Morkle Muckleaf serves as the Editor in Chief of Fact Goblin, where he is responsible for maintaining the organisation’s famously rigorous standards of factual certainty, editorial confidence, and decorative footnotes.

Like almost all our staff, Morkle, or “Mucks” to his many friends, and raised in the quiet Hertfordshire village of Radlett, Morkle displayed unusual intellectual interests from an early age. While other young goblins spent their days collecting shiny objects or arguing about clouds, Morkle devoted himself to the careful observation of ducks attempting to disguise themselves as other things. His notebooks contain thousands of recorded sightings, including ducks pretending to be swans, ducks pretending to be geese, and one particularly ambitious duck that spent six months attempting to pass itself off as a wheelbarrow.

Morkle’s editorial career spans more than a century, although he becomes surprisingly vague whenever anyone attempts to calculate exactly how many years that might be.

Perhaps the most famous incident in his personal life occurred in 1934 when he briefly became engaged to a Remington typewriter known as Beatrice. The relationship ended amicably after legal experts determined that neither party could properly sign the marriage register. Morkle still speaks fondly of Beatrice and insists that “she understood punctuation better than most people.”

Editorial Honours and Awards

• The Golden Footnote for Outstanding Confidence in Unsupported Assertions (1948)
• The Grand Quill of Improbable Accuracy (1962)
• The International Society of Editorial Certainty Lifetime Achievement Medallion (1989)
• The Distinguished Award for Excellence in Publishing Things That Sound Correct (2007)
• The Platinum Comma of Remarkable Persistence (2019)

Personal Interests

Outside of editorial work, Morkle maintains a large collection of rare and unusual microorganisms. His prized bacterial cultures are all named after characters from medieval Romanian folklore, including Greuceanu, Iovan Iorgovan, Prâslea, Făt-Frumos, and Ileana Cosânzeana. He claims the bacteria respond positively when addressed by name, though this finding has yet to pass peer review.

Family and Pets

Morkle shares his office with an unusually intelligent Moss-Ferret named Bartholomew Picklesniff, a rare creature known for sleeping inside filing cabinets and stealing only documents it disagrees with.

Favourite Day of the Week

Morkle’s favourite day is Thursday.

According to Morkle, Thursday is “the most sensible day.” Monday is too ambitious, Tuesday is overconfident, Wednesday cannot make up its mind, Friday is distracted, Saturday is noisy, and Sunday spends most of its time worrying about Monday. Thursday, he argues, simply gets on with things and asks for very little in return.

Official Motto

“Facts are like ducks. The interesting ones are usually pretending to be something else.”