "appetizing". They are not discouraged from losing their voices during this event, because it is vital that no child makes a sound until they are certain that Old Man Winter will have eaten his fill of smoking ghosts. Generally during this grace period, the children are entertained with gifts and toys given to them by their parents, said to be looted from the sooty remains of "those who were taken". it is a joyous occasion, meant to reinforce a child's belief in helping the community, as well as exalting their efforts in doing so.

Of course no child can "live the dream" for their entire lives as our friend puts it, and before long they begin to ask why none of their gifts are burned, or who they're taken from if everyone uses an effigy. Eventually every Gertisch parent takes their child aside and gently breaks it to them that there probably is no Old Man Winter. Better to be told sooner, as she puts it, for it is even worse to come to the realization that one year, a child is a child no more, and will no longer stave Winter off as well as they used to.

Now Hraela is wistful, and will speak no more of the heartbreak she felt when she discovered that it was her father who made those howls and dragging sounds across their rooftop every year.



¹ Of course it must be noted that the proud old tradition of Gertisch alehouses can be attested to as far south as the edges of Deneroth and beyond, even in these disjointed days.

The True Meaning of Narblesnard.

Seasonal greetings, Burrowers!

Christmas Goblin by ScandinavianLullaby

I hope that wherever you are, your holidays of choice are or have been bringing you spiritual fulfillment and/or really freaking neat stuff.

I am at least distantly observant of the Yulesmas, if only because I can't fit any evergreen larger than a shrub through the front door of my burrow. But I do have my own rituals. I can't say that it's a goblin holiday, since I haven't really met any others of my kind- probably because I'm usually hiding. Then again, if there are any other goblins in the Upstate mountain valleys, I can't help but imagine that they must celebrate it as well.

After all, our lives depend on it.

You see, a goblin is not the most secure creature in its environment. The rivers we enjoy living next to can flood, or the weather can trap us indoors with snow, ice, or mud. The mountain-folk can occasionally make sport of hunting us down with their brand new Weatherby hunting rifles, or accidentally run us over when we attempt to cross a street. And any pet larger than a large mouse is a natural predator to us, in sufficient numbers and with the necessary viciousness of course.

But all of those pale in comparison to the danger of the squirrels.

Masters of the trees overhead, possessed of an unnatural speed and jerkiness of movement, and obsessed with gathering food in these trying months, squirrels have spelled the doom of many a hapless goblin. Either by ravaging our food stores, or attacking us directly in their rush for supplies, only woe betides one who sees those black eyes and massive incisors during the first ghost of winter.

Or so I like to imagine, to make my ideas make more sense. Like I said, I've never seen another goblin.

At any rate, a great deal of trial and error went into developing the perfect response to the hostilities of nature's most godless nibbling-machine. The answer, it turns out, is appeasement. It required cutting almost all of the acorns out of my diet, but by leaving a trail of them leading away from my territory, deep into the woods where a mighty cache of the nuts can be found, a goblin can live in peace for the most trying of weeks before the beginning of the long cold. You just have to get used to the sounds of savage fighting, if more than one squirrel followed the trail to the distraction.

That time of huddling in one's burrow is an excellent opportunity in which to try brewing any new tea recipes you've discovered on the backs of recycled boxes that year, or to finish stitching patches into the heels of your decade-old socks. Or, if you're feeling particularly daring, try taking just one or two of those acorns you secreted into your person, and roasting them in your oven made from discarded terracotta pots and votive candles.

But in the end, the sounds of chittering, narbling, and rapid munching comes to an abrupt snard of an end, and the quiet of winter can set in at last. This is Narblesnard, and it is a moment for collective sighs and relief among all goblinkind.

Of course the bushy-tailed devils don't actually hibernate, so it's back to basics every week when they wake back up to forage some more. But the spirit of the holiday is to remind us all that we can survive. That the future brings with it new potential for good, as well as for terror. This feeling is reinforced by the fact that, after the day of Narblesnard, the hundreds of convenience stores in town finally stop playing those infernal songs about jingling bells and unwheeled chariots drawn by mutant snow-deer.

So, Blessed Narblesnard to all!

May you survive the New Year, so that we can do it all again next time.

And the next time.

And the next time...

And the next time.