A fraid knot is a very singular kind of knot simply because tis not a knot at all. Once upon
a time there was a lonely piece of string that lay across the baked soil of the furthest
land across the equator. Occasionally the sparse breeze lifted a hair or two of this lone
piece of string and the hair quivered in suspension, floating above its body. Over time,
there happened to be a few more pieces of string and the sun continued its slow path
across the sky that never moved until one day there came a deluge of the wettest rain
imaginable and the strands of string coalesced in a brave attempt to protect its inner
core from the onslaught it was subjected to. And so the string grew. And grew. And
along came man. Now man was in a knotty situation as he had been cast aside by his
tribe for forgetting to stoke the fire at night thus the great leader had not had his cup of
hot honey water in the morning. Anyway, this knotty man, and literally his body reflected
the knots of the trees that now surrounded him, contorted so it was. This knotty man,
despondent as he was and not knowing where he should go, his eyes cast to the ground,
came upon this self-same piece of string, now much enlarged, lying on the baked earth of a
land furthest across the equator. And so he picked the string up in his great hairy hand and
rubbed his thumb along the frayed sides of the piece of string, sensing its raw power and
how it could change, would change. Lost in thought he almost turned back to retrace his
steps but thought better of it and continued to wander in the direction he had previously
been going before picking up the piece of string that had caused him to now be lost in
wonder.
And so the knotted man wandered through the trees of one of the Great forests that still
roamed the earth in this beginning time. He did not see the great chasm that had opened
right in front of his path with spurts of red balls of fire spewing from its very centre and a
great yellow glow of some thick gooey mass oozing along on the bottom. It was to this place
of doom that the knotted man was even now striding, lost in wonder. And so it was that the
knotted man did fall inside this chasm of fire, head over head over head he fell, almost
certainly to a fiery end but lo and behold he found himself landing, feet first and in one go,
on a slim slice of soil incredibly protected from the fires and the thick gooey mass all
around. All around that is, except from an even slimmer slice of soil that stretched as far as
the eye could see so the knotted man followed this thin stretch of land and finally came
upon the end, much exhausted, that lay in the mouth of a deep, dark cave.
As the knotted man lay exhausted on the land in the mouth of the cavern, he realized
that his arms had been burnt as he had been flailing around in his fall to the centre of
the earth. He looked around and spied a cactus like plant that would help his skin
recover from the burns and crawling to the plant, he tore off two of the big green leaves.
But what could he do? He couldn't stay here - there was no food, just fire. And so it was,
that he remembered the piece of string that he also had. He tied the big green leaves to
his arms with the piece of string and tied a knot so it would stay. But this is not why it is
a fraid knot.
Twas called the house of Knot.
Now, how about the fraid knot bit, I hear you say....well, it came about that the knotted
man or Mr Knot, as he was now called, did discover once when looking in wonder on the
fraids on the piece of string that were suspended in the blowing of a slight breeze that
often came through the Golden city on the approach of evening. He had luckily been
keeping all these fraids in a box he kept in a corner of his house made from trees. He
gathered up the fraids in six small bundles and used one fried to tie a Knot around each
of the six small bundles. He took a plank of wood and whittled a smaller piece of wood
to which he attached the six small bundles onto one end at right angles to the plane of
piece of wood that he had just taken and whittled away at. Smiling, dabbed the wooden
implement in some water and then some charcoal and began to rub the wooden
implement, with the bristles facing the teeth, up and down his teeth. Soon the invention
9f the knotted man was all the rage and everyone who was anyone in the land of the
gold just had to have the brush of the fraids made by Mr Knot. And so it was that the
proud and lithe people of the land of the gold did come to refer to the house of Mr Knot
as the house of the Fraid Knot!