Welcome to another adventure from the Thousand Acre Woods deep within Trollheim of the NJ Pine Belt! Tales Chronicled by Jonathan Hulton... That's me! In today's tale, Gramps and I visit a Howe to have the Bergfolk to repair the shears they made that Karl broke. How he broke them involves a dwarf and donkey...

Gramps had gone to his garden and found his pruning shears broken. The blade snapped. When I found him, he was looking for Karl. He figured he was the culprit. The shears were made by the bergfolk.

The bergfolk lived in the mounds around 21 Lakes. In Ireland, they are called the Sidhe. They live in another world or dimension entered at various crossroads of the living or dead. Where four roads meet or where one moves from this world to the afterlife. Out of habit, they prefer burial mounds. In the same way, it is easier for them to travel between worlds when foxes are active; dusk and dawn.

The bergfolk here are a mixture of Welsh, Finnish, Swedish, and Lenape.

In the Pines, the Lenape dominate the portals. The portals can take you anywhere, like our great steamboats, but you will find more Irish in Irish ports or Norwegians in Norse ports. These fair others with a different technology say they travel through our world and others in a flash of light. Starting with Prince Madoc and then the Scandinavians, other—others have been traveling here.

Now Gramps is bringing his shears back to them to fix before Karl gets a hold of them. Karl brought five spades to his cousin to repair, and they turned to leaves and ash.

The bergfolk can only fix them. They must have some steam powered factory because they repair them within hours. Chance takes most of the time up on when they find them after you leave them on the mound.

After Crossing the Disappearing Pond, we took a left and headed southeast. I did notice the Great Horned Serpent, poking his head up, but when he saw it wasn't Bjorn he just turtleheaded. He can get away with playing tricks on Bjorn, but Gramps has tied his neck into a not in the past.

Just after passing the road back to the highlands above the pond, we bumped into Karl.

He was dressed in robes made for the finest sultan, but they were torn with food stains—everywhere!

"First, why did you change your clothes—second, why did you ruin your best suit; I'm not going to even ask where you got them…" Gramps asked.

"Well, I went to Olaf's feast last month, and they weren't letting me in because of how I was dressed. So I decided this month I would show up in my finest."

"OK."

"Well, they let me in."

"So?" Gramps said, pointing at his clothes.

"Well, I figured if they let my dress in that, they deserved the food more than I did."

"Olaf, must have loved that," I said.

"Karl," Gramps interjected. "What happened to the shears?"

"Well, there was a monkey, a donkey, and a dwarf…"

"Never mind—Karl…"

"Excuse me, I have a huldra waiting for me."

"Dressed like that?" I asked.

"I didn't say I would be still dressed by the time I got to the spring."

So we left Karl and continued straight on past the small canyon on the right and walked between the last two lakes where the mounds were at 21 Lakes.

Gramps placed his shears on top of the first mound next to the fox den.

We sat on the mound for an hour, waiting for dusk. At twilight, one of the bergfolk was coming out for the evening, when he saw the shears.

"Why heh-lo," said a tall Welsh man. "I see you're in need of repairs. Let me pop in for a second and fix these."

The next minute he was back with the shears fixed, oiled, and shined.

"Thank you!" Gramps said.

"You're welcome!"

Then the man turned into a fox and walked off.

"That's all," I asked, "no payment?"

"Stop being foolish—no, I didn't want to embarrass him,"

"By paying him too little?"

"No, by making too much out of it—you saw he fixed them in less than a minute. It's like—do you expect someone to pay you for opening a door…"

"No…"

"It's the same with them, boy." I tend not to allow people talk down to me, but he is an elder that tends to suspend me, upside down, from the tallest trees, and is still capable of talking down at me…Though it never stops me lobbing a few insults over his head. Unfortunately, not all of them have been beyond his reach. If we were anywhere within a millennium of age, I would definitely have been smarter.

"I get it, it's all perspective—the starving man who found the delicacy in the river daily; made from almond butter, honey, figs, and grape leaves that ended up being a princesses' discarded facial."

"You got it."

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If you like the tales from Trollheim you will love Trolls: A Compendium!

by Christopher Jon Luke Dowgin and
Christopher Jonathan Hulton

Fiction/ Illustrated Fantasy/ Mythology / Scandinavian Myth/ Norse Sagas / Scandinavian Folk Lore / Coffee Table Book

Paperback: $45 | Hardcover: $65 | PDF eBook $5
Buy now link...

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.

Preview: Google Books

Paperback: $45.00

Hardcover: $65.00

PDF (non-flowable, best on tablet, desktop, or laptop) eBook: Download a copy onto your device today! Only $5.00