Reading Notes: English Fairy Tales (Part A)

 Bibliography: The following stories are from English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs (1890).

I've put a '✿' next to the stories I enjoyed the most, with notes on them below.

READING A:

✿Tom Tit Tot
The Rose-Tree
✿The Old Woman and Her Pig
✿Binnorie
✿Mouse and Mouser
Cap O' Rushes
The Story of the Three Little Pigs
The Master and His Pupil

Tom Tit Tot - I liked this story. I thought it was pretty funny. First the girl ate 5 pies and the mom kept asking where the pies were when the girl kept saying she'd eaten them all. Then the king gives a backhand insult to the mom and says he's looking for a wife and wants to marry her daughter. So the daughter marries him, but because of how the mom made her daughter out to be super talented with making yarn, the king said one month of the year she'd have to show off her skills. Well of course she had no idea how, so this little creature helped her and she had to guess its name. It was overall a funny story.

The Old Woman and Her Pig - This story had the same repetitive pattern as bunches of other stories from past units, where it's just a huge chain of events until the last one is able to give in and reverse all the others. 

Binnorie - Omg I thought the ending of this one was great. So basically, a princess' husband fell in love with her younger sister and left her for the sister. The older sister was so pissed off by this that she brought her sister to what I think was a cliffside and pushed her off and left her to drown. The younger sister drowned and a famous harpist came by when her body washed ashore, and he made a harp out of her breastbone and golden strands of hair. When he eventually came to the castle to play his harp(s) for the king and everyone, the harp made out of the sister started to sing and left everyone speechless. What got me was how the harp/sister had mentioned everyone in the family and how much she missed them or whatever, but then at the very end she completely ousted her older sister's crime.

Mouse and Mouser - This one was not particularly likeable but I still thought it was interesting because of the format of the story. It felt like it would be more like a song or a poem, though things didn't particularly rhyme. But I thought the cat's comebacks to the mouse were witty and funny.

Photo by Candy Goode on Unsplash