Reading Notes: Celtic Fairy Tales (Part A)

For the extra reading this week, I decided to read the Celtic Fairy Tales unit, and I fell in love with all of these wonderful stories.  My favorite from the first half was Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree from Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1892).  In this story, the mother, Silver-Tree goes to a trout in the river and asks if she is the most beautiful to which it tells her that actually her daughter, Gold-Tree is the most beautiful.  Silver-Tree can't stand this and decides that Gold-Tree must die so that she will remain as the most beautiful.  The story carries on very similar to Snow White, with the mother trying repeatedly to kill her daughter. She even poisons Gold-Tree and the prince that Gold-Tree had married refuses to bury her because she is too beautiful.  Eventually, the prince's second wife saves Gold-Tree from the poison and then tricks Silver-Tree into killing herself the next time she shows up to kill Gold-Tree.  I thought the story was very similar to the Snow White that I grew up with, but also had its own unique bits.  I really like how the story ends with "I left them there."  It's like a version of "and they lived happily every after," but I feel like it can be used in more situations than stories that end happily.  I also love the Celtic language in the story.  Silver-Tree always greets the trout by saying "Troutie, bonny little fellow, am not I the most beautiful queen in the world?"  "Bonny" is a common Celtic word meaning beautiful or attractive and I just love this word.  I often watch Outlander and you hear "bonny lass" very often throughout the show.
Image: Huge Tree



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