By Clare B. Dunkle. New York: Henry Holt, 2003.
Readers have written me to ask questions about the book. Here are some of those questions and their answers. Although I still answer reader mail about this book, I no longer add questions and answers to this page because I wrote this book over five years ago, and I no longer trust my memory about its details.
WARNING: If you have not read the book, please DO NOT read this page. The questions won't interest you, and they will ruin some of the book's best surprises.
ARE YOU GOING TO WRITE ANY MORE HOLLOW KINGDOM BOOKS?
WILL THIS BOOK EVER BE A MOVIE?
HOW CAN I TELL WHICH PRINTING OF THE BOOK I OWN?
IN THE BOOK IT SAID CATSPAW'S PAW WAS A LION'S
PAW, SO WHEN HE GROWS UP WILL HE BE MARAK CATPAW OR MARAK LIONSPAW?
SINCE CATSPAW HAS SOME OF KATE'S HAIR AND
SOME OF MARAK'S HAIR, AND MARAK'S IS LONGER, IS HIS HAIR
UNEVEN LENGTHS, OR ALL THE SAME, JUST DIFFERENT COLORS?
DO YOU EVER HAVE CONCERNS VOICED ABOUT THE
FACT THAT KATE, & ALL THE OTHER WIVES, ARE BASICALLY PRISONERS?
IS MARAK PSYCHIC? HOW DOES HE KNOW WHAT KATE
IS THINKING?
WHY DID THE SORCERER HAVE TIL?
WHY DOESN'T MARAK LIE? DID HE GET THE
STAMP OF TRUTH? ARE ALL GOBLINS AS TRUTHFUL AS MARAK?
DOES SEYLIN END UP MARRYING EMILY?
WHY DOES SEYLIN THINK HE LOOKS BAD?
WHAT IS THE KNIFE CUT ON MARAK'S ARM IF
HIS LINE IS ON KATE'S WRIST?
WHAT ARE THE KING'S WIFE CEREMONY TESTS
THAT AGATHA PERFORMS?
WHEN THE SORCERER ASKS KATE IF HER BRACELET LIGHTS
UP BY ITSELF OR DOES SHE WORK MAGIC ON IT SHE SUPPOSES IT GLOWS BY
ITSELF BUT, THEN IT GLOWS BRIGHTER. DOES IT GLOW BY ITSELF OR DOES
KATE UNKNOWINGLY WORK MAGIC ON IT?
WHAT IF THE KING'S WIFE CAN'T HAVE
CHILDREN, OR IF THE KING DIES BEFORE HE HAS A CHILD?
WHY COULDN'T MARAK HAVE A CHILD WITH HIS FIRST
WIFE? COULDN'T THEY EVEN TRY? COULD THEY GET A DIVORCE?
DID YOU BASE MARAK'S APPEARANCE ON THE
GOBLIN KING IN LABYRINTH?
WHY IS SEYLIN A CAT?
WHY ARE KATE AND EMILY NAMED KATE AND EMILY?
WHEN WILL THE HOLLOW KINGDOM COME OUT
AS A PAPERBACK BOOK?
WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THE NAME "SEYLIN"?
HOW ARE THE HOLLOW KINGDOM NAMES PRONOUNCED?
IS YOUR TRILOGY BASED ON THE FOLKTALE, "TAM
LIN"?
HOW DO GOBLINS MATE?
GOBLINS MATE WITH ANIMALS TO BRING NEW TRAITS
INTO THE MAGICAL MIX. BUT HOW CAN THEY, SINCE THEY ARE HUMANOID? DO
THEY CHANGE TO ANIMAL FORMS?
KATE MENTIONS THE BIBLE. IS SHE A CHRISTIAN?
ARE YOU?
WHEN
DOES THE BOOK TAKE PLACE?
IF I ENJOYED
THIS BOOK, WHAT OTHER BOOKS MIGHT I ENJOY?
MARAK'S PERSONALITY DOESN'T
REALLY MATCH HIS APPEARANCE, DOES IT?
WHAT IS MARAK'S FULL NAME? WHAT WAS HIS FATHER'S
FULL NAME?
HOW OLD IS MARAK AT THE
START OF THE BOOK?
WHY DOESN'T KATE
WORK ELF MAGIC TO SAVE HERSELF FROM MARAK?
IF THE TRUCE CIRCLE PREVENTS
FORCE, HOW CAN MARAK SCARE KATE AND EMILY THERE WITH HIS MAGICAL
LIGHTNING AND WIND?
WHY DOESN'T KATE
NOTICE WHEN SHE BITES MARAK'S THUMB THAT HIS BLOOD IS BROWN?
WHY WOULD THE DWARVES
DO SO MUCH WORK BUILDING THINGS FOR THE GOBLINS?
WHERE DID YOU GET THE
IDEA FOR HOW MARAK LOOKS?
WHERE DID MARAK GET HIS
NAME?
DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE
IS A BIG TALKING BLACK CAT IN ANOTHER BOOK?
WHAT DOES THE GOBLIN KING'S BEDROOM LOOK LIKE?
I appreciate the desire to see more books about this world, but I hate to repeat myself. At this point, you readers have three books in this world: The Hollow Kingdom, Close Kin, and In the Coils of the Snake. For three books, I was able to use this world to say new things and to take you readers to new places, but I think that by the fourth book, I would be in familiar territory. You love the first book because it surprises you. Don't you still want to be surprised? I can do that by taking you to new worlds like the one in By These Ten Bones.
I doubt it. Not every good book makes a good movie. The Hollow Kingdom books are all about ambiguity, prejudice, and perception. No one in the trilogy is completely good, and very few people are thoroughly bad, either. I wanted to make readers think about that. I didn't want to give you easy answers about who to like and who to hate.
Movies work best with simple characters and lots of action, but that isn't why I wrote the trilogy. I won't let a movie director turn my characters into something they aren't just to make a more exciting movie.
The Hollow Kingdom has changed in subtle ways with each of its first three printings. From now on, it should stay the same. The first printing had jacket art by Megan Lightell Timmons, as well as blue and brown boards on the book itself. If this is what you own, congratulations! They are long gone now; even I only own five of them. If your book has blue and brown boards but the Matt Manley cover, you own a rejacketed first printing. When the cover art changed, Holt replaced the old cover on the remaining stock of the first printing copies.
Printings after the first one have cranberry red boards and a black spine; they also feature a silver moon and star on the front of the book, as well as the Matt Manley cover. The second printing has no series title on the title page. The third printing has the series title at the top of the title page and a correction to a typo on page 227. In the first and second printings, that page reports that Marak is using his convalescence in a review of the King's Wife Chronicles, and this is wrong. Why would he do that? He has a happy marriage, so those chronicles have nothing further to teach him. Instead, he is using his convalescence in a review of the King's Chronicles, a much more logical thing for him to do.
A goblin King's nickname is just that—a nickname.The official word for this is a "descriptive," but the parents have the right to choose that descriptive as they wish. This means that Catspaw will stay Marak Catspaw even though he really has a lion's paw. It would be too confusing to change it. And since there already was a Marak Lionclaw, having a Marak Lionspaw would be confusing, too! (The goblins know that a King couldn't really have a cat's paw—it would be too small to fit on a goblin King.)
In English (one of the prince's two native languages), "catspaw" is an unlucky name to have because a catspaw is a fool duped into doing someone else's dirty work. The goblin prince knows this about his name, and he's determined not to be made into a fool. This may be one reason why, as he ages, he's so keen on practicing military magic.
Actually, Kate's hair is longer than Marak's hair, but that doesn't matter for Catspaw's hair; his hair is short when he's born (just as ours is), and Kate makes sure that it's always kept cut in a short haircut because she hates Marak's wild hair so much.
Yes, and I have grave concerns about this, myself! My books are in no way supposed to suggest that this behavior is proper, but only that this is something that bright young people have been dealing with for centuries—and, in fact, are dealing with still. Even though the books present some cases in which women come to terms with their treatment, each book also presents women who have come to tragedy through it. I deliberately chose this very painful subject for my books because I feel that we Americans have a problem with confronting reality as regards this issue. We have never confronted the cultural issue of imprisonment of others. We pretend that we don't do it at all until we feel we need to do it, and then we vilify the group we're ready to imprison.
It is sadly true that the King's Wives are only prisoners in their new culture, but these members of another race are at least treated well, accorded a high social status, and allowed free movement throughout the entire underground realm. We Americans have not had such a good record in our 200+-year history of dealing fairly with members of other races, and we represent one of the most enlightened set of philosophical values ever put into practice. What good did the Constitution do the native Americans, or the Japanese Americans during World War II, a scant 60 years ago? What about all the tap-dancing our Founding Fathers did around the slavery issue, and what about the issues of civil rights? There are prisoners being held right now by our own government without either arrest or trial, and the whole world has been horrified by pictures of their treatment.
My feeling is that books for teens should not present an unreal world, a sanitized place of simple cultural values. All cultures have found it necessary to deprive some people of their freedom, and our present culture is no exception. We should not present this as a good thing, but we should also not present it as an impossibly evil thing engaged in only by Nazis and villains, something that we "good people," thank heavens, need never worry about. Instead, we need to study it honestly as a problem even of "good people." Until we do that, I don't think we'll ever improve our deplorable track record on this issue. We will continue to force our own prisoners into subhuman roles in order to soothe our conflicted consciences whenever we deprive a group of its freedom.
No, Marak isn't psychic, but he's a very clever schemer himself, so he's very quick to think through what someone else might be planning. However, he's very slow to figure out how people are feeling—that's why, when Kate is terrified, he'll say something like this: "You seem upset." He genuinely doesn't understand how she feels.
The sorcerer has killed Til's parents to steal her, and he intends to work some spell that calls for some part of her. His magic is based on animal and people parts because that's what the demons enjoy: they don't care about the body part, but they do like to cause pain and suffering. He tells Kate that he's going to use her liver and her left ear in spells, and he has a whole roomful of animals to use for spare parts. Some, like the one-eyed bear and the three-pawed mouse, already have parts missing.
No, Marak has not had the Stamp of Truth. That spell forces people to tell the truth, but Marak isn't forced. Goblins just think that lying is stupid and immoral, and they're very proud of telling the truth. It's important in their culture, just as individual freedom and independent thought are important in our American culture.
Some goblins do tell lies, but goblins don't have much of a weakness for lying because they are so insensitive in their feelings. They don't mind telling you anything, no matter how much it might upset you—that won't bother them! We usually lie because we're afraid of a person's reaction, but they don't feel that way at all.
The question is Does Emily end up marrying Seylin? That's answered in Close Kin (Book II), which came out in October 2004.
Seylin's fellow children and adults have been raised to think of the elves as inferior. Even his own parents have been horrified about his looks. We learn from our friends and family what looks good and what doesn't: if we grew up like Seylin, with people laughing at us, or wincing and looking away when they saw us, we'd think we looked awful, too. My beautiful sister-in-law Millie, who is Hispanic, thought that she was thoroughly ugly when she was growing up because in her little Texas town, only "white" children were praised for their looks—Millie thought she needed blond hair and blue eyes to be pretty.
The cut on his arm is just a cut—no big deal to it. He has to cut himself to add some blood to the mix, but his cut heals as a plain old scar. Marak has two such scars, one from each marriage.
The spell that gives indications of the future is a one-time-only spell. A goblin King can work it several times, but it has to be worked on someone who has never had the spell before. That means he could not work this spell on himself the second time if he married twice, as Marak has done. It has to be worked on the bride.
Mostly, these are tests for health in all the different systems: lungs, eyes, brain, etc. This is why they take place before the ceremony begins: if something is wrong, the King will have to come try to heal the damage, or even call off the ceremony if it's something that he can't heal.
Actually, both. The bracelet does light up by itself, so anyone who wears it in the dark can use it. But Kate's powerful magic affects the bracelet when she thinks about it. If she worked at it, she could control its light much more closely.
Kate is working lots of unconscious magic in this scene. If she weren't so magical, she could never break through the sorcerer's spell to reach Marak and help him free himself from it.
These problems certainly have finished off their fair share of human dynasties, but the First Fathers were extremely intelligent and able to forestall them magically. For instance, the tests that Agatha performs on Kate before the wedding are medical tests, and they detect a variety of conditions that would affect both general health and fertility. Kate passes them all. If she had failed one, the women would have summoned the goblin King, who could probably have healed the medical condition, depending on exactly what was wrong. That's why these tests take place before the wedding actually begins—so that he can take care of any problems that turn up or call off the ceremony if they are too serious.
If the King dies childless, then the ballgame is over. There is no substitute for the King because he isn't just a ruler: he holds the magical key to the race itself. Another lord may step forward to try to hold the people together and defend them, but they will never again be what they were, and their magic will eventually die away—even though it may take a long time.
But, because the First Fathers knew this, they designed their Kings for survival. Very, very few Kings die violently, and then it only happens when they've been careless or stupid and ended up facing many warriors alone. The Kings don't become ill or fall off ladders. Their unique defense magic is always on the alert, even when they're tiny babies, and their bodies have a strong capacity for self-renewal. The innate magic of the King is an almost overwhelming force. Properly taught, a careful King has no real worries about his own lifespan: he'll make it to about a hundred years.
They could try, but the magical formation of the Heir has to have input from both King and Wife. Annie was insane and believed that the goblins were just a nightmare she was having. Since she believed that Marak did not exist outside her own imagination, she could contribute nothing to the magical formation of their child.
No, divorce is not possible: try telling Charm that it's time to move on! Murder is possible: as Kate discovered, the goblin King can kill his own wife. But none of them ever has, and Marak was unwilling to do so, especially since he knew his wife had gone mad through his own carelessness. He just hoped that he would have enough time to try again.
Of course not. Marak is an old, ugly, bowlegged goblin, whereas David Bowie is gorgeous. The man is to die for! What's not to like about the Glitter Rock King? Many readers are in denial about Marak's true looks, and I don't blame you a bit. Bowie and Connelly are a dreamy pair, and thinking about them certainly makes Kate's marriage less depressing. But if you want to see what Marak really looks like, you're watching the wrong film.
Pull out Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy and find some orcs instead. You'll see that nasty, been-drowned skin, the awful, bony skull, the graceless horsetail hair, the pointed teeth... I swear, sometimes I get all nostalgic and affectionate just watching the orcs trot by with their tire-irons, I've worked with goblins so long! But you may find it a little easier to see Kate's side of the marriage issue if you take a good look at them.
Did I steal Marak from Jackson? No. We both read Tolkien. And Tolkien read the Scandinavian myths. (Come to think of it, so did I.) That's all.
That's easy. I love cats! I have always owned at least two cats, and sometimes three. And because black cats are so common, my cats are usually black. At one point, all three of my cats were black! It's purely accidental: we take in the cats that God chooses to send us.
At this point, I own one black cat and one gray tabby. Both cats perform tricks to earn their dinner every night, just like the dog does. In fact, they learned this from the dog, we think. My tabby cat, Tor, is the smartest. He can roll over, lie down (in a crouch, or it doesn't count), and beg. He can even play dead: when we point a finger at him and yell, "Bang!" he flops over onto his side.
When I came to write the bonfire scene, I just chucked in a magical black cat for fun. I knew my daughters and Emily would be delighted. And I knew that Marak wouldn't bring anything too strange to the bonfire: he didn't want to alarm the girls too soon.
These young women come from a traditional, rule-bound culture: they are gentlewomen in 1815-or-so England, for whom many things are forbidden that would be allowed even to the farming and servant class. Consequently, their names follow the kinds of rules that they themselves are expected to follow. I found the names in books that were written at the time, like Jane Austen's novels, and took them from women in history at that time. "Katherine," it seems, was the name of a girl in every gentleman's family in Regency England, and, frankly, there are only certain nicknames of "Katherine" that I can stand. (I'm allergic to "Kitty," which was a popular nickname in Kate's time.) Emily owes her name to Emily Brontë, who was a wonderfully strong-willed woman.
I chose those names because they were so typical a choice for the sort of traditional, conservative man that their father was. We can see that he was like this through Kate's own desire to follow her father's rules even after he's dead and gone. She loves those manners and rules and harbors an abiding belief that they are a good and healthy thing: she stays an English lady to the end of her days, even after a long life in a magical kingdom.
It is scheduled to be released as a paperback in September of 2006.
I named Seylin at his very first appearance at the bonfire. At the time, I didn't know he was a shape-shifter or an elvish goblin; I had worked out the major plot but not many of the minor details. I hadn't even named Marak yet; I had only named Thaydar, who was also standing nearby.
"What's a good name for a magical black cat?" I asked myself. And I began rummaging around in my mind for black-cat names. I've lived with black cats for decades, so naming them is something I'm used to. Seylin, I decided. I have no associations with the name at all. The only thing that occurs to me is that it's similar to the name in my favorite poem: Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin" has been my favorite bit of verse since I was a child, and I think it always will be. I just learned from the Net that there's a Pokemon Seylin, but I'm sure I'd ever heard of him. I know that Seylin is a relatively rare name, but it certainly exists with reasonable regularity—there's even a skateboard park named Seylin. I can only assume that at some point in the past, I met a cat with that name. What I didn't know is that Seylin is often a girl's name!
But the effort of naming Seylin and Thaydar had taken its toll. I decided that that was the very last time I would ever come up with a fantasy name out of my own personal brain, with no justification. I chose a language to work with (Assyrian), and I used it for all goblin names thereafter. Assyrian is uncommon enough that no one is likely to have lots of mental associations with my goblin names, although the words really do exist: someone sent me a clipping of a wedding announcement of a Mr. and Mrs. Marak the other day.
English names are pronounced normally:
Celia: SEE-lia
Goblin names are pronounced in typical American style, with unaccented vowels generally falling into schwa sounds. (My Webster's New World Dictionary defines the schwa as the sound of the a in ago, the e in agent, the i in sanity, the o in comply, or the u in focus.)
Marak: MARE-ik
Second syllable vowel is a schwa; vowels rhyme more or less with
vowels in garret or parrot.
Thaydar: THAY-dar
Soft th, as in thin, and first syllable rhymes
with flay. Second syllable's vowel is not a schwa
sound, but rhymes with car.
Seylin: SAY-lin
Second syllable rhymes with thin.
Sayada: Say-YA-duh
Middle syllable vowel sounds like the a in father;
final syllable vowel is a schwa, like the a in ago.
Dibah: DEE-buh
Second syllable vowel is a schwa.
Katoo: ka-TOO
First syllable vowel sounds like cat. The two syllables
have almost equal stress.
Dayan: DAY-un
Second syllable vowel is a schwa, like the a in ago.
No: although my trilogy is based on British folklore, it isn't based on "Tam Lin" at all. There are many abduction folktales in the British tradition that come much closer to my trilogy than "Tam Lin" does; properly speaking, "Tam Lin" is not an abduction tale at all, even though some versions allude to the abduction of the human knight before the story begins.
"Childe Roland" is a much closer antecedent to my trilogy. Concerning that tale, some scholars assume that Burd Ellen has been stolen to pay the fairy teind, but there is no evidence for this in the story as I learned it. And I find it interesting that while the most famous retelling calls Ellen's captor the King of Elfland, one scholar calls him a goblin king. This highlights the confusion in British folklore between the beautiful and the ugly magical races: sometimes "fairies" are described as misshapen.
If you are interested in the ideas that I took from folklore to build the trilogy, you may find them on the Creating Fantasy Worlds page under the Fiction Writing section of this website.
In the Hollow Kingdom world, the goblin high families (goblins who can speak) are descended originally from human women, as are all of the elves. This means that they mate just like we do. The beast goblins, on the other hand, are descended from animals and therefore mate according to their species types (some of the bird goblins lay eggs). For more information about beast goblins, see the next question.
The only problem that both high-family goblins and elves face, whether in a marriage with their own race or with a human being, is that their mating is much less likely than ours to result in a pregnancy. Goblin genetics becomes wilder the more "purely" goblin it becomes (i.e., the more goblin-goblin marriages are in a person's immediate ancestry). Ultimately, this means that there is no possibility for a viable match-up on the cellular level: the resulting baby might have genetic coding for fangs, beak, feathers, pelt, zebra stripes, leopard spots, bat wings, prehensile tail, and snake eyes all at once, and not even goblin magic can bring about a child like that. This is why goblins have to keep bringing human or elf blood back into their race. The more consistent genetics of the other races stabilizes theirs.
Elves do not usually have this problem of sterility because their genetic information is even less variable than our own. However, elves are very sensitive, and if elf women are stressed, they usually cannot become pregnant. This parallels the situation in a number of different animal species, where females under stress don't bear young. Zoos have to deal with this problem frequently.
There are four sentient races in the Hollow Kingdom world: elves, goblins, humans, and dwarves. Not every race can produce offspring with every other race, however (even assuming that they would care to). Only goblin males can have children with females of all three other races. Elf and dwarf men can have children only with females of their own kind. Human men can have children with human or elf women. This is the reason why Marak immediately refers to Kate's elvish ancestor as "she" as soon as he realizes that his bride is an elf-human cross. There must have been an elf woman married to a human man because an elf man married to a human woman could never have had a child.
The elf and goblin Kings are a separate case entirely. Magic, not genetics, controls their fertility and offspring. In magical homage to their distant ancestors, the bodiless First Fathers, the Kings must never marry their own kind. And they are thoroughly goblin or thoroughly elf, no matter how many women of other races have contributed to their ancestry.
The First Fathers, who were invisible, bodiless beings, got excited about the possibility of the physical universe. You can either think of them as mythological beings, like the West Wind in Longfellow's poem, who fathers a child with Hiawatha's mother, or you can think of them as scientists, tinkering with the DNA of earthly women to get the results they wanted. In any case, the founders of the elvish race went with a very narrow concept of what they wanted to take from the physical world, and they excluded everything else. This means that the elves are more limited in appearance even than humans—there are only certain combinations of hair/eye color, for instance, because that's what the First Fathers of the elves thought beautiful—and nothing else would do.
The First Fathers of the goblins, by contrast, went very broad in their thinking. They thought that humans—and even more, elves—were terribly limited in form, and boring as well. They wanted to find a way to channel any animal trait into their "master" race. So they set up a two-tiered system: beast goblins and the goblin high families.
The beast goblins are truly animals. They cannot reason or speak, and they generally have a distinct animal form. The high families, on the other hand, are the rational, human-like race. These two levels cannot interbreed. They mate only within their own levels of the system: high families with other high family goblins or with the sentient races (elves, humans, and dwarves); and beast goblins with other beast goblins or with animals of their type. There are bird goblins, mammalian goblins, etc. It's a whole menagerie. The exception is that there are no insect or spider goblins because the First Fathers couldn't work out the problems of mixing such wildly different genetics.
Within the high families as well, goblins are often known by their most dominant traits (the guard Katoo, for instance, is a cat goblin). But these traits are no more fixed than a certain hair color or a type of nose among our human families, and they don't determine who can marry whom. Katoo's friend Brindle, for instance, has some dog traits, but he is married to a bird goblin with wings. Their daughter Penelope has snake eyes.
There aren't very many beast goblins in the trilogy, but you do see beast goblins, for instance, in the King's valet and his assistant, who is in charge of shoes. They're simian goblins—ape goblins. Beast goblins may have work assigned to them, but they aren't slaves or beasts of burden: the goblins use regular domesticated animals for that. Marak is King of the whole race, both beasts and high families. He has to govern them all fairly.
Although it's never stated, this is the obvious reason why goblins never eat a female animal. She might have mated with a beast goblin; ergo, she might be a mother to goblin young. Goblins consider all females of all races or species taboo to harm, therefore, and never kill them. They simply say that all mothers are sacred.
The Hollow Kingdom, incidentally, is not the first goblin book to bring up the concept of both goblin "people" and goblin "animals." MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin also has this two-tiered system in his goblin society.
Kate is indeed a Christian: specifically, she is a Low-Church Anglican, a member of the branch of the Church of England that opposes elaborate ritual and is strongly evangelical. Among other things, the Low-Church Anglicans of Kate's day strongly disapproved of anything relating to the Church of Rome, so it would doubtless horrify poor Kate to learn that she is the brainchild of a Catholic (me).
The book takes place in about 1815, during the Regency period of English history. Influenced both by the styles that have emerged from the French Revolution and by the growing interest in Roman and Greek classical forms, clothing has become simpler and less fussy. The women are wearing gowns with very high waists and no train; because these gowns are not very revealing, the corset has been temporarily discarded. Hence, Kate is very unhappy when the goblins put her into a gown that has a tight, revealing bodice. The men are still wearing knee-length breeches with stockings on formal occasions, as Marak does at court, but they are also wearing trousers or breeches with riding boots. The George Washington-style wig, formerly worn by every gentleman, has almost completely disappeared, except for servants in livery, members of the judiciary, and the occasional eccentric who doesn't mind being behind the fashion. Instead, men are wearing their hair "Roman" style, in what is called the Brutus cut (this is, more or less, the style that we have to this day). Pocket watches are now a relatively ordinary item of a gentleman's dress, but people still write with a goose feather quill. The railroad has not yet revolutionized transportation, although the Industrial Revolution has already begun in the form of textile factories, where cloth is woven on large machines. The rigid geometry of the Hallow Hill formal gardens is currently the height of fashion.
Kate is influenced most strongly by Milton and Shakespeare, as well as such writers as Swift, Alexander Pope, Coleridge, and Wordsworth, the latter of whom are still writing at this time. This period of history itself is best captured in the works of Jane Austen, who clearly conveys the complex manners of the day. Kate has been raised to define her sense of self-worth by her careful adherence to these social rules; hence, in dealing with Marak, she is as aware of her behavior as she is of her safety, and even in the most dangerous situations, a part of her brain is always concerned with whether or not she is acting like a lady. Instead of feeling stifled by these social rules, Kate finds them comforting and believes that they help her to be a better person. Marak, on the other hand, values aspects of Kate's personality that she has not been taught to appreciate, such as her bold courage and her quick-witted replies.
Several astute reviewers have noticed a similarity between The Hollow Kingdom and Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard. Both books are rooted in the British folklore tradition, and both concern a strong-willed Englishwoman tangling with "the people under the Hill." (Both women are even named Kate, although this is hardly surprising: Catherine was an enormously popular name in England for centuries.) While my tale is broadly magical, Pope looks to history instead, painting her "fairy folk" as descendents of the tribes who inhabited Britain before the Romans came. The Perilous Gard richly deserved its Newbery Honor award, and it remains my favorite fantasy book. Pope's The Sherwood Ring, a ghost story about the Revolutionary War, might also provide a reading experience similar to The Hollow Kingdom.
Another author to whom I feel I am indebted for my writing style is Ursula K. Le Guin. Her Tombs of Atuan in particular has a magical, romantic feel and reminds me of my own books. For older readers, the writer who can weave a subtle, mystical tale better than anyone is Isak Dinesen, a.k.a. Baroness Karen Blixen. She can make the most mundane setting yield the most beautiful results, and I especially enjoy her short stories. "Babette's Feast" is a treasure.
Although every book is different, readers who have enjoyed The Hollow Kingdom will hopefully enjoy the rest of my trilogy. Close Kin, the second book, comes out in October of 2004, and the third and last book, In the Coils of the Snake, follows a year later.
The idea that personality and appearance should match is an interesting one. In theory, only ill health or malnutrition would link a bad appearance with a bad personality. In practice, however, we humans are a social breed, and our own prejudices doubtless help to form unpleasant personalities in less attractive people. If we expect an ugly person not to be witty or interesting, that ugly person will have a hard time developing the confidence to be so. Our expectations wind up shaping the reality.
Marak has been raised with none of these prejudices. My goblins appreciate their own monstrous forms and actually believe themselves to be members of a superior race. Moreover, Marak has known from early childhood that he is to be a king and that his entire people will obey him without question. When the book begins, he has been the ruler for over fifteen years and is accustomed to giving orders and making important decisions. Accordingly, he speaks with authority and a great deal of confidence. He is perfectly at ease with himself and has none of the self-conscious awkwardness that an ugly human would have learned through the ridicule of others.
Goblin Kings are all known by the word Marak, meaning Lord in the goblin language, and by a descriptive word taken from one of their unique traits. Adele's King is Marak Dogclaw. While Kate's Marak could be Marak Horsehair, there already was a previous King with this name, so he is Marak Sixfinger. This is a good thing for Kate: she could have been stuck with Marak the Antlered or Marak Batwing!
Marak is sixty-one years old when the book begins.
Kate's untaught magic does try to save her. It guides her to the truce circle, for instance, and it makes her very uncomfortable around goblins even when she doesn't know what they are. That keeps her from letting Marak put her onto his horse. But magic in the Hollow Kingdom world is like mathematics: having a talent for it isn't enough.
Most elf magic consists of speaking a phrase in the elvish language while concentrating on a certain constellation, star, or planet. Some of it involves writing a special magical symbol as well. If Kate knew any elvish, she might begin to work untrained magic. But because she doesn't know the language of her ancestors, her magic has very little chance to help her.
The goblin King, by contrast, has spent thirty years of his life formally studying magic and the magical languages. He still spends time practicing or researching it almost every day.
A goblin King and an elf King met together thousands of years before Kate's time to make the magic of the truce circle. They wanted to create a place where an elf or a goblin would be safe even if his counterpart wanted to kidnap or kill him. They thought of the various things that could happen and tried to build magical safeguards against each of them.
All physical force against someone else is completely useless inside the truce circle, whether the victim is conscious or not. Thus, when Kate is unconscious, Marak cannot simply pick her up and carry her away. The truce circle magic won't allow that to happen. Marak can heal her, and he can hold her hand, but the minute she tries to get away, she can easily pull free from him.
In other ways, the truce circle allows the "victim" to decide what is appropriate or not. Marak indulges his temper in a fit of lightning and wind, and as long as no one protests, that lightning and wind can continue. But the minute that Kate complains, the truce circle magic stops it. Marak doesn't stop it himself.
Persuasion is not the same thing as force, even when it is magical, and the original founders of the circle didn't bother to make spells against it because full-blooded elves and goblins aren't affected by persuasion spells. Kate's mixed elf-human blood shows in her actions when Marak works a persuasion spell. She understands what is happening, and she tries to control herself, but she can't quite escape its influence. Emily, much more strongly human than her sister, falls under the spell right away. Neither one is saved by being in the truce circle.
Later, Marak uses magical persuasion again when he sees Kate becoming agitated and pacing back and forth. Concerned about her mental state, he magically suggests that she sit down. Kate doesn't identify this suggestion as a threat and readily falls under its influence. She only stands up again after Marak has left the circle.
During the King's Wife Ceremony, Kate is shocked to learn that Marak has dark brown blood. But she has already seen his blood. Earlier in the book, she bites him when he comes to the Hall to try to steal her, and she notices afterwards that he is bleeding. However, it is quite dark in Kate's room at the time. Twilight has fallen, and she has no way to light a candle. She can't distinguish colors in the gloom, so she doesn't realize that Marak's blood isn't red.
They do the building work because the goblins do all the rest of the work. Goblins farm, harvest, cook the food, and weave the dwarves' clothes. That leaves the dwarves free to mine, build, and work with stone and metal. Also, the dwarves love to have an audience. The goblins think up projects for them and admire their finished work.
The goblins and dwarves have cooperated in their jointly-owned home for thousands of years, ever since Marak Lionclaw moved in with them and magically created the valley under the lake. For instance, the spell that Marak uses to stick Hugh Roberts to the ceiling is a goblin spell that often helps the dwarves in building or mining projects.
In some ways, Marak looks like a classic folklore goblin: that's where he gets the deformed elf ears, gray skin, deep eye sockets, and bony, bowlegged appearance. He has brown blood just because I thought brown blood sounded interesting and because it would naturally tend to make his lips and fingernails unappealing. But where does he get his unmatched eyes?
I have always been interested in the folklore descriptions that link oddly matched eyes to magic. Many cultures around the world identify any sort of odd-eyed person as having the Evil Eye. Odin, the chief god of the Norse, has only one eye, which is very bright and piercing; the other eye is gone, and his long hair covers up the empty socket. In some mythologies, a great warrior has one eye that changes and becomes blood red during battle while the other eye recedes and becomes less noticeable. Some of the stories of Cuchulain describe this happening to him. The single red eye is so prevalent in myth that some believe it is an observation of the red spot of the planet Jupiter.
The most clear antecedent I have for Marak, aside from the god Odin, is the Drosselmeyer of the Nutcracker story, as he was played in a film a few years ago that used sets by Maurice Sendak and dancers from the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Sadly, this remarkable film is no longer in print. The Drosselmeyer in it was hunched and cloaked in black. While the other men around him had their hair pulled back into the queue that men wore in the 1700's, the Drosselmeyer's long flyaway hair was loose, and it straggled into his face. He had only one eye, the other eye being covered by a black patch, which is traditional for this character.
I live every day with eyes of two different colors, so once I began to think about the magical nature of unbalanced eyes, the rest came pretty quickly. And I live every day with spots as well, so Marak's hair has a black patch in it.
I don't like making up names in a fantasy language because it's hard to make them sound right, so Marak's name is based on Assyrian. That language is the source as well for such names as Katoo, Dibah, Sayada, and Dayan. The elf names in the Hollow Kingdom world are based on Sumerian.
Large talking cats are very important in folklore, Puss in Boots being the most famous. And there's a big tomcat who speaks in one Irish folktale, declaring, "I'm the king of the cats!" But Seylin has a very specific inspiration: Behemoth, the large black tom in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel called The Master and Margarita. Behemoth also serves a king (in this case, the Devil himself), and he also can walk on his hind legs. But the two talking cats have very different personalities. Behemoth is the court jester, flamboyant and outrageous, a swashbuckling, bragging loudmouth. My own talking cat is quite sensitive and shy, and he's far too serious for jokes.
Marak tries to talk Kate into coming and seeing her new bedroom, but because she refuses, the reader never finds out what it looks like. All the royal rooms are rather grandiose and gaudy, the walls and ceilings decorated with elaborate mosaics, just as Kate noticed in the hallway. Because goblins don't care for representational art, there are no portraits of ancestors or scenes from nature. The mosaics are just interesting patterns of colored stones.
The goblin King sleeps in a bed, something that makes elvish King's Wives very unhappy at first. Elves sleep in small tents, and they derive a certain feeling of safety from the nearness of tent walls. Goblin Kings, no matter how elvish, would never agree to sleep in a tent because it is such an "elf" thing to do, so their wives simply have to adjust. Of course, being newly married to a goblin King is the kind of thing that makes an elf woman feel unsafe anyway.
Aside from the main bed, there has always been another single bed in the goblin King's bedroom because under certain circumstances, the goblin King doesn't wind up sleeping with his wife. Then he lets his wife have the main bed. Some goblin Kings just aren't very comfortable to sleep with: Marak the Antlered is an example of this type. And often the new King's Wife is so traumatized by her capture that she becomes ill for days or even weeks. In this case, the goblin King winds up acting as both doctor and nurse to his wife, and he sleeps on the small bed across the room.
This happened when Adele was newly married. Marak warns Kate not to create a scene during her wedding because his own mother's behavior was the stuff of legend: she fought like a tiger throughout the women's attempts to dress her and through the ceremony itself. Taken to the small room to recover from the ordeal, she instantly bolted for the door and "escaped." Marak Dogclaw admired Adele's bold, adventurous nature and made it a practice never to discourage her, so he just sat down to a quiet dinner and let her test her limits. He knew she couldn't get into any danger since the King's Wife spells were all in place.
Realizing that she was underground, Adele headed up at every staircase and at last came to the water mirror cave. She decided to escape through the water wall. Charm woke up and told her not to try it, and she told the snake to keep its thoughts to itself, whereupon Charm promptly bit her, making her one of only six King's Wives who have been bitten on their wedding day. Then it crawled off to find the King. When Marak Dogclaw arrived, he offered to show Adele a scene in the water mirror as a kind of peace offering, and Adele asked to see her father. She was sure Dentwood was out with his servants, blasting his way into the goblin kingdom.
But Adele's father had tracked her with the dogs and had found the scuff marks on the ground where she had been dragged right through the cliff face. He realized that the old goblin tales were true. Marak Dogclaw's water mirror magic revealed Dentwood in the act of saying good-bye to the servants and driving away with Elizabeth. He had abandoned his daughter in order to save her friend.
Adele was devastated by her father's betrayal and overwhelmed by the shock of her new life. She was physically ill for days. When she recovered, she occupied herself entirely with the goblin kingdom and never mentioned her family again. Marak learned no stories about his mother's childhood beyond his father's own notes, so he exhibits genuine interest when she comes up in conversation with humans who might know something of her past. This is also why he and his father didn't realize Elizabeth was half elf. Neither one knew very much about her.