Extra Reading Diary: Celtic Fairy Tales

For this week, I finished the Celtic Fairy Tales unit, which I still found to be pretty strange. The first story in the second half of the unit, King O’Toole and His Goose, started out pretty normally, but the end of the story was very bizarre, and I’m still not entirely sure I understand it. I was glad that King O’Toole made the right decision in his dealings with Saint Kavin, as I could see it going very badly if he’d done something differently. It kind of reminded me of the prince’s ordeal in Beauty and the Beast, but in this case, the king made the right call. The goose was a little weird though.

The story of Beth Gellert was just a tragedy. Finding out you killed the dog that saved your son from a wolf? Talk about a tear-jerker. I was just so incredibly saddened that Gellert had died when it was discovered that he saved the prince’s son. It certainly seemed that he was the culprit at first, but the prince’s haste in killing Gellert prevented him from seeing what had actually happened. I can only imagine how terrible he felt after acting so swiftly. To me, this was one of the few stories in this unit that had an actual moral to learn from the storyline.

(The prince's son. Illustration by John D. Batten. 1892)

Reading Diary A: Celtic Fairy Tales

For this week, I read the Celtic Fairy Tales Unit. Since much of my family is Irish, it seemed like a fitting choice. When I finished reading the first story Connla and the Fairy Maiden, I was incredibly confused, as I didn’t really understand the point of the story. There didn’t seem to be a moral or a lesson to be learned, so I was a little confused as to what the story was trying to convey.

When I read the tale of The Horned Women, I thought it was incredibly frightening. Again, I’m not really sure what the point of this story was, other than being scary. I found that it was quite bizarre and almost grotesque, which was fascinating but disturbing.

The Shepherd of Myddvai was an interesting tale. I had a bad feeling about things when the maiden said that she would leave him if he struck her three times, but I couldn’t imagine him hurting her after all that he did to win her affections. I was really frustrated by the outcome of the story. By merely tapping her on the shoulder, he lost her, and she went back to the lake. That seems pretty unfair. And then the story ends with her giving her sons healing powers when they’re full grown? That’s just a little random...

Illustration by John D. Batten (1892)