Herding Cats
Welcome to another adventure from the Thousand Acre Woods deep within Trollheim of the NJ Pine Belt! Tales Chronicled by Jonathan Hulton...Have you ever wondered what trouble Trolls could have? Cats!
I returned to Trollheim and was about to knock on the Nattroll's door—when a dozen cats ran in between my legs, putting me into a spin. It was then that I realized that the door was twenty feet tall, and I felt like a mouse sneaking in the front door.
"Off with you!" Helgi shouted.
"I'm sorry; I'll come back later..." I answered quite embarrassedly.
"No, its me," Helgi said as I realized she had shrunk back down from the bulk mass of a great ice age bear looming in the doorway, yelling, "Its them damn cats again; they got into the cream again." Nattrolls' homes are so large that they have cat holes burrowing through their wall trim. "Angrboda left the lid off the melk kan again..."
Inside, Angrboda was chasing cats with a broom. Her yelling knocked me over. Neither she nor their living room had shrunk down to my perspective yet. I felt like a mouse looking into the dining room. Another cat ran past me. There was a cat on the bookshelf, licking its paws. One was napping under the couch. A third climbs out of the milk can with a Cheshire smile.
Helgi was hoping it would vanish like the epitomized one through the looking glass.
"Every spring, they raid the house looking for the spring melk!" Helgi said, chasing another through the door. "Now off with ya!"
"Have you seen Bjorn?" I asked.
"He always finds an excuse to be missing this time of year," Helgi said with a chagrin, nodding her head. "He is out walking Bjorn." If Nattrolls think of cats as mice, to them, dogs are rats. Bjorn is a bear who spends most of his time sleeping under the table. "Come on in; I'll set you up a cup of Lapsang souchong with some gjetost cheese on a nice marbled rye."
The house had shrunk down to my perspective as I made my way to their table. Angrboda ran past again, screaming with her broom, but only a whisper compared to her former screeches. Even now, she was deafening.
"Brave is the thief who carries a lantern!" Helgi said as she placed the tea and cheese before me as another cat jumped up on the table to stick its nose in the creamer. She just gave him a look, and he was gone.
"To an ant, a drizzle is a torrent," I said as I was sipping my tea.
"Perspective is due to the light you shine on it," Angrboda said on her latest pass as she was pursuing a ginger.
The gjetost had a nice salted caramel flavor that complimented the smoky character of the tea. A tea leaf dried over a pine fire. Every good Piney's favorite tea.
Helgi sat down next to me and took her tea with a little cream. "It is funny how humans are on about suffrage and equal rights—as Nasrudin proved centuries ago, he might be head of the club 'Who Were Not Afraid of Their Wives', but he could not have a seat at the meeting since his backside was black and blue from his spouse."
"The world has always been how you look at it." I said before another nibble of the rye. It was then that I had a cat on my lap, just for a second before Angrboda almost knocked my tea onto the floor.
"The Sicilians around the docks on Cranberry Inlet are the worst," I said, laughing. "Always going on how they put their wives in place; I have broken bread with them several times, and not once did I make it through a diner without their wives hitting them with her shoe."
"Just another sabotage..." Helgi said, looking to the side with a faux haute composure.
"Touche!"
"It all comes down to the trouble with pussy," Helgi said before getting up to chase the cat that dared to jump up on her shoulder. "I wish I did not have any."
Bjorn then just came home, took her seat, and began sipping her tea.
"Helgi once asked for a house with no cats in it," Bjorn said, laughing. "I asked her if there were any cats on the other side of the hill; she replied no; so I told her to move the house there to solve her problems."
Next, I'm not sure if Bjorn got smacked by a broom when Helgi missed while chasing a cat or not.
"I had the privilege once of observing Siddhartha Gautama sitting in front of a wall soon after he agreed to teach; he sat there for a whole week," said Bjorn. "Then one day I saw him sitting in front of the same wall at a different angle. It was then that I asked him why he changed his angle. He said if he was going to have to teach man once more, he better learn all he can from this wall."
How so?"
"He said talking to men was like talking to a wall—so he better get different angles of view."
"I guess life is all about how you look at it."
"Or which seat do you sit in?" Helgi said as she pushed Bjorn out of her chair and took her tea back.
"I'm reminded of the story of the man who swore to sell his house for one silver coin to give to the poor." I said as I placed my tea cup down.
"What happened to him?" Helgi asked.
"He sold the house for one silver piece, but the cat that came with it for a thousand." I answered.
"We could make a fortune with this house, Dad!" Angrboda said as she continued shooing cats.
Fiction/ Illustrated Fantasy/ Mythology / Scandinavian Myth/ Norse Sagas / Scandinavian Folk Lore / Coffee Table Book
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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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