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Some stories are simply too wonderful to grow out of. Curious Tales of Edenglow celebrates the timeless poems and stories that have delighted generations of children—and the grown-ups who still remember them fondly. Here you'll discover beloved works by authors such as James Whitcomb Riley, Eugene Field, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, Christina Rossetti, and many other literary treasures from the public domain, lovingly reimagined with original music, narration, and a touch of Edenglow magic. Whether you're introducing these classics to a new generation or revisiting the stories that once lived on your own childhood bookshelf, we hope you'll find the same sense of wonder waiting between every verse and every page. So settle into your favorite chair, gather the little ones—or simply indulge your own inner child—and let these curious tales remind you that imagination never really grows up.
Behind the Melody
Behind the Melody
Long before Edenglow had goblins of its own, there were nine little goblins I already knew very well.
James Whitcomb Riley's Nine Little Goblins has been one of my favorite poems since childhood because my dad used to read it to me. I remember the wonderful rhythm of it, the strange little characters, and that delicious childhood mixture of being slightly creeped out and completely delighted.
So turning this poem into music wasn't simply a matter of finding an old public-domain poem that sounded fun. This one came with memories attached.
For the musical adaptation, I wanted to preserve the playful cadence and storytelling that made Riley's poem so memorable while giving those nine goblins enough theatrical energy to properly misbehave. The music is lively and mischievous rather than frightening—because these are exactly the sort of goblins that would eventually feel quite at home wandering around Edenglow.
There's something wonderfully circular about that for me. A poem my father read aloud to me when I was little stayed tucked away in my imagination for all these years. Now I've turned it into music and can share it with another generation.
Maybe that's part of why Edenglow ended up with so many goblins in the first place.
Apparently James Whitcomb Riley and my dad planted them there a very long time ago.
Behind the Melody
Behind the Melody
Some children's poems teach lessons with gentle wisdom.
Hilaire Belloc preferred lions.
Jim comes from Belloc's wonderfully wicked 1907 collection Cautionary Tales for Children, and it's exactly the sort of children's literature I love—the kind written before adults decided every story needed to be reassuring.
Young Jim has been warned. He has been instructed. He has been given perfectly reasonable advice.
Jim, naturally, knows better.
What follows is an increasingly ridiculous cautionary tale involving disobedience, a trip to the zoo, and one very consequential encounter with a lion. Belloc tells it all with such exaggerated seriousness and dark humor that the terrible fate of poor Jim becomes part morality lesson, part comedy, and part warning to children that perhaps—just occasionally—the grown-ups have a point.
For the musical adaptation, I wanted to preserve that mischievous theatricality. The fun is in the contrast: terrible things are happening, but the storyteller seems almost gleefully determined to make sure we learn something from Jim's unfortunate example.
It's macabre, absurd, and more than a little naughty.
In other words, it fits into Curious Tales of Edenglow beautifully.
And the moral?
Listen to your parents. Or don't. But do keep an eye on the lion.
Behind the Melody
Behind the Melody
Some poems don't have to be discovered. They've simply always been there.
Wynken, Blynken and Nod by Eugene Field is another of my childhood favorites, and perhaps that's why putting it to music felt so natural. Written in 1889, it already reads like a lullaby: three tiny sailors climb aboard a wooden shoe and drift across a nighttime sea, casting their nets among the stars.
As a child, I simply loved the magic of it.
As an adult, I love the cleverness hiding underneath.
The entire adventure is really the story of a child falling asleep. Wynken and Blynken suggest those increasingly heavy, blinking eyes; Nod is exactly what comes next. The wooden shoe sailing across the heavens eventually becomes something much more familiar—a cradle—and suddenly we realize that the moonlit voyage we've been following has been unfolding inside a child's imagination all along.
That's the feeling I wanted the music to preserve. Soft piano, warm strings, delicate vocals, and a gentle rocking rhythm allow the poem to float rather than march forward. It should feel like that peculiar space between awake and asleep, when the room around you begins disappearing and imagination quietly takes over.
There's also something deeply nostalgic for me about taking a poem I loved when I was little and giving it a new life through music. More than a century after Eugene Field wrote it, children are still climbing aboard that wooden shoe.
And now, when I hear it, I'm both places at once—the grown woman creating the music and the little girl who already knew the story.
Some childhood favorites don't really stay in childhood. They simply wait for us to find our way back to them.
Behind the Melody
Behind the Melody
Apparently Jim wasn't enough of a warning, so Hilaire Belloc gave us Matilda.
Matilda Who Told Lies, and Was Burned to Death comes from Belloc's 1907 Cautionary Tales for Children, and it may be one of the finest examples of why I find his work so wonderfully inappropriate by modern children's-literature standards.
Matilda has a problem: she lies for attention. Most famously, she raises false alarms and summons London's fire brigade when absolutely nothing is burning. Eventually everyone learns not to believe her.
You can probably see where this is going.
When Matilda's house actually catches fire and she desperately calls for help, nobody believes her. Belloc does not swoop in with forgiveness, personal growth, or a reassuring adult who arrives at the last possible moment.
Nope.
Belloc burns Matilda.
That's precisely the outrageous humor behind these poems. Belloc was parodying the relentlessly moralizing children's literature of his time by giving relatively ordinary childhood misbehavior spectacularly disproportionate consequences—and delivering the whole dreadful business in cheerful, rhythmic verse.
For this adaptation, I leaned into that absurdity and turned Matilda into dark cabaret. The theatrical swagger, vintage vaudeville energy, crooked spotlight atmosphere, and sardonic delivery make her catastrophe feel less like a conventional children's song and more like a magnificently ill-advised stage production.
Because beneath all the macabre fun, Belloc's joke still works more than a century later: we're horrified by what happens to Matilda...
...but we absolutely understood the moral.
And once again, children:
perhaps listen to the grown-ups before Belloc decides to write a poem about you.
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