Trolls

I really felt that my trolls had to be something both like and unlike humans. They have an earthy, stony quality, but they are not made of stone. They look quite human in their body proportions and many of them are either much taller or much smaller the human average. I use the name Orcneas for them, using a word used once to describe Grendel in Beowulf. English did not have a word cognate with troll, it seems to have come into mainstream English usage in the 19th century, although it is recorded in the 17th century in a witch trial from the Shetlands.

I hint that trolls eventually leave Britain in order to find lands less densely inhabited by men; that they now live in Iceland and Scandinavia.During the 7th century they live in areas which are sparsely populated, but the human population is already on the increase and new lands are being cleared for human settlement and agriculture. In Northumberland, the spine of hills that we now call the Pennines meets the Cheviot Hills and the Southern Uplands of Scotland. This area is perfect for the trolls, and this is the area referred to as Trolldom in the book. There are other trolls living outside of Trolldom; one lived near Yeavering under a bridge over the River Glen. Communications with trolls living south of Hadrian's Wall have been lost, so there is no news of any who may have been alive further south.

Trolls and humans can have children together, although it is clear from what Alfreda says that trolls consider humans to be ugly - and most humans similarly consider the trolls to be ugly. Fortunately this is not always the case! Half-trolls may exist, and over time their descendants merge fully into the human population.

The Billy Goats Gruff in Blighty!

The Adventures of the Three Billy Goats Gruff is now available from Amazon in the UK, priced £7.60

Thanks Amazon.co.uk for including the additional information that I sent in.

The Gefrin Trust

Just when you thought you had seen every significant thing on the Web to do with Yeavering, up comes something remarkable. This is the first that I have heard of the Gefrin Trust, the current owner of the site of Gatburgh.

It is all down to a chance encounter between archaeologist Roger Miket and an estate agent in Wooler, the latter casually stating that a piece of land with an interesting bit of history behind it had come on the market. The upshot was that he raised the money to buy the site and has since set up the Gefrin Trust to manage the site. The Trust is a registered company and a charity.

The company logo is interesting - they have taken the head of Ceredig's staff (well, technically the head of his father's staff, but they looked very similar) and transformed the front of it into a modern graphic. A lot of logos of this sort lose the power of the original but this works very well - it just goes to show how stylised the original was!

The website has some interesting resources, including a pdf of Hope-Taylor's monograph and an interesting piece aimed at kids (pun intended) called "What the Goats Saw" This is an account of the history of the site from a goat's eye view. No Grufflings get mentioned.

The board of the Trust includes a good mix of scholars (Rosemary Cramp!) and the local area - Northumberland National Park, the County Council and the Glendale Gateway Trust.

I recall using some of Roger Miket's material as a source of very detailed information on Anglo-Saxon cemeteries and other sites which provided some background material for my dissertation on place-names in Northumberland. Roger's data included OS references and so it was very easy to georeference the locations and present them as a distribution map.

I would like to wish Roger and his associates the very best in their endeavours at Gefrin. It is good to know that such an important site is in good hands!

Setting (1) The time and place at the beginning of the book

The book opens in the autumn of AD633 in a place I call Gatburgh. The ruler in the region at the time was King Eadwine. This land would later to be known as Northumbria but there was no such political sense of unity at the time and each separate component of the realm ruled by Eadwine had its own history and traditions. Gatburgh lies in the province that I have called Dinware from the Welsh Din Guaire. This later becomes merged in the popular mind with Bernice (Bernicia) which lay further to the south, centred on Tynedale and especially Corbridge.

Eadwine had converted to Christianity a mere six years earlier and so the religion from the south had strong backing but relatively weak roots. Christianity had been known of for much longer among the Welsh population of Britain, but although there had been Welsh Christians in the north of Britain for a long time, it would seem that this corner of England had remained pagan even up to the coming of the English. In my book I have assumed that it was the threat of encroaching Christianity that persuaded the leading families of Dinware to offer the rulership to Ida, a Saxon pagan already strong in Bernice to the south. By bringing in a strong pagan of a different tradition, they safeguarded their own ancient ways against the tide of Christianity. The tactic works for about two generations, maybe slightly longer. By this time the population is thoroughly mixed and the language of Ida and his successors dominates everyday life to the point that names of places are becoming English names.

Gatburgh is an attempt to give an English name to modern Yeavering; a place known to history as Ad Gefrin. This itself is a Latin rendition of Welsh Gafre Vrin which translates as the hill or place of the goats. My name Gatburgh derives from the Old English gat (goat) and burh (fortified place). The place is named in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (Bede) as being a royal palace site, from where we get the Latinised name. Excavations by Brian Hope-Taylor (H-T) at Yeavering revealed a sequence of occupation whose earliest stages probably pre-date the Anglo-Saxon presence in the area but whose development clearly shows evidence of a change in building style that suggests the arrival of a new culture. I have assumed for the book that the name Gatburgh will fall out of use once Eadwine's people are no longer in command of the site.

You can see the attraction of the place for my story about goats. Yeavering was probably a site which in pre-Christian times was the centre of what can only be called a goat cult. This is echoed in Grave AX from H-T's site report which is mentioned in passing in my book and has both an animal skull and a broken staff in it. The animal skull, identified as a sheep by H-T, I have re-assigned as a goat. The two skull types are difficult to tell apart as the two species are very close (hybrids are possible). More importantly, the staff (which is discussed in terms of being a surveying device by H-T) is surmounted by a bronze and wood figurine that closely resembles a goat. This staff and another identical one come into the story at different points in time and are a significant part of the development of the story.

I still find it somewhat strange that I learned all of this long after I had chosen Yeavering as the origin place for the brothers; before I had really researched the place. Even the place-name was at that point an unknown factor, all that I knew was that it was a known site of Anglo-Saxon date. It was one of several times that I found things falling neatly into place as I developed my story. That I subsequently developed the story around the site I can only hold up my hand to but then it really is a fascinating site.

Links/further reading:
H-T's book Yeavering: An Anglo-British Centre of Early Northumbria is usually pretty expensive; I was fortunate to have access to it while studying at Newcastle University.
A more accessible format for information on this subject is Paul Frodsham's recent book Yeavering: People, Power and Place
More immediately you can view the Past Perfect website devoted to the location. Check it out (especially the sparrow's flight), it is well worth a visit!

Introduction

Hello world, this is the blog for the Adventures of the Billy Goats Gruff, a novel by Kevin Futers (that's me!) about the Three Billy Goats Gruff, available from Eloquent Books in the near future.

I'm not certain at this stage what you can expect from this blog but I will try to keep things nice and simple, tell you a few things about the book and other things that are going on connected to the book, such as promotions and book signings.

For now I can tell you that the story takes the traditional story as a starting point and then takes the three protagonists (or antagonists if you take the trolls' viewpoint) on a quest to undo a curse. The action takes place against the background of the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland, England and The Borders Region of Scotland during the seventh century AD. It is a world still in touch with other realms of reality, a world where trolls walk freely in the waking world (so long as you are awake at night) and a walk in the mists can transport you to the delights and horrors of Elfland. It is a world on the cusp of change, a change that is fragile and could easily be halted.

The brothers Gruff are in Trolldom against their will because they have been turned into goats and only the trolls have the solution to their predicament. As we all know, things get off to a bad start over a simple bridge crossing. Can they turn the situation around and dispel the curse?