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readallthenewberys2017-08-30 09:23 am
justice_turtle) wrote in readallthenewberys2017-08-30 09:23 am
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Newbery Honor: The Big Tree of Bunlahy: Stories of My Own Countryside (Padraic Colum)
Another collection of retold folktales, this one by Padraic Colum, who's usually pretty good. Judging by the frontispiece, this purports to be a collection of tales told under a particular tree outside a small Irish village. Let's see, then.
* Table of contents starts us off with "The Story of Usheen", that being either Oisín the son of Fionn (whose story ended The Tangle-Coated Horse) or someone named after him.
* We start with an introduction to the village of Bunlahy. The conceit of the book is that it's being told from the memory of an old soldier who grew up in the Bunlahy area, has spent "the two middle quarters of my life guarding Kings' palaces and searching for gold in the valleys of Van Diemen's Land", and has now returned to his hometown.
* Our narrator recalls a visit to Bunlahy in his youth, when he read a letter for a man called Simon the Huntsman, and in return was told the story of Oisín, which follows.
* Niav (Niamh), the daughter of the king of the Land of Youth, has come to Ireland to court and marry Oisín. "But the elements of our land made a change in her"; in the mortal world she appears to be an ugly old hag with a crooked nose and tangled hair. However, she has fallen in love with Oisín and would rather stay near him as a hag than return to her father's palace as a beautiful maiden.
* Oisín spends a day hunting, and kills so much game he can't carry it all back to camp. Niamh, who has been watching, comes out of hiding and offers to help him carry his catch in exchange for a kiss. He kisses her, and this turns her back into her normal beautiful self.
* Oisín's companions welcome Niamh, but there is awkwardness in the camp, and eventually Oisín's father Finn tells him to leave with Niamh for the Land of Youth, saying "it is not well when many men think of one woman". Oisín and Niamh accordingly leave.
* Time passes differently in Tir na nÓg than it does here, and after three years there, Oisín asks to return and visit his family and friends, but in Ireland three hundred years have passed. Still, Niamh lets him go back on a magical horse, warning that if he touches the ground he will immediately age.
* Of course he does wind up touching the ground, falls from his horse and ages to near death. This version leaves out the ending I always heard, which is that Oisín then told the tales of the Fianna to St Patrick and his people, who preserved their memory -- it just ends with Oisín fallen, "And all his companions were dead and gone, and their names were hardly remembered."
* The next tale is told by a "half-crazy" clock-mender known as Old Cuckoo, who carries the yellowed faces of unfixable clocks in his bag.
* This story is called "The First Harp". A grouchy old couple live in a hut, grouching and grumbling and blaming each other for everything that goes wrong. One day both of them leave the hut and each other, planning not to return. They wind up at the same beach, not knowing it, and they hear an odd musical sound, so each of them goes toward it. The wind is making music in the rib-bones of a whale skeleton. They go home, talking about the wondrous music instead of grumbling, and the man eventually builds first an aeolian harp and then the regular sort. Finally the king summons the man to play for him, and gives him riches so the couple can live happily and contentedly the rest of their days. The harper, we are told, was named Cendfind, which I assume means something to people who know more Irish folklore than I do. XD
* Then we have a story the narrator tells himself, not a retelling; this one is called "Our Hen". It begins with a very calm, well-behaved, relatively quiet barnyard. The titular hen is called Our Hen because "she never did nor said anything that a Hen shouldn't do or say". There's a bit of (not terribly convincing) exposition about how well she handled her brood of ducklings, and then we're told that she currently has a brood of pheasant-chicks.
* One day she takes her brood of young pheasants through the hedge and past the duck-pond, and they wander farther and farther down the lane, following the tracks that the turkeys leave when they go out every day. They go even farther than the turkeys ever do, and they come to Bunlahy and the big yard of the manor-house that stands near the Big Tree. There they meet the farmyard's Irish setter, Pointer, and the hen scolds him for following them and chases him off. Then they all go home.
* After that the pheasants are put into a big wire cage, and the hen sits with them and tells them stories about their adventure, since... I don't know, maybe pheasants have a worse memory than chickens? I have no idea. But it says those are the only stories they want to hear.
* The pheasants grow up, and for some reason the bantam rooster, whom nobody likes or pays any attention to (the only reason given is that he had rebuffed the attentions of a young hen who then went crazy), helps them get out of the cage. They fly out of the barnyard and go to live in the wood. The hen goes and asks them to come home, but they say "Oh, but this is our home", and the hen goes back without them. She roosts in a tree like the crazy hen and refuses to hatch any more eggs, but tells the other hens' chicks stories about her beautiful children and the world outside the farmyard.
* That was a weird-ass story. O_O
* The next story is introduced with a bit about some men who have been shooting pheasants in the wood. That... doesn't make it any less weird, sir. O_O But anyway, one of the hunters has had his game-bag ripped open, and the young narrator fetches the shoemaker's daughter to sew it up. In order to stop the young men flirting with her, the shoemaker' daughter tells the next story, of "The Man with the Bag".
* Oh, I know this one! A girl named Liban, which we're told means Beauty of Woman, lives with her mother. Liban has many suitors, but the mother sets them all a task to climb a tree overhanging a high cliff and fetch back a pair of scissors and an egg from a raven's nest in the tree, and none of the young men can manage it. Then a beggar with a bag comes through town and begs from Liban and her mother a place to sleep, and out of his bag he takes a single pea, which he says they must keep safe for him while he sleeps.
* Of course the hen eats the pea, and then somehow the pig eats the hen, and the horse knocks down the wall upon the pig and kills it, and at each change the beggar says he now owns whatever killed his previous thing. Finally Liban takes the horse out to graze by the cliff, and the horse falls down and is killed, so the beggar demands Liban in payment. So the mother says no, but the beggar grabs Liban and puts her bodily into his bag and runs off with her. And then he turns out to be a baron's son and they get married and the story is ended.
* Then a lawyer's clerk comes to talk to the shoemaker, and he tells a story about the peacocks of the local deserted manor, which is called Baron's Hall. Apparently the peacocks come originally from France, and it is required that anyone leasing the manor should keep the peacocks there. The story goes back to the old days, when the possessions of Catholic nobility were seized and given to Protestants; it tells of a pair of Catholic nobles, brother and sister, who for whatever reason are only "the size of a child of a dozen years", and their two wicked Protestant uncles who first kept up the place for them and then of course eventually seized it for themselves, because that's what wicked uncles do. ;S But though they banished the two Catholic nobles to a hunting lodge on the grounds, they let the peacocks remain, and so did all their descendants. And the peacocks cry over the nobles' graves.
* Then later the shoemaker tells a story of a little girl named Nannie, ten years old, who wants a pair of nice shoes for her confirmation day. Nannie's father is dead and his parents hadn't wanted him to marry her mother, again because of the divide in religions that so many Irish stories come back to. But the mother has to ask her in-laws for work in order to earn the money to buy Nannie the shoes, and though the in-laws don't like the mother any better, they become slightly less crusty toward Nannie by the end of the story.
* The next story is called "The Three Companions", about a horse and a donkey and a goat that go along the road together. First they scare a bunch of robbers out of a house in the manner of the Musicians of Bremen, and then they sleep in the stable of the house and eat up the garden. But the horse, having been a circus horse, knows how to go up stairs and ring a bell, and a magpie that lives in the house becomes jealous and decides to make the quadrupeds leave. So she tells them lies about each other, and the goat gets angry and butts a beehive and makes the bees sting the donkey, who runs away. The donkey and the goat go back to their owners, but the horse wanders the roads for a while before he too finds his owner again and everybody lives happily ever after.
* Then it is a year later, and our young narrator meets a stranger under the tree who has him help twist a rope out of hay to lead a calf with, and while they are twisting the rope he tells the story of "The Two Youths Whose Father Was Under the Sea".
* So there are twin brothers, Jack and John Sea, and one of them goes out to try and find his father. The boys don't know (though we are told) that their father was a man their mother had fished up out of the sea, and that when he'd had to return to the sea he had warned against "the Hag of the Hollows".
* So first he meets a fox and feeds it, so the fox owes him a favor. Then he feeds pigs at the castle of a giant, and for payment he receives a hawk and horse and hound. Then a hare leads him into the middle of a wood, where he camps the night, but in the night an old lady begs him for shelter, and he lets her in, whereupon she turns out to be the aforementioned Hag of the Hollows and turns him into a sea-blue stone on the ground.
* Then his twin brother sets out to seek him, and he feeds an eagle that will now owe him a favor, and he herds cattle for the giant and receives the same hawk and horse and hound (which had run back home after their former master turned into a rock), and he follows the hair into the wood. But when the old hag tells him to tie up his horse and hawk and hound using a hair she gives him, instead of obeying like his brother, he burns the hair and lies about it. Then he forces her to bring back his brother and tell them how to find their father.
* In order to find their father they must kill her sister, the Hag of the Waves, and she gives them full instructions on how to destroy the egg holding the Hag of the Waves' life, which is in a duck in a stag on a mountain. They do this, they meet their father for a little bit, then he goes back to the sea, but he gives them arm-rings of gold, and then as a sort if afterthought they go and marry the two daughters of the giant they did farm chores for.
* Then there is a story of a Bonfire Night (late June) which for some reason is called here "Bone-fire Night", and at the bonfire the story is told of "The Wizard Earl". Earl Gerald of Kildare, a great wizard, goes to gather fern-seed at sunset on Midsummer's Eve, which we are informed is the proper time to do this if you want it to make you invisible. (Ursula Vernon has noted in "Castle Hangnail" that since ferns reproduce by spores, finding fern-seed is a project in and of itself.)
* But the "country people" are watching and distract him, and he misses sunset. (I thought for a moment "country people" meant fairies, but it seems to mean peasants.) This angers him, but he has not brought a sword so he can't kill them. He doesn't seem a very pleasant person.
* Then his "young Countess" -- I think she's his girlfriend of some sort? -- asks him to show her the stars, so he does, and they see the bonfires around (I always thought Bonfire Night was St. John's Eve, a few days after Midsummer's Eve, but whatevs). Also there's a monkey in the castle because of reasons.
* Oh, she's his wife.
* She asks him to show her the shapes he can change into -- one is a stag, with which he frightened the villagers earlier. But if she, his love, is frightened by any of the shapes, he will have to disappear into the fairy mounds and never be seen by mortals except on Midsummer's Eve, so he doesn't want to show her.
* And she isn't frightened by any of the shapes, but while he is in the shape of a tiny version of himself, the monkey pounces and grabs him, and she's frightened by that, which is sufficient to trigger the spell. Which seems pretty arbitrary to me, but whatever.
* Then there is a bit about how the Earl rides out every Midsummer's Eve on a fairy horse with silver shoes, and when the silver shoes are worn through, "he will know that the time has come when the people are ready to take help from himself and his horsemen." I assume this is referring to throwing the English out of (Northern) Ireland, as this whole book so far has been... rather more aggressively political on that front than I tend to expect from American children's books!
* Then our narrator tells a story of finding a treasure chest in a peat bog, and of how an archaeologist comes out to look round and find other relics in the same area, and the archaeologist tells the story of "When the Luprachauns [sic] Came to Ireland".
* A tiny man, Eisirt, of the tribe of the Luchrapaun [sic] comes to the court of King Fergus of Ireland and requests permission to take the "king's dwarf", named Ae, to his own country for a visit. They go there, and Ae is like a giant among the leprechauns. It turns out that the king of the Luchra had boasted his armies were the greatest on earth, and Eisirt having disproved this, he now dares the king to go to Ireland and taste King Fergus's porridge as it stands by the hearth in the morning. So the king and queen of the leprechauns go there, but the king gets stuck in the porridge-pot, and is taken honorably hostage by King Fergus.
* The armies of the Luchrapaun destroy the grain and the fish of Ireland, but they cannot get their king back. Eventually the king offers to ransom himself with one of the five powerful magic items he owns, and King Fergus agrees in principle but can't pick one. Eventually, though, a water-monster threatens King Fergus' realm, so he chooses the shoes that allow one to walk on water or on the water-bed. The king of the leprechauns goes back home, and King Fergus defeats the water-monster but dies of his wounds -- the moral being that "treasures forced from the Little People" bring bad luck.
* I am now deeply perplexed, because that story sort of did what it said on the tin, but sort of not. I mean, yes, the leprechauns technically came to Ireland, but they didn't stay. One would expect a story of how the leprechauns "came to" Ireland to deal more with a permanent immigration. O_O
* Then the archaeologist tells the story of "King Cormac's Cup". King Cormac, we are told, had three faults: he would believe anything anyone told him, he would trade anything of his for anything anyone brought him, and he "governed his men of lore and learning very slackly" such that they didn't do their jobs of researching and teaching. Other than these faults, he was a good and a handsome king.
* A juggler comes to see the king, and he has a silver branch bearing golden apples that ring like bells and make beautiful music. The king offers to trade anything he has for the branch, and the juggler says he will ask for three things, the first request to come when the king sees him again. Then he leaves the branch with the king and departs.
* The next year, the juggler comes back wearing a big cloak, and the first thing he asks for is the king's daughter. The king brings his daughter, the juggler wraps his cloak about her, and poof! they both disappear. The queen and all her ladies begin wailing, but when the king rings the bell-branch, they all forget their sorrow.
* Here I was thinking the juggler wanted the princess for marrying purposes, but the next year when he comes again, he takes the king's son in the same way! Now I am confused. O_O
* And in the third year, the juggler takes the king's wife, and the king gives her, but when the stranger has disappeared he runs off wildly across the plain. A mist comes up, and when it clears he sees a wall of bronze around two palace-like dwellings, and a well of clear water surrounded by nine hazel-trees and inhabited by five salmon which eat the hazelnuts as they fall into the well. This is starting to sound familiar, if one knows Norse mythology.
* Then King Cormac goes inside the bronze wall, and sees that one of the dwellings is finished, but the other is being thatched with feathers that keep blowing off again, so it doesn't look likely to be finished.
* He goes into the finished dwelling, and they greet him and have him sit down, and a pig is put to roast, but we are told that the pig will not be cooked "until, for every quarter of it, a true tale is told". So Cormac tells of how the strange juggler took his family and how he came here, and one quarter of the pig is cooked. The lord of the palace tells of a grain-field that was mysteriously grown and harvested and the sheaves made into a rick (like a haystack), and no matter how much grain his men thresh, the rick never gets any smaller. Then another quarter of the pig is cooked. The lady of the palace remarks that she has seven cows and seven sheep which can supply the whole land with milk and wool, and apparently that's enough of a story that the third quarter of the pig is cooked. Then the man cooking the pig tells of how he found a lost cow one day, and how he traded her back to her owner for the ax and the log of wood with which he made the fire: the wood burns but is never consumed, and when he strikes the pieces of wood with the back of the ax they become a whole log again.
* Then the pig is entirely cooked, and King Cormac knows that he has come to "the Land of Wonders", Tir Taingire, about which I can find nothing via Google because apparently it's a Shadowrun setting these days. ^_^ But the lord of the palace is Mannannan mac Lir, and he has brought the king here to teach him some things: how to recognize wise scholars (this had to do with seeing the Well of Knowledge), and how to recognize foolish scholars (the ones trying to thatch the unfinished castle), and to give him a cup that will break in pieces whenever a false story is told over it and will mend itself when a true story is told.
* (I like this. It's a fairytale concept, and yet still a lot more manageable than "just be more skeptical"... ;P)
* Then the archaeologist also tells two stories, one false that he says broke the cup and one true that put it back together again. The first story, a man of Britain tells King Cormac that he found a smithy with the words "The Wonder Smith and His Son" written over the door, and that the two smiths there blew out of their bellows, first a shower of wheat, then a flock of pigeons that ate the wheat, then a salmon that leaped into the stream by the forge and swam away, then an otter that fetched back the salmon. For all this part of the story the cup stays whole. But then the man says he found a mill called the "Grind 'Em Young Again", and if you go in you will have the old age ground out of your bones, but that he couldn't get in for the crowd of young men coming out... then the cup breaks.
* Then the prince of Connacht tells a true story to put the cup back together, and he tells that when his mother died in childbirth, she asked that he be raised in a far tower and no one told of his existence, in case a wicked stepmother should try to kill him, and this was done. But when he was nearly grown, a mysterious old woman charges his stepmother a great fee in wool and butter and wheat, and tells her of the prince's existence and that the stepmother's son is not heir to the throne of Connacht after all. The old woman also advises the stepmother to have the prince sent off to bring her "the Wild Steed of Bells from the stable of the Dismal Knight of the Glens", thus hoping to get rid of him.
* But the prince meets a fellow called the Champion with the Black Cap who goes with him, and when they are captured trying to steal the steed, the champion buys the prince's life by telling yet another story, this one about how he rescued a kidnapped child from three witches by cutting off the child's finger which had an enchanted tracking ring on it and throwing the finger and ring into a lake.
* Then it turns out the child he rescued was none other than the Dismal Knight himself, and in thanks the knight gives the prince his steed and lets them both go free. Then the prince brings back the steed, and when his stepmother hears him coming, she falls off the high tower and dies, and everybody else lives happily ever after.
* Then the next story is told on the day our young narrator leaves Bunlahy to seek his fortune, and it is called "The Story of the Spaeman". (A spaeman appears to be a soothsayer or fortune-teller.)
* This story is told in the first person, goddess knows why. Our narrator, a beggar of some sort, goes to "the Parish of No-sense", and while camping in a deserted house, happens to overhear some burglars hiding their loot and planning their escape. Then the town crier tells him about the robbery, and some people say that if the town had a hired Spaeman who could find missing things there would be no robberies, so our beggar claims to be a spaceman and tells them where to find the loot and how the burglars plan to escape. So they hire him on as village spaeman. But it's a boring job, so one day he agrees to help the village squire find out where his silver has been disappearing to. He figures out that the servants have been stealing it, and scares them into telling where it is, and then he tells the squire where it is and the squire hires him on as spaeman at a much better rate.
* But then the squire wagers his whole fortune to another gentleman that the spaeman will be able to find out the contents of a dish, and of course our spaeman has no real foresight, so he's scared. But the particular test is that he has to say what kind of meat is in a stew, and he says "Your honor, the old fox is caught at last", and by pure luck the meat in the stew is fox meat.
* But then the squire goes traveling with the money he won, and the steward kicks the spaeman out of his little cottage, and the villagers no longer want a spaeman for hire, and so our fellow goes back to being a beggar and winds up again in Bunlahy. And that is the end of the book.
* I don't know. That's not a very satisfactory book. It's kind of all over the place, for all that it tries to tie the stories together with a cohesive framing narrative. :S
* Table of contents starts us off with "The Story of Usheen", that being either Oisín the son of Fionn (whose story ended The Tangle-Coated Horse) or someone named after him.
* We start with an introduction to the village of Bunlahy. The conceit of the book is that it's being told from the memory of an old soldier who grew up in the Bunlahy area, has spent "the two middle quarters of my life guarding Kings' palaces and searching for gold in the valleys of Van Diemen's Land", and has now returned to his hometown.
* Our narrator recalls a visit to Bunlahy in his youth, when he read a letter for a man called Simon the Huntsman, and in return was told the story of Oisín, which follows.
* Niav (Niamh), the daughter of the king of the Land of Youth, has come to Ireland to court and marry Oisín. "But the elements of our land made a change in her"; in the mortal world she appears to be an ugly old hag with a crooked nose and tangled hair. However, she has fallen in love with Oisín and would rather stay near him as a hag than return to her father's palace as a beautiful maiden.
* Oisín spends a day hunting, and kills so much game he can't carry it all back to camp. Niamh, who has been watching, comes out of hiding and offers to help him carry his catch in exchange for a kiss. He kisses her, and this turns her back into her normal beautiful self.
* Oisín's companions welcome Niamh, but there is awkwardness in the camp, and eventually Oisín's father Finn tells him to leave with Niamh for the Land of Youth, saying "it is not well when many men think of one woman". Oisín and Niamh accordingly leave.
* Time passes differently in Tir na nÓg than it does here, and after three years there, Oisín asks to return and visit his family and friends, but in Ireland three hundred years have passed. Still, Niamh lets him go back on a magical horse, warning that if he touches the ground he will immediately age.
* Of course he does wind up touching the ground, falls from his horse and ages to near death. This version leaves out the ending I always heard, which is that Oisín then told the tales of the Fianna to St Patrick and his people, who preserved their memory -- it just ends with Oisín fallen, "And all his companions were dead and gone, and their names were hardly remembered."
* The next tale is told by a "half-crazy" clock-mender known as Old Cuckoo, who carries the yellowed faces of unfixable clocks in his bag.
* This story is called "The First Harp". A grouchy old couple live in a hut, grouching and grumbling and blaming each other for everything that goes wrong. One day both of them leave the hut and each other, planning not to return. They wind up at the same beach, not knowing it, and they hear an odd musical sound, so each of them goes toward it. The wind is making music in the rib-bones of a whale skeleton. They go home, talking about the wondrous music instead of grumbling, and the man eventually builds first an aeolian harp and then the regular sort. Finally the king summons the man to play for him, and gives him riches so the couple can live happily and contentedly the rest of their days. The harper, we are told, was named Cendfind, which I assume means something to people who know more Irish folklore than I do. XD
* Then we have a story the narrator tells himself, not a retelling; this one is called "Our Hen". It begins with a very calm, well-behaved, relatively quiet barnyard. The titular hen is called Our Hen because "she never did nor said anything that a Hen shouldn't do or say". There's a bit of (not terribly convincing) exposition about how well she handled her brood of ducklings, and then we're told that she currently has a brood of pheasant-chicks.
* One day she takes her brood of young pheasants through the hedge and past the duck-pond, and they wander farther and farther down the lane, following the tracks that the turkeys leave when they go out every day. They go even farther than the turkeys ever do, and they come to Bunlahy and the big yard of the manor-house that stands near the Big Tree. There they meet the farmyard's Irish setter, Pointer, and the hen scolds him for following them and chases him off. Then they all go home.
* After that the pheasants are put into a big wire cage, and the hen sits with them and tells them stories about their adventure, since... I don't know, maybe pheasants have a worse memory than chickens? I have no idea. But it says those are the only stories they want to hear.
* The pheasants grow up, and for some reason the bantam rooster, whom nobody likes or pays any attention to (the only reason given is that he had rebuffed the attentions of a young hen who then went crazy), helps them get out of the cage. They fly out of the barnyard and go to live in the wood. The hen goes and asks them to come home, but they say "Oh, but this is our home", and the hen goes back without them. She roosts in a tree like the crazy hen and refuses to hatch any more eggs, but tells the other hens' chicks stories about her beautiful children and the world outside the farmyard.
* That was a weird-ass story. O_O
* The next story is introduced with a bit about some men who have been shooting pheasants in the wood. That... doesn't make it any less weird, sir. O_O But anyway, one of the hunters has had his game-bag ripped open, and the young narrator fetches the shoemaker's daughter to sew it up. In order to stop the young men flirting with her, the shoemaker' daughter tells the next story, of "The Man with the Bag".
* Oh, I know this one! A girl named Liban, which we're told means Beauty of Woman, lives with her mother. Liban has many suitors, but the mother sets them all a task to climb a tree overhanging a high cliff and fetch back a pair of scissors and an egg from a raven's nest in the tree, and none of the young men can manage it. Then a beggar with a bag comes through town and begs from Liban and her mother a place to sleep, and out of his bag he takes a single pea, which he says they must keep safe for him while he sleeps.
* Of course the hen eats the pea, and then somehow the pig eats the hen, and the horse knocks down the wall upon the pig and kills it, and at each change the beggar says he now owns whatever killed his previous thing. Finally Liban takes the horse out to graze by the cliff, and the horse falls down and is killed, so the beggar demands Liban in payment. So the mother says no, but the beggar grabs Liban and puts her bodily into his bag and runs off with her. And then he turns out to be a baron's son and they get married and the story is ended.
* Then a lawyer's clerk comes to talk to the shoemaker, and he tells a story about the peacocks of the local deserted manor, which is called Baron's Hall. Apparently the peacocks come originally from France, and it is required that anyone leasing the manor should keep the peacocks there. The story goes back to the old days, when the possessions of Catholic nobility were seized and given to Protestants; it tells of a pair of Catholic nobles, brother and sister, who for whatever reason are only "the size of a child of a dozen years", and their two wicked Protestant uncles who first kept up the place for them and then of course eventually seized it for themselves, because that's what wicked uncles do. ;S But though they banished the two Catholic nobles to a hunting lodge on the grounds, they let the peacocks remain, and so did all their descendants. And the peacocks cry over the nobles' graves.
* Then later the shoemaker tells a story of a little girl named Nannie, ten years old, who wants a pair of nice shoes for her confirmation day. Nannie's father is dead and his parents hadn't wanted him to marry her mother, again because of the divide in religions that so many Irish stories come back to. But the mother has to ask her in-laws for work in order to earn the money to buy Nannie the shoes, and though the in-laws don't like the mother any better, they become slightly less crusty toward Nannie by the end of the story.
* The next story is called "The Three Companions", about a horse and a donkey and a goat that go along the road together. First they scare a bunch of robbers out of a house in the manner of the Musicians of Bremen, and then they sleep in the stable of the house and eat up the garden. But the horse, having been a circus horse, knows how to go up stairs and ring a bell, and a magpie that lives in the house becomes jealous and decides to make the quadrupeds leave. So she tells them lies about each other, and the goat gets angry and butts a beehive and makes the bees sting the donkey, who runs away. The donkey and the goat go back to their owners, but the horse wanders the roads for a while before he too finds his owner again and everybody lives happily ever after.
* Then it is a year later, and our young narrator meets a stranger under the tree who has him help twist a rope out of hay to lead a calf with, and while they are twisting the rope he tells the story of "The Two Youths Whose Father Was Under the Sea".
* So there are twin brothers, Jack and John Sea, and one of them goes out to try and find his father. The boys don't know (though we are told) that their father was a man their mother had fished up out of the sea, and that when he'd had to return to the sea he had warned against "the Hag of the Hollows".
* So first he meets a fox and feeds it, so the fox owes him a favor. Then he feeds pigs at the castle of a giant, and for payment he receives a hawk and horse and hound. Then a hare leads him into the middle of a wood, where he camps the night, but in the night an old lady begs him for shelter, and he lets her in, whereupon she turns out to be the aforementioned Hag of the Hollows and turns him into a sea-blue stone on the ground.
* Then his twin brother sets out to seek him, and he feeds an eagle that will now owe him a favor, and he herds cattle for the giant and receives the same hawk and horse and hound (which had run back home after their former master turned into a rock), and he follows the hair into the wood. But when the old hag tells him to tie up his horse and hawk and hound using a hair she gives him, instead of obeying like his brother, he burns the hair and lies about it. Then he forces her to bring back his brother and tell them how to find their father.
* In order to find their father they must kill her sister, the Hag of the Waves, and she gives them full instructions on how to destroy the egg holding the Hag of the Waves' life, which is in a duck in a stag on a mountain. They do this, they meet their father for a little bit, then he goes back to the sea, but he gives them arm-rings of gold, and then as a sort if afterthought they go and marry the two daughters of the giant they did farm chores for.
* Then there is a story of a Bonfire Night (late June) which for some reason is called here "Bone-fire Night", and at the bonfire the story is told of "The Wizard Earl". Earl Gerald of Kildare, a great wizard, goes to gather fern-seed at sunset on Midsummer's Eve, which we are informed is the proper time to do this if you want it to make you invisible. (Ursula Vernon has noted in "Castle Hangnail" that since ferns reproduce by spores, finding fern-seed is a project in and of itself.)
* But the "country people" are watching and distract him, and he misses sunset. (I thought for a moment "country people" meant fairies, but it seems to mean peasants.) This angers him, but he has not brought a sword so he can't kill them. He doesn't seem a very pleasant person.
* Then his "young Countess" -- I think she's his girlfriend of some sort? -- asks him to show her the stars, so he does, and they see the bonfires around (I always thought Bonfire Night was St. John's Eve, a few days after Midsummer's Eve, but whatevs). Also there's a monkey in the castle because of reasons.
* Oh, she's his wife.
* She asks him to show her the shapes he can change into -- one is a stag, with which he frightened the villagers earlier. But if she, his love, is frightened by any of the shapes, he will have to disappear into the fairy mounds and never be seen by mortals except on Midsummer's Eve, so he doesn't want to show her.
* And she isn't frightened by any of the shapes, but while he is in the shape of a tiny version of himself, the monkey pounces and grabs him, and she's frightened by that, which is sufficient to trigger the spell. Which seems pretty arbitrary to me, but whatever.
* Then there is a bit about how the Earl rides out every Midsummer's Eve on a fairy horse with silver shoes, and when the silver shoes are worn through, "he will know that the time has come when the people are ready to take help from himself and his horsemen." I assume this is referring to throwing the English out of (Northern) Ireland, as this whole book so far has been... rather more aggressively political on that front than I tend to expect from American children's books!
* Then our narrator tells a story of finding a treasure chest in a peat bog, and of how an archaeologist comes out to look round and find other relics in the same area, and the archaeologist tells the story of "When the Luprachauns [sic] Came to Ireland".
* A tiny man, Eisirt, of the tribe of the Luchrapaun [sic] comes to the court of King Fergus of Ireland and requests permission to take the "king's dwarf", named Ae, to his own country for a visit. They go there, and Ae is like a giant among the leprechauns. It turns out that the king of the Luchra had boasted his armies were the greatest on earth, and Eisirt having disproved this, he now dares the king to go to Ireland and taste King Fergus's porridge as it stands by the hearth in the morning. So the king and queen of the leprechauns go there, but the king gets stuck in the porridge-pot, and is taken honorably hostage by King Fergus.
* The armies of the Luchrapaun destroy the grain and the fish of Ireland, but they cannot get their king back. Eventually the king offers to ransom himself with one of the five powerful magic items he owns, and King Fergus agrees in principle but can't pick one. Eventually, though, a water-monster threatens King Fergus' realm, so he chooses the shoes that allow one to walk on water or on the water-bed. The king of the leprechauns goes back home, and King Fergus defeats the water-monster but dies of his wounds -- the moral being that "treasures forced from the Little People" bring bad luck.
* I am now deeply perplexed, because that story sort of did what it said on the tin, but sort of not. I mean, yes, the leprechauns technically came to Ireland, but they didn't stay. One would expect a story of how the leprechauns "came to" Ireland to deal more with a permanent immigration. O_O
* Then the archaeologist tells the story of "King Cormac's Cup". King Cormac, we are told, had three faults: he would believe anything anyone told him, he would trade anything of his for anything anyone brought him, and he "governed his men of lore and learning very slackly" such that they didn't do their jobs of researching and teaching. Other than these faults, he was a good and a handsome king.
* A juggler comes to see the king, and he has a silver branch bearing golden apples that ring like bells and make beautiful music. The king offers to trade anything he has for the branch, and the juggler says he will ask for three things, the first request to come when the king sees him again. Then he leaves the branch with the king and departs.
* The next year, the juggler comes back wearing a big cloak, and the first thing he asks for is the king's daughter. The king brings his daughter, the juggler wraps his cloak about her, and poof! they both disappear. The queen and all her ladies begin wailing, but when the king rings the bell-branch, they all forget their sorrow.
* Here I was thinking the juggler wanted the princess for marrying purposes, but the next year when he comes again, he takes the king's son in the same way! Now I am confused. O_O
* And in the third year, the juggler takes the king's wife, and the king gives her, but when the stranger has disappeared he runs off wildly across the plain. A mist comes up, and when it clears he sees a wall of bronze around two palace-like dwellings, and a well of clear water surrounded by nine hazel-trees and inhabited by five salmon which eat the hazelnuts as they fall into the well. This is starting to sound familiar, if one knows Norse mythology.
* Then King Cormac goes inside the bronze wall, and sees that one of the dwellings is finished, but the other is being thatched with feathers that keep blowing off again, so it doesn't look likely to be finished.
* He goes into the finished dwelling, and they greet him and have him sit down, and a pig is put to roast, but we are told that the pig will not be cooked "until, for every quarter of it, a true tale is told". So Cormac tells of how the strange juggler took his family and how he came here, and one quarter of the pig is cooked. The lord of the palace tells of a grain-field that was mysteriously grown and harvested and the sheaves made into a rick (like a haystack), and no matter how much grain his men thresh, the rick never gets any smaller. Then another quarter of the pig is cooked. The lady of the palace remarks that she has seven cows and seven sheep which can supply the whole land with milk and wool, and apparently that's enough of a story that the third quarter of the pig is cooked. Then the man cooking the pig tells of how he found a lost cow one day, and how he traded her back to her owner for the ax and the log of wood with which he made the fire: the wood burns but is never consumed, and when he strikes the pieces of wood with the back of the ax they become a whole log again.
* Then the pig is entirely cooked, and King Cormac knows that he has come to "the Land of Wonders", Tir Taingire, about which I can find nothing via Google because apparently it's a Shadowrun setting these days. ^_^ But the lord of the palace is Mannannan mac Lir, and he has brought the king here to teach him some things: how to recognize wise scholars (this had to do with seeing the Well of Knowledge), and how to recognize foolish scholars (the ones trying to thatch the unfinished castle), and to give him a cup that will break in pieces whenever a false story is told over it and will mend itself when a true story is told.
* (I like this. It's a fairytale concept, and yet still a lot more manageable than "just be more skeptical"... ;P)
* Then the archaeologist also tells two stories, one false that he says broke the cup and one true that put it back together again. The first story, a man of Britain tells King Cormac that he found a smithy with the words "The Wonder Smith and His Son" written over the door, and that the two smiths there blew out of their bellows, first a shower of wheat, then a flock of pigeons that ate the wheat, then a salmon that leaped into the stream by the forge and swam away, then an otter that fetched back the salmon. For all this part of the story the cup stays whole. But then the man says he found a mill called the "Grind 'Em Young Again", and if you go in you will have the old age ground out of your bones, but that he couldn't get in for the crowd of young men coming out... then the cup breaks.
* Then the prince of Connacht tells a true story to put the cup back together, and he tells that when his mother died in childbirth, she asked that he be raised in a far tower and no one told of his existence, in case a wicked stepmother should try to kill him, and this was done. But when he was nearly grown, a mysterious old woman charges his stepmother a great fee in wool and butter and wheat, and tells her of the prince's existence and that the stepmother's son is not heir to the throne of Connacht after all. The old woman also advises the stepmother to have the prince sent off to bring her "the Wild Steed of Bells from the stable of the Dismal Knight of the Glens", thus hoping to get rid of him.
* But the prince meets a fellow called the Champion with the Black Cap who goes with him, and when they are captured trying to steal the steed, the champion buys the prince's life by telling yet another story, this one about how he rescued a kidnapped child from three witches by cutting off the child's finger which had an enchanted tracking ring on it and throwing the finger and ring into a lake.
* Then it turns out the child he rescued was none other than the Dismal Knight himself, and in thanks the knight gives the prince his steed and lets them both go free. Then the prince brings back the steed, and when his stepmother hears him coming, she falls off the high tower and dies, and everybody else lives happily ever after.
* Then the next story is told on the day our young narrator leaves Bunlahy to seek his fortune, and it is called "The Story of the Spaeman". (A spaeman appears to be a soothsayer or fortune-teller.)
* This story is told in the first person, goddess knows why. Our narrator, a beggar of some sort, goes to "the Parish of No-sense", and while camping in a deserted house, happens to overhear some burglars hiding their loot and planning their escape. Then the town crier tells him about the robbery, and some people say that if the town had a hired Spaeman who could find missing things there would be no robberies, so our beggar claims to be a spaceman and tells them where to find the loot and how the burglars plan to escape. So they hire him on as village spaeman. But it's a boring job, so one day he agrees to help the village squire find out where his silver has been disappearing to. He figures out that the servants have been stealing it, and scares them into telling where it is, and then he tells the squire where it is and the squire hires him on as spaeman at a much better rate.
* But then the squire wagers his whole fortune to another gentleman that the spaeman will be able to find out the contents of a dish, and of course our spaeman has no real foresight, so he's scared. But the particular test is that he has to say what kind of meat is in a stew, and he says "Your honor, the old fox is caught at last", and by pure luck the meat in the stew is fox meat.
* But then the squire goes traveling with the money he won, and the steward kicks the spaeman out of his little cottage, and the villagers no longer want a spaeman for hire, and so our fellow goes back to being a beggar and winds up again in Bunlahy. And that is the end of the book.
* I don't know. That's not a very satisfactory book. It's kind of all over the place, for all that it tries to tie the stories together with a cohesive framing narrative. :S
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