First off, there was a delay in getting today’s strip out. Greg let me know there would be a slight delay in the finishes, which is fine (he is a good man, that way). However, I fell asleep earlier than I expected (on my couch, next to my open powerbook, which I found my cat sleeping sprawled across this morning, no less), so I didn’t upload the strip last night. Wednesday, who lives at a different time of day, discovered the strip hadn’t been put up, so she put it up, but of course she couldn’t very well write this rant. Which I am now writing.

Got that? Good.

We begin to touch on classic fairy folklore with today’s strip. We’ve known that the good lieutenant was a warrior and a killer, and was concerned with fae honor. Today we’ve begun to identify him in the fairy tradition — namely, as one of the Redcaps.

However, students of fae lore will notice something important. Malachite doesn’t look like one of the traditional descriptions of the Red Caps.

I’ll quote from the Wikipedia entry on Red Caps. (Said entry is covered by a GNU Free Documentation license, which allows me to quote it here, though of course I need to give full credit, link back, and point out that the excerpt is itself covered under that selfsame license, which you can read in full at Wikipedia’s site. Me am good Internet Citizen.)

A Redcap, also known as a “powrie,” is a type of malevolent murderous Goblin, Elf or Fairy found in British folklore. They inhabit ruined castles found along the border between England and Scotland. Redcaps are said to murder travelers who stray into their homes, staining their hats with their victim’s blood. Redcaps are very fast inspite of the heavy iron pikes they weild and the iron shod boots they wear. Outrunning the buck toothed little daemons is quite impossible.

In case you haven’t noticed… Malachite doesn’t seem to wield a pike, doesn’t seem to be wearing iron boots, and isn’t buck toothed. And yet, here he is, claiming to….

Well, that’s the thing. He says “we don’t wear red caps any more.”

In other words… something has changed, which means the old depictions of Red Caps, as short, squat murderous thugs with buck teeth and bloodstained caps shouldn’t be assumed to be wrong. They’re just… potentially… out of date.

What’s changed? And why?

Well, that’s for another day, isn’t it?