Reading Diary Week 12: Welsh Fairy Tales

Welsh Fairy Tales, collected by Peter Emerson (1891-92)

Fairies of Caragonan: I like the way this story is arranged, with the middle excitement (the man gets sick, the fairies heal him), the back story, and then the resolution. It makes it more exciting to read, and more concise, rather than reading the whole thing straight through. And this way, it allows the author to explain everything about the witch in one section, with just a short mention to the man's sickness.

These stories talk about fairy rings, and it's another of those little mysteries that's never quite been explained (as far as I know)... which of course means, there's room for a story! It'd be neat to write a different explanation for what a fairy ring is, or who a set of them came to be...

(Fairy Rings)

It also might be fun to write this first story of the wicked witch and the fairies' plan to exact revenge in the modern world. I would write it from the perspective of a little boy who is being bullied, and then keep the fairies the same... they help the little boy see in a mirror where the bully is hiding everyone's lunch money or something, and then he vanquishes the bully with the aid of the fairies...and maybe a charmed bike or something that goes rogue when the bully steals it.

The Origin of the Welsh: This story tells of a strange breed of giant bird that lives in the wild lands outside Persia. They eat people, they're huge, and they run faster than a horse. Reading this, the birds (called Rohs in this story) reminded me a lot of a giant breed of bird I created for my novel last semester. I called my birds Rakachans, picturing them to be about as large as a horse, and vicious, but trainable. It might be fun to merge the two stories; describe part of the plot line from the Welsh tale, and then have my character appear (she is taken to a magical world by an evil sorcerer disguised as a Rakachan).

Side note, this story seemed like a very roundabout way to describe where the Welsh people came from.