For such a small girl, Hilda is about to get very big, and I am not at all surprised. My five-year-old daughter brought the first book home from a friend’s house, and it took reading only the first few pages, beautifully laid out, with the rich color palette of a Nordic sweater, to know that Hilda was something special. Trolberg may have a complex of bell towers (bells keep trolls at bay, we learn), but it also has a glassy downtown à la Houston. “All of these stories are riffs on folktales that are as old as time, that have taken a hard left turn through Luke’s imagination and all of these contemporary pop-cultural sensibilities,” Kurt Mueller, the executive vice-president at Silvergate Media, which will produce the Hilda series, said. (The company’s other series include “The Octonauts” and “Peter Rabbit.”) “Like the movies of Miyazaki, she feels totally of the moment, but she’s reacting to something that feels ancient and archetypal,” Mueller said. The nostalgic Northern European setting recalls Miyazaki’s romanticism, while Hilda’s communion with the conjoined natural and spirit worlds recalls San from “Princess Mononoke” or Satsuki from “My Neighbor Totoro.”
My first point of comparison was Lewis Carroll’s Alice, though Pearson said that he never thought of her. But, greeted by a little girl in an unchanging outfit, who is confronted with all manner of creatures great and small, in landscapes giant and miniaturized, who else are we to think of? What’s markedly different with Hilda is the attitude with which she greets her wonderland. She does not fall down a hole but strides, prepared with sketchbook and satchel, into the wind and weather. The first words of the first book, “Hilda and the Troll,” are delivered by a radio announcer: “But tonight clouds rolling in from the east … temperatures remain mild … with the likelihood of heavy rain.” Hilda, reading a tome on trolls at the breakfast table, rushes outside her red, peak-roofed cabin to see storm clouds forming over an adjacent peak. “Mum! Mum! It’s going to rain tonight! Can I sleep in the tent?” And Mum says yes.
momalibrary: Subtle cover design alert: the skyline appears to be printed to show through the unbleached muslin binding, resulting in an atmospheric image. The interior is equally elegant, featuring traditional page layout and typography. Henry Holmes Smith. The Chicago Landscapes of Art Sinsabaugh: A History of the Photographer (self-published, 1976).
This
so-called ‘magical stela of Horus’ (a stela is a large tablet, usually made of stone) depicts the god Horus in the conventional Egyptian form for a youth: nude and wearing his hair in a side lock. He is portrayed here as Harpokrates, the Greek version of Horus-the-Child. The story told on this stela refers to the episode in Horus’ life when he grew up hiding from his evil uncle Seth in the marshes of the Nile delta. Protected by the magical powers of his mother, Isis, he was saved from a venomous animal’s mortal bite.
This slab shows the infant god as a conqueror of dangerous beasts. He is standing on a crocodile, holding a snake, a lion, a scorpion and a gazelle. These kinds of stelae were inscribed with magical spells and were thought to possess healing properties and used to protect people from dangerous animals. Water was poured over the stela to charge it with magic, the water was collected in the basin and the victim drank it.
This particular stela shows the popularity of ancient Egyptian gods even among people from elsewhere. It features a Phoenician inscription of the person who dedicated it – Paal-Astarte, son of Chemrebi, a man of Phoenician origin who believed in ancient Egyptian magic!
The good news is that both libertarianism and the LP have roughly arrived at places where that kind of two-way tolerance is the rule, not the exception. America is a weird place. It’s filled with weird people who increasingly don’t fit into the traditionally dominant political cultures. Those people should know that there’s a big tent around the corner, waiting to welcome them in all their glorious individuality.
Thanks for everything, Timmy. May you enjoy the decades of Dungeons and Dragons and paintball that you have so richly earned.