In the Thrall of the Mountain KIng

 Substitute teachers - where do they come from? Where do they go? What's their story?

In my school years I endured a small number of substitute teachers - usually one-offs, but some lasted a little bit longer. In fact, in my fourth form year in particular, it's probably fairer to say they endured us, precocious little brats that we were. I don't remember many of them now, but one struck a chord with me.

I was in the third form, Year Zero for my Dungeons and Dragons experience, and my knowledge of the game and its fantastic worlds is new to me - still developing with every impression and suggestion that I encounter. It's a time I find myself drawn back to increasingly, before the codification and regulation by the rulebooks, magazines and artwork I'd encounter not long afterwards. But at this time there was none of that; my imagination was in the driver's seat, my mind was open, and my senses were alert to this fantastic new world and something - anything that would feed it further.

Mr R was a local part-time teacher, and we had him for a day - maybe two, tops. What subject he covered I don't know, but the subject he brought to us on one of those days was fantastical - music and literature in Grieg's Peer Gynt and in particular its most famous and fantastic chapter The Hall of the Mountain King.

Edvard Grieg's building, thunderous piece is well known enough - I was sure to have heard it before that day, but I wasn't aware of its story, which our sub dutifully filled in, of the hero Gynt and his wandering into the titular hall to be discovered by the monstrous gathering attending the great Mountain King within. There were even lyrics - we were challenged to find the "Slay Him! Hack Him!" in the one-two of the finale, and, hands splayed as if casting long fingers of firelit shadow against cave walls, our teacher roused us to picture the scene as the music played. Well, it worked for me at least.I was there, in that Hall, running for my life mere months before any would-be hero I could conceive in a roleplaying game would get the chance to.

I met Mr R a few weeks later in the local library while I was photocopying the fold-out maps from some hardback Tolkiens, destined to be stuck together an displayed on my wall. The end of the year was coming, and with it my first proper foray. I don't remember much of our conversation, but I do recall him looking over my evening's work and encouraging me to continue using my imagination, perhaps to make stories of my own. And so I did, to the best of my ability. Stories with ogres and caves and bellowing hordes lurking in stone catacombs with great shadows hunched and grasping behind them. Vast, brutal and sluglike chiefs at their head, ordering nasty ends to any interlopers in his domain. They were basic ideas, soon to be overwritten by 'authoritative' and 'official' creature descriptions and depictions, but their primal origins haven't been forgotten. They're still be best versions of those monsters, for me