Sir Henry Saville died as he lived, under the constant pressure of a deadline.

Sir Henry Saville slurped in the drool, which attached his face to the manuscript on the desk. The overwhelmed writer had fallen asleep while attempting to finish the first draft of The Bible as ordered by King James of England. The last thing he remembered was his vision blurring, seeing double, then quadruple, and the darkness of slumber.

He shook his head in disbelief and slapped himself in the face to make sure he was actually awake and not dreaming. That slap would go on to be a hand shaped bruise. What once was scattered and strewn piles of paper was now stacked neatly, ready to go to press. Henry was absolutely perplexed. He was months away from completion, yet before him, everything was packaged together with red ribbons, good to go. He now knew that this was not his handiwork. He would never be so particular as to use flashy red ribbon. He looked skyward with great reverence. Surely, the Lord had felt sympathy for all this hard labor and intervened divinely.

The unknown truth was: the benevolent elves who would eventually assist a kindly cobbler in his dire hour of need, made their first appearance here, in Saville’s den. The good news: the first draft of the King James Bible was completed; the bad news: the elves were notorious imps. They added their idea of flair. They had added the letter ‘s’ in the most inappropriate passages of the manuscript, so it read, “Let there be slight.” And “Jesus Swept.” Perhaps the greatest prank, which was also the very first reference to a certain Belgian sensation, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the Smurf.”

Slight