Reading Notes: Welsh Tales, Part A

To kick off this week’s reading, we have three short stories about welsh fairies from the Welsh Fairy-Tales and Other Stories, by Peter H. Emerson. These all have the common theme of why you don’t talk about the nice things fairies do for you.

Reading Notes: The Old Man and the Fairies

• Back when one could see fairies dancing in the Welsh mountains, an old man who was traveling back from the fairs fell asleep in a small valley, dropping his bag by his side.
• When he was soundly asleep, some fairies came along and carried both him and his bag under the Earth.
• When the old man awoke, he found himself in a gold palace surrounding by dancing and singing fairies; the fairies showed him around the palace and danced around him until he fell asleep again.
• When he was back asleep, the fairies took him back to the same valley, so when he woke up he thought he had dreamt the whole thing.
• However, when the man tried to lift his bag, he could hardly move it, because it was full of gold.
• He eventually managed to pick it up, and he went home to his wife.
• When he got home, he put the gold in a box under their bed; his wife nagged him incessantly about where he got the gold, until he finally told her.
• The next morning, when he opened the box, instead of gold he found the box to be full of cockle-shells.

Reading Notes: Tommy Pritchard

• On his way to school, Tommy Pritchard thought he heard someone singing on the other side of a stone wall; when he investigated, he moved a stone and found a sixpence underneath it.
• After that, every morning on his way to school Tommy would look under the same stone, and every day he would find a sixpence.
• Eventually his father noticed that Tommy always had money, and worried that Tommy was stealing from someone. 
• Tommy refused at first to tell his father where the money came from, but relented after his father threatened to beat him.
• After that, Tommy always found cockle-shells in the place where he had once found the sixpence.

Reading Notes: Kaddy’s Luck

• A tall young woman was constantly visited by fairies in the night; the fairies would sneak through the keyhole into her room, and while she could hear them dancing and singing around, she never saw them, just the small amount of money they left her each time.
• Eventually the woman married a tall young man, and they had a big child.
• One night, they went to a fair, and went to one side of the fair to listen for the fairies coming.
• While they waited, the woman told her husband about how the fairies used to visit her and leave her some money.
• When they got home, everything with their baby seemed normal, so they went to bed.
• But the next morning, the mother found that her baby was now very small, and the child never grew very big, for the fairies had changed the baby out of spite.

The cockleshells the characters from the first two stories found (Source)