Love at First Sight
Welcome to another adventure from the Thousand Acre Woods deep within Trollheim of the NJ Pine Belt! Tales Chronicled by Jonathan Hulton... That' me! Today's tale we learn how Grams met Gramps by working for a wizard for three years.
"So Grams," Angroba began to ask, while picking mullein; "How did you meet Gramps?"
"He got tricked into working for a trollkarl.
"For three years he worked for him, feeding all the wild animals in the forest that were trapped in a large stable. After feeding them all each year, he was transformed into a rabbit, a raven, and a fish consecutively."
Helgi just smiled and kept picking herbs.
"He was turned into three different animals each year!" Angroboda exclaimed.
"Yes, it was pretty hard for him since all the domestic dogs and hunters had nothing left to hunt for three years—besides him."
"So how did you meet him…"
"When he was turned into a fish, he found the crystal castle my father imprisoned me in under the North Sea."
"I thought it was hard when my father followed me on my first date with a tree trunk in his hand…"
"When I met him, I transformed him into a adult—"
"Sick—I don't want to know about any of that icky stuff, what happened in your bed…"
"No, I hit him with my magic stick."
"Well, it is quite magical—"
"Grams!!!!"
"Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!"
"Grams!"
"I'll be good, I'll be good…"No, he just grew up when I hit him on the head with my rowan staff."
"Oh," Angroboda said, scratching her head.
"I kept it with me for years and kept smacking him whenever he was a pain in my ass…"
"I bet you snapped it a few times.." Helgi chimed in.
"Well, it was as long as a sword; now it can fit in my dress.
"We spent the summer in the palace, but he had to turn back into a fish to return to my father when he called."
"And I thought Karl was the fishy one of the pair..." Helgi said, stuffing the plants down in her sack.
"Before he left, I told him to become the fool of a lord who owed my father a fortune. He was to take his wages for the past three years and give them to the king to prevent him from losing his head.
"Then what happened?" Angroboda asked as she dropped her bag. "I kind of can see him working as a fool…"
"The King was able to pay my father back, but your grandfather broke three windows in my father's castle. Which he had to pay for them or answer three questions."
"What were they?"
"He had to guess where I was imprisoned and identify me."
"That should have been easy."
"Yes, but my father turned me into a fish also within a large school that swam in the surrounding air," she said, mimicking pointing at all the invisible fish. "I did tell him I would nudge him—I told him the questions before he swam back.
"Then my father asked where his heart was—Gramps told him it was in another fish."
"Then what?" Angroboda exclaimed.
Helgi sat back into a large pine and just listened to this tall tale she was told a few centuries ago when she asked herself.
"He grabbed the right fish and shook it so hard that my mother was forced to turn back into a woman—she got angry after my father and Karl's father went on a bender and came back and put a goat in her bed."
"I knew Karl was fishy…" Angroboda said, shaking her head.
"So he captured all of the wild animals afterward!"
"Yes, he was so mad she left, he was going to put every animal in the woods, in turn, in her bed—if he could ever find it again."
"So they got back together?"
"Yes, she really missed him too—and that is how Norway got sushi."
"Grams—you're not going to say it again!!" Helgi sat up and shouted.
"That's how we learned to eat fish raw…"
"Ewhhh—you made that all up; I think I'm going to throw up now."
Helgi just put her arm around Grams and shook her head.
Fiction/ Illustrated Fantasy/ Mythology / Scandinavian Myth/ Norse Sagas / Scandinavian Folk Lore / Coffee Table Book
Paperback: $45 | Hardcover: $65 | PDF eBook $5
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Following the Harry N. Abrams, Inc. tradition of the series that created Brian Froud's and Alan Lee's Faeries and Gnomes by Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet, we present you with what would have been the next book in the series: Trolls: A Compendium. Trolls—do you think you know what they are? Could you be wrong?
Trolls within Scandinavian lore, myth, saga, fantasy, and folktales are actually anything magical within our northern neighbor's culture. Richly illustrated in this volume are the tales of faeries, dwarves, nissen, huldras, gods, Jotuns, draugar, ghosts, and more. Also, this book introduces our readers to the world of Trollheim, populated by Nattrolls that escaped the 17th-century Swedish colony within the New Jersey Pine Barrens. Narrated by Christopher Jonathan Hulton, who lives in the Thousand Acre Woods just after the Civil War, their tales are filled with Native American lore and tales of their neighbor, the Jersey Devil.
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Hardcover: $65.00
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