Week 12 Reading Diary: Celtic Fairy Tales

This week, I'll be reading stories from the Celtic Fairy Tales unit. I'll go through, read the stories, and record notes about some of the most interesting ones for my reading diary, as I usually do.

The Field of Boliauns 
The first thing I did when reading this story was look into what a Lady-day was. According to Wikipedia, Lady-day is the traditional name of the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin (25 March) and it is the first of the four traditional English quarter days. The "Lady" is the Virgin Mary. This wasn't necessarily important to know in order to understand the story, but anyway. The discovery of the leprechaun was a highlight of the story. Tom captured the leprechaun because he was after a fortune, and the leprechaun took him to a field of boliauns which are apparently ragweeds. The leprechaun promised not to remove the marking from the boliaun, and he kept his word...but he did manage to find a way to keep his treasure from being found and I thought that was really clever.

The Shepherd of Myddvai
I found this story really interesting. When the women came out of the sea, I was pretty surprised. I also thought it was curious that the man could only tell his wife by the strap of his sandal, for one because I didn't imagine women who lived in the sea to necessarily need shoes. Also, the whole three strikes thing seemed a little weird to me, especially when a tap on the shoulder was considered a strike.

Beth Gellert
So sad! I had a feeling the story would end in a way similar to this. Many folk tales end with a 'too little, too late' type of sentiment, as this one did.
"Too late, Llewelyn learned what had happened while he was away. Gellert had stayed behind to guard the child, and had fought and slain the wolf that had tried to destroy Llewelyn's heir."
In haste and panic, Llewelyn had doubted something he had no real reason to doubt (a dog that had given him a lifetime of loyalty) and both the dog and Llewelyn ultimately paid.

Brewery of Eggshells
The illustration for this story was pretty terrifying, so I assumed something weird was going to be happening before I even began reading this story. The woman's twin babies were not aging, which led her to believe that something was wrong. After being advised by a wise man, the woman did her little cooked eggs thing and found out that the children were not normal after all. She thew them into the lake and, come to find out, they were actually goblins.