Fredrick the Troll Wants New Hair: A Fable

Fredrick the Troll Wants New Hair is a playful story that chronicles a genuine quest from a child's perspective.

Fredrick wants new hair and sets out on a journey to find it. Ultimately Fredrick's perseverance is rewarded, and he has magnificent new hair that is just right for him.

Fredrick's adventure and his new floral hair are an allegory of how we come to know new ideas and make them our own. The people around us give us "seeds for thought". If we are like Fredrick, we can plant these ideas in the gardens of our minds, care for them dutifully and then we will have bright, beautiful ideas popping out of our heads

The story of Fredrick the Troll is my own echo of the biblical parable of the sower and the seeds. I was studying the writings of the Semiotician Charles Sanders Pierce when the relevance of that old and simple parable dawned upon me with tremendous power and clarity.

Pierce sought to describe how the human mind comes to know things. Pierce's writings are notoriously difficult to understand and he was losing me in his labyrinth of detailed distinctions and pages of nuanced explanations.

As I strained through another murky page of Pierce's writings, I realized that what I was reading seemed familiar. The process he was describing was the same process as the sower and the seed. Pierce explained how a person comes to know something in his mind. Jesus explained how a person comes to faith in his soul. Both processes are a process of personal cultivation of something received from outside of oneself.

In our current cultural atmosphere of digital yelling and trying to verbally bludgeon one another with our opinions, we can learn from Jesus and Charles Sanders Pierce. These two intelligent thinkers reveal that there is never a true conversion of the mind or the heart brought about by force.