The Great Troll War

5 As you might have guessed, John Nettles played Bergerac in Bergerac. He later found success in Midsomer Murders. But just so we’re clear on this, he wasn’t in Murder, She wrote or Columbo.

6 The sword that Jennifer wielded when a dragonslayer. It was called ‘Exhorbitus’ owing to the unreasonably high cost of manufacture. Tell a swordsmith they’re making something for Dragon or magical intent and they’ll always add three noughts to the bill.

7 According to most betting offices this would be somewhere between fifteen and twenty-six seconds.

8 ‘Gaussing’ is the manner by which you might place a magnetic field onto something. It’s really not that vital to know, although to the Mysterious X, whose particles do not have any bonds to keep them in place, it’s vital. Maybe.

9 The name of a popular brand of vacuum cleaners are called ‘Henry’ for precisely this reason.

10 The recipe reminded Troll chefs to ‘take extra care to remove any tiaras, rings and corsets as if they are swallowed this may be regretted later’.

Princesses

11 Not the smallest Kingdom recorded. The Duchy of Bryn Mawr was only the size of a double garage with seventeen inches of coastline. It gave them the legal right to a navy, though not a very big one.

12 It isn’t unusual for royalty to have sponsorship deals. Running castles can be expensive.

13 Technically it’s actually a rug, but that and other details were covered in The Song of the Quarkbeast.

14 He had been paid a lot of gold to get rid of the Dragons – which he didn’t.

15 Suitably paired, any two identical receptacles can be used for two-way communication. Shoes only work over a short distance but are convenient to carry. A pedal bin will certainly work up to a hundred miles and a well-paired tuba can reach Australia, although the voice at the other end sounds like Vaughn Williams’s Bass Tuba Concerto in F Minor.

16 Even more powerful than either of them, if she hadn’t had her index fingers removed, was Once Magnificent Boo – hence the honorific.

The Sorcerer’s Conclave

17 Chillingly, not always in this order.

18 The technique by which young tree saplings are bent and woven to make a living hedge. The ‘billhook’ is a large and very sharp sort of chopper.

19 A very vulgar taunt known to enrage Trolls everywhere. It suggests they ‘would far prefer a sofa, potted plants and pale blue wallpaper’ to the usual draughty cave littered with bones and as-yet uneaten entrails. The human equivalent would be calling someone ‘a massive softie’.

Sir Matt Grifflon

20 I never did find out what this meant.

21 You’ll have to watch the movie.

The Mighty Shandar

22 ‘Parler’ meaning a talk, from the French ‘parler’, meaning to speak.

23 See The Last Dragonslayer for a full explanation.

24 Twenty-eight dray-weights of gold, a dray being a very large horse. It was about a third of all the gold in the world at that point. Today it would be worth about 1.2 trillion moolah.

25 The Last Dragon, as killed by the Last Dragonslayer. Wise beyond measure, as old Dragons generally are. He became a good friend.

26 In this context, quenching the power of the magic. You would have to be very powerful indeed to do any useful spells underwater. It also explains why getting rainstorms to start is easy, but getting them to stop is almost impossible.

27 With this method, Feldspar would ascertain two angles and one side of a triangle. Enough to figure out the other angle and sides – and a fix on where Shandar was based.

Troll Defence

28 Vast tracked vehicles four storeys high and with a crew of eighteen; there is one described in Song of the Quarkbeast.

29 You would know it as Scotland, more or less.

30 A thousand Shandars is a KiloShandar, a thousand KiloShandars is a GigaShandar, and a thousand GigaShandars is a TeraShandar. It’s a lot.

The Troll

31 It’s not important. This is just Jenny distracting herself with the minutiae of driving fifty-year-old cars.

32 An early pioneer of steam engineering, both of pit pumps and locomotives.

33 Another TV star that you might not have heard of.

34 It’s sort of a gelatine made from boiled-down bones that can be used to preserve previously cooked meat.

Dinner

35 The Dibble Jar, despite its horribly uncool name, is a method of storing wizidrical energy, like a battery. There’s more about them in The Song of the Quarkbeast.

Moll the Troll

36 Exponential notation allows us to express a high number without running out of ink. For comparison the age of the universe in years is thought to be only a trifling 1.3 x 1010.

This HENRY totally sucks

37 It’s not relevant, but each looked like a glass half-size Roman amphora sealed with a large cork bung.