King of the Forest Trolls
Pronunciation: GRAY-mung (rhymes with THEY hung)
Greymung was an ambitious young troll who got fed up with life under the yoke of old King Guttlekraw. He organized an uprising and successfully deposed the impotent monarch and his followers, banishing them to the original troll home caverns under the Frozen Mountains.
Greymung thus became king of his own society of trolls, and promptly set about spending his long tenure becoming fat, lazy and increasingly nasty and vindictive, eventually earning the never-said-to-his-face title “Greymung the Shiftless.” He was known to remove toenails with pincers as punishment if one of his subjects should annoy him.
When Wolfrider chieftess Goodtree settled her elfin tribe in the forest above the troll caverns, Greymung ordered his people to stay hidden from the woodland elves. (The sole exception to this rule was his old nursemaid Old Maggoty, so she could filch the elves’ prized dreamberries–until she got caught centuries later by Bearclaw.)
Bearclaw’s discovery ushered in a era of, if not actual friendship, then a kind of tolerance between trolls and elves, who traded with each other for goods and services. That all ended when Greymung tricked the Wolfriders into the burning waste of the desert, trapping them there. Why? Simply, revenge for his injured pride after being embarrassed in front of his subjects by Cutter.
Not long thereafter, Greymung met his own end under the blades of Guttlekraw’s troll warriors, who returned from the Frozen Mountains for long-delayed revenge on the usurper. He ended up in the invaders’ cook pot.