Week Twelve Reading Notes Part A - Celtic Tales

Source Story: Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, with illustrations by John D. Batten (1892). Web Source.

• "Connla and the Fairy Maiden"
• A prince, named Connla, sees a fairy maiden who invites him to come and live with her in a land without sin or death. He is the only one who can see her, but his father hears her voice and gets his Druid to cast a spell and get rid of her. Before she disappear, she throws an apple to Connla, who eats only that for a month because it replenishes when he eats it. He falls in love with her during this time, but when she reappears his father again tries to call for his Druid to dispatch her. But before the Druid comes, Connla runs away with her on a glass canoe off to sea.
• "The Field of Boliauns"
• A man named Tom Fitzpatrick meets a leprechaun working on a holiday. He follows the leprechaun for awhile, and then begins to threaten the leprechaun, wanting to know where he's hidden his gold. He grabs the leprechaun, spilling his beer, and makes the leprechaun take him to the hiding place, which is under a boliaun in a field full of boliauns. He doesn't have a shovel with him, so he ties his red garter to the boliaun and makes the leprechaun swear not to move it, then goes home to get his shovel. When he returns, the leprechaun is gone and so is the garter, so he never gets his gold.
• "The Horned Women"
• A rich woman's house is taken over by weaving witches with horns on their heads. They tell her to make them a cake while they weave, so she goes outside to get some water. The Spirit of the Well tells her how to get rid of the witches, and once they leave, how to perform a series of rituals to keep them from coming back. She follows the instructions, and when the witches return, they cannot get back into her house, so they leave.
• "The Shepherd of Myddvai"
• A shepherd sees three beautiful maidens come out of a lake, and through trial and error and a lot of bread, he convinces one of them to marry him. She tells him she will be his wife, but if he strikes her three times without cause she will leave him. Twice he taps her on the shoulder and she counts it, and finally, when she bursts out laughing at a funeral, he grabs her shoulder roughly, so she leaves him and takes all the animals she brought with her back to the lake. She returns one final time later to give her sons gifts when they become men.
• "The Sprightly Tailor"
• A laird named Macdonald tells a sprightly tailor that he'll pay him handsomely if the tailor will sew him some trews at night in a haunted church. The tailor agrees and goes to sew them that night. A monster starts to rise out of the ground, and keeps asking the tailor if he sees the monster's great head/neck/arms/etc. The tailor just responds "I see that, but I'll sew this!" each time, and finishes the trews just as the monster fully emerges. The monster chases him, but the tailor is nimble and escapes, then receives a rich reward from the laird.
• "Munachar and Manachar"
• Munachar and Manachar went to gather raspberries, but Manachar eats all the raspberries that Munachar picks, so Munachar decides to hang him. He goes looking for a rod, who says he must first find an axe, who says he must first find a flag, and so on until he gets to a miller who tells him to bring a sieve filled with water. A crow cries "daub, daub," so Munachar daubs clay in the sieve so the water doesn't run out. After going through all the lengthy process to get the supplies to hang Manachar, he returns to find that Manachar has burst from eating all the raspberries, and is already dead.
• "Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree"
• An evil queen is mad because a fish says her daughter is prettier than her, so she tries to kill her daughter. She makes several attempts to murder the daughter, and is successful one time, but each time she thinks the daughter is dead, she is either mistaken, or the daughter comes back to life. So when she returns to the fish, expecting to be considered the prettiest, the fish always tells her that her daughter is prettier. In the end, the daughter's sister-wife helps trick the queen into killing herself. The daughter and her sister-wife live happily ever after with their shared husband, who is a rich prince.

Image of the fish who kept calling the queen ugly, probably.
(Image of a trout from Flickr)