Week 5 Reading Diary: Twenty-Two Goblins

After reading a classmate's storytelling post based on this section last week, I was excited to get the chance to read Twenty-Two Goblins by Arthur Ryder! Plus, this was a fun chance to read more about India, which I got the chance to learn a lot about last semester!

Twenty-Two Goblins is a story about a brave king who agrees to assist a devoted monk. The monk asks that the king meet him in a graveyard at night to fulfill the promise. Spooky! Then, once in the graveyard, the monk instructs the king to remove a dead body that is hanging from a tree to bring back to the monk. The monk has also prepared some form of ritual display. Now this is just eery! What does the monk intend to do?

Of course, fetching the dead body is no easy task. It has been inhabited by a goblin! I had no idea that this is what goblins did! No wonder they're such a scary part of folklore! The king relents on, though, and carries the goblin within the corpse toward the monk. However, the goblin then begins telling stories with riddles. If the king solves the riddle, the goblin returns to hang in the tree. If he does not know the riddle, nothing happens. However, if the king knows the answer but says a wrong answer, then the king's head will explode.

Luckily, the king is extremely clever and reasons out each riddle. Then, he dutifully returns to the tree to get the goblin down again. Why does the goblin play this game? What is the backstory of the monk and the goblin? Finally, what would happen if the riddle was something that couldn't be reasoned out? Could the king still solve it?

The king carries the goblin while he recounts his riddles
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