Goblin Letters
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time writing letters to my nieces in goblin alphabet (I've mentioned this alphabet already, but I found it in the back of The Father Christmas Letters by J.R.R. Tolkien, which I bought in Gould's last week - I have the 1976 George, Allen and Unwin edition). And I mean a LOT of time. Soon after I began I realised how long it was going to take and almost gave up the idea in despair. But, I don't feel like I am a particularly good Aunt to these two dear little girls up in Brisbane, so I pressed on, knowing, as anyone who has any connection with two siblings would, that what you do for one, you have to do for the other. So, given that I may never put so much effort into such a thing again, here are my letters (I won't reveal what they say, because it's a little piece of nonsense, and my original ideas were severely culled when I realised how labour-intensive they were going to be - most of the little pictures are only ONE LETTER!). 'Twas fun plugging my name into fantasy name generators to see who I could be. I started out with idea that this could be but the beginning of something, and my nieces could write back to me in 'goblin', but I think it might be too difficult for them (not to mention that it might drive ME crazy!) ...
This one is for the oldest niece. She loves cats:
And this is for the younger one. She loves cooking (and I gave her cooking gear, including gingerbread cutters, for Christmas if you're wondering what gingerbread men have to do with goblins):
P.S. I did do the drawings, with watercolour pencils, but I copied pieces of them out of three children's books: Trolls and their relatives by Jan Eriksen, illustrated by Per Aase (a previous boss gave me this book when I left work to go to Scandanavia?!), Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, illustrated by Arthur Rackham and Shirley Barber's Fairy Book. The gingerbread man, however, was all mine :) ... And I scanned them at work before I posted them because I thought, 'if one of these goes missing in the Easter mail, that would be tragic'.