Reading Notes: Welsh Fairy Tales, Part B

For this week, I decided I like to read more of the short stories about fairies, from Welsh Fairy-Tales and Other Stories, by Peter H. Emerson.

Reading Notes: Robert Roberts and the Fairies

• Robert Roberts was a hard-working carpenter who could never resist talking.
• One day, a little man came up to him and told him to dig under a certain tree, and he would be rewarded.
• Robert Roberts did, and found a box of gold; he visited twice more, and found a box each time.
• However, as he grew rich he started to boast about his “mysterious friends,” and eventually he confessed it was fairies that were giving him the gold.
• The next time he went to the tree, which was located near a hill, rocks came rolling down and barely missed him.
• Robert Roberts ran from the tree and never went near it again.

Reading Notes: Ellen’s Luck

• Ellen, a good and pretty girl, was walking in her town on a Sunday when she passed an open gutter and saw a copper coin laying there.
• After that, every Sunday she found a copper in the same gutter; Ellen would hoard her money.
• One day, her mother found the coins, and Ellen told her where she got them.
• After that, Ellen never found another copper, no matter when she walked past the gutter.

Reading Notes: The Fairies’ Mint

• A miller noticed one day that something was off in the mill; he felt that someone was working in his mill in the night. 
• He and a friend decided to investigate one night.
• They went to the mill near midnight, and were surprised to see that it was clearly running. 
• The miller crept to a window and saw little men operating the mill; while he couldn’t see what they put into the millstones, what was coming out was not flour, but coins.
• The miller immediately unlocked the door and ran in, and the lights went out suddenly, and there were sounds of people running. 
• When the lights came back on, the mill was empty, except for the cocker-shells lying all over the place.
• After that, the miller left the fairies alone to mill their coins, even when many people reported seeing the mill operating at midnight.

Apparently corgis were how Welsh fairies preferred to travel. (Source)