Great Books, Half Read.

Read Part I §  Read Part II

IT TOOK TWENTY SMURFS to carry the giant lead weight attached to Brainy’s foot and Papa Smurf’s stretcher out to the drawbridge outside of Gargamel’s castle. Harmony Smurf started tapping out a drum roll on his drums. Several of the Smurfs ran forward, but those who did were immediately placed in shackles and marched back to the village, to await trial for High Smurf Treason, a new legal term amongst the villagers. After some loud bangs, the front door to the castle slammed open. The villagers watched as Gargamel, his bald head glistening in the sun and his potato-sack overshirt swaying in the breeze, went over to examine the package at the end of the drawbridge. The villagers ran and hid in the bushes, waiting. There was a tiny yelling, almost indiscernible from the whistle of the breeze through the forest. A giant smile erupted across Gargamel’s face as he lifted the weight up, brought it into his castle, and shut the door.

“But we’ll never know for certain if they’re dead,” Poet Smurf said to Smurfette.

“The only way we’ll know if they’re truly gone,” Smurfette said, “is if their spells stop working and everything returns to normal. In the meantime, I’m the Papa.”

In Gargamel’s laboratory, Brainy and Papa begged for mercy, saying that they’d deliver up the rest of the village if they were spared. “I’ll do anything!” Papa Smurf screamed. “Anything!”

“I’ve learned my lesson from countless years of trying to catch you Smurfs,” Gargamel said in his shrill voice. Gargamel, as vassal lord for the neighboring town, was a vicious landowner, wealthy enough until the wars started to the North and government tithing plundered his entire stock of gold. In his old age, Gargamel had grown fixated on the idea that the only thing that could restore his wealth and his food supply, for both him and his cat Azrael, was an indefinite supply of the little blue creatures that lived by his castle. “Two Smurfs in the hand is worth more than five-hundred in the bush.” He continued sharpening his meat cleaver. Continue reading →

Read Part I

THE HARVEST FEAST was a grand celebration of everything Smurf. The villagers, forgetting the aches and pains of the past weeks spent in the fields, frenziedly prepared for the evening. Vanity scrubbed himself and liberally applied a lapis makeup all over his body, while Poet and Harmony coordinated their efforts in composing a special song for the occasion. For several days, Cook had been preparing acorn stew, rye bread, and boiled radishes. Wild Smurf had even come from the forest staggering under the weight of three baby Cornish Game hens, enough to feed the entire village several times over. Even though the village commonly believed that Greedy was malingering, Cook had Papa Smurf put two guards outside of Greedy’s toadstool just to make sure he didn’t consume all of the acorn stew by himself.

The tables were set up in a U-shape in the village square, covered in white sheets and decorated with giant tallow candles. The villagers strung the toadstools with captured fireflies, and the entire village glowed as if the morning dew had continued into nightfall. After Papa said the nightly Smurf benediction the villagers tucked into the feast, slurping at their soup, gobbling down the rye bread, and tearing at the three giant hens with their little blue hands. In between gulps of elderberry juice, singing and dancing started at the center of the tables. The villagers swayed back and forth to songs of working the fields and farming the harvest, and in the great joyous commotion, nobody except Brainy Smurf seemed to notice the two empty places at the center table.

Brainy had spent many hours arranging and bartering for the seat next to Smurfette. He eyed the bare wooden chair while Vanity continued on about how good he looked. “Does the bread taste funny to anyone?” Vanity asked when he was done bestowing compliments upon himself. Continue reading →

CLAVICEPS PURPURAE GROW during the wet springtime, dotting the summer crop with blackened, curved kernels – virtually indistinguishable from the usual sun-baked seeds appearing in every year’s harvest. A letter to the French Royal Academie des Sciences first documented these grains in 1676. The next year, John Ray, a British naturalist, made a brief observation of the same phenomenon.

But the villagers of a small town in Languedoc finished their summer harvest without knowledge of such things.  They picked their grain unaware that Philip de Valois had ignored Edward of England’s claim to the French throne, or that outnumbered English bowmen in Crecy had just defeated Philip VI’s far superior army, or that the Hundred Years War raged within their borders.

For the most part, the village didn’t know about the outside world. They didn’t need to. Every family had a home, and every home had a front yard. They lived in what could be called a benign oligarchy, a decentralized community where every member had their function and purpose, with no member outranking another. For reasons lost to time, most of the population was male. Some have hypothesized that homocentric fraternal ordering regulated the community. However, what few females there were in the community still served as equals. Male and female villagers alike farmed the communal fields in the morning and took to pastimes – singing, dancing, and other assorted merriments – in the afternoon. What little organizational ranking they had was led by a village elder. All the villagers trusted this village elder to make the larger decisions for the benefit of the whole. The villagers gave him a diminutive honorific as a title, roughly translating to the word “Papa.” Though he was leader, there was no confiscation of property, no forcible labor. The lazy could remain lazy and still get fed; in fact, the villagers used these traits for the nomenclature of their members. It was the combination of the American dream and the Communist ideal, some four centuries before America and some six centuries before Communism, and some three centuries before the blackened grains would be discovered in John Ray’s laboratory.

The village’s domiciles were arranged in no particular order; they sprouted out at random, blending naturally into the landscape. Each house was more or less the same, though some natural variations appeared in the roof colors of each abode. And had the village not been located in fourteenth century Languedoc France, one could quite easily have mistaken the place for a socialist Levittown, save for the fact that the buildings stood less than twenty centimeters tall and were constructed of toadstools.

Indeed, the villagers themselves had certain physical characteristics that made them unique; all the villagers had cerulean skin, and the tallest – called “Hefty” on account of his physical abilities – stood only eleven centimeters tall. Because of these physical differences, the villagers chose an honorific for the entire village, the word itself creeping into the common vocabulary to describe all things good and true. They called themselves Smurfs. Continue reading →