A life examined | 1 March 2008

In Competition No. 2533 you were invited to submit an obituary of a well-known fictional character, which gave you the opportunity to try your hand at what is an often underrated art. The only fictional character that I am aware of who has been honoured with an obituary in the real world is Hercule Poirot, whose death was marked by a front-page splash on 6 August 1975 — in the New York Times, no less.
There was a record postbag this week, with a welcome influx of newcomers. Popular subjects included William Brown, Sherlock Holmes and various members of the cast of the Pooh stories. While some of you stuck fairly closely to the fictional facts, others indulged in flights of fancy. Thus Nigel Harding had Gandalf the Grey, post-battle with the Balrog, metamorphosing into Gandalf the White and developing the first biological washing powder.  Commendations to Noel Petty, Alanna Blake, Dorothy Pope and Basil Ransome-Davies. The life-enhancing winners, printed below, earn £25 each. Brian Murdoch gets £30.

The death has occurred of Adam, protoplast, progenitor, park-keeper and agriculturalist. He was 930. Created fully formed, he thus avoided most formal education, but in later years he sometimes expressed regret at ‘missing out on Oxford’. After a widely reported dispute with a celebrity employer, Adam’s family hit the headlines again with the notorious fratricide case, when his son Cain was accused of killing his brother. There were no witnesses, but the stigma stuck, and Cain left the district. Adam and his wife Eve (née Rib) had numerous other children. In the first Who’s Who (in which his was the sole entry) he listed only animal taxonomy under hobbies, but later editions added delving, begetting, and eventually Scrabble, a game he invented. He is survived by his wife, and all of humanity except Abel.