Week 7 Essay: A Goblin's Riddles

19th century depiction of a goblin. (Source)

This week, I read the Twenty-Two Goblins unit in the Untextbook. These short stories are framed inside the story of a king carrying a goblin from a tree to a monk. Everytime the goblin tells the king a riddle, the latter must give an answer. If the answer is correct, the goblin magically returns to the tree and the king must start over. If the king lies about knowing the correct answer, his head will explode. The framework story was definitely my favorite part of the whole reading. Frankly, I didn’t trust the goblin to begin with, but it ultimately ends up helping the king. The notes provided before the stories were definitely helpful in better understanding the plot of the framework story - otherwise I may have been a little confused. 

My favorite story was The Girl and The Thief. I couldn’t help but laugh when I read it, thinking, “Everyone always loves a bad boy.” Some things never change, I guess! The General’s Wife was also a really great story because it brought up a sort of moral dilemma, which is always fascinating to read about. I enjoyed trying to guess the answer to the riddles before reading on and finding out what the King guessed. There really weren’t any stories I disliked, although I was indifferent about The Snake’s Poison. The setting seemed like it was going to be a really interesting story, but then it really didn’t go anywhere. What happened to the wife?? 

It was definitely interesting that a few of the stories took place in Ayodhya, and even mentioned Rama and Ravana by name. Putting the riddles into context with those characters would have been an interesting concept. While I enjoyed most of the stories in this unit, I actually found it very difficult to pick one to rewrite. It very well could have been lack of imagination or creativity on my part, but it could have also been the riddle-format of the stories that threw me off. Perhaps I could have used the stories to make the riddle more difficult or insolvable.