This bit of whimsy is for Sue’s Thursday photo prompt.
Once upon a time, in the wilds of the far Northlands, there lived a community of trolls. The pride of their tribal lands was not the snow-capped mountain, the majestic glacier or the deep, dark fjord, but a beautiful, silk-smooth, impeccably rolled bowling green. Every Saturday evening, the elderly and not so elderly trolls would troll over to the bowling green and spend the long hours of Nordic moonlight solemnly rolling polished rocks across the greensward. The idyll, alas, turned to tragedy after the visit of a cousin from the south.
Everything in the Northlands was new to Eamon, the mountains, the glaciers, the fjords, but nothing appeared stranger than the game of bowls. In fact, Eamon found it utterly incomprehensible. The ball games he was used to were much more boisterous, if not riotous, accompanied by growls and roars and the loss of many limbs. Which is why, when the troll doyen, in a friendly gesture, handed Eamon a bowling ball and offered him a turn, it was more or less inevitable that someone was going to get hurt.
The punishment for Eamonโs gross abuse of hospitality was to be left out when the sun rose the next morning. You can still see him, a paw to his mouth in a gesture of horror, and his unfortunate, headless victim. A lesson to all hooligans.
I love that almost everyone seems to be seeing the frozen life in the stones here ๐
I see frozen life in the floorboards…
You and me both ๐
You know, given the number of people who spend hours staring at floorboards, stains on the ceiling, cloud patterns and funny shaped stones, I think it must be a human characteristic to persist in seeing what isn’t really there ๐
Or maybe it is there but logic won’t acknowledge its presence ๐
The trolls and the fairies have to live somewhere, don’t they?
They do…and not all of them under bridges ๐
The story made me chuckle–and so did the exchange between you and Sue. ๐
Don’t forget the creatures hidden in the shadows, too.
They are the nastiest ๐
Yes, best avoided. ๐