FAIRY GOLD(Irish) Folk Tales from Breffny, collected by Bampton Hunt
A. Context.
- FAIRY GOLD is an Irish fairy tale, from BRITISH ISLES
- The fairy tale was collected by Bampton Hunt. In the INTRODUCTION of the collection we find that many of the stories in this volume were told by an old man, but it happened that the old man took a contract to break stones for lime, and a child with an insatiable desire for information came to watch him at work and the old man told her the fairy tales. The child was only seven years old, and could not remember all she heard, so most of his lore died with him.
- The title of the collection is Folk Tales from Breffny, year 1912.
- It is a collection has 26 tales; I consulted the volume Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation, from MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON, 1912.
B. Summary
It happened one time that a poor man dreamt three nights after other of a sack of fairy gold was buried in under the roots of a lone bush and it growing in a field convenient to his house. He told nobody about his dream and went to search for the treasure, after digging for it, he finally found “a powerful fine sack of pure gold and splendid jewels” and he went along planning what to do with that wealth.
When he got home, he left the treasure in the byre and went inside. There were two strangers sitting by the fire pace, he told his wife in gaelic about the treasure and after those two man left he went to the byre to see it. The woman asked if the man spited on it, but the man did not. The woman told him that she heard her father saying that “how those treasures do be enchanted, and power is on them for to melt away. But if a man was to spit on fairy gold he'd get keeping it surely”. The man didn’t believe her and opening the sack they were scarified by “The appearance of the eel twisted itself out of the sack and travelled along the ground, putting the six feet of its length into the awfullest loops and knots were ever seen. Then it reared up its head and neck to stand swaying for a while, a full half of it in the air.” The man and the woman were beside the door but they were stupefied and couldn’t move to run outside.
The end of the tale is not very clear; the reader has the opportunity to elect what to belief. We have an open end: “Didn't it break away out through the thatch, and whether it melted off the face of the earth or travelled to other parts was never heard tell. But the likeness of that beast was the whole and only treasure came out of the sack the poor man dug from under the roots of the lone bush where the fairy gold was hid.”
I belief that the story could be continued, it ends very briefly at the most interesting part. As we know from the INTRODUCTION of the collection the stories were told by an old man to a child, the child was only seven years old, and could not remember all she heard, so that’s why this story might be incomplete.
I have chosen this fairy tale believing that it might be about The Gold Fairy but I was disappointed to find that the story end briefly and there is no happy end or any end at all.
C. Position in the Aarne-Thomson-Uther Index.
- TALES OF MAGIC 300-749
725 The Dream
735 The Rich Man's and the Poors Man's Fortune
736 Luck and Wealth
D. Characters and functions according to Vladimir Propp.
- Lack - The man is poor and they lack money
- Mediation - The man dreamt three nights after other of a sack of fairy gold was buried.
- Departure - The man starts his quest
- Return - He returns home, and he went along planning what to do with that wealth
- Designation - The sack he broth home is wicked and the ell comes out
- Pursuit - The ell “twisted itself out of the sack and travelled along the ground, putting the six feet of its length into the awfullest loops and knots were ever seen”
E. Similarities with other known tales (Romanian, Hungarian, French, German...)
I don’t think we have in Romanian fairy tales that have this king of plot, we can encounter some dragons similar to the ell from this story, and the idea of a poor family searching for gold or wealth. In my search I did not find any other fairy tale with this name, the only thing I fond related it was Fairy gold : a book of Old English fairy tales, but it is not relevant.
F. Modern-day editions in English and Romanian
I believe that this story is not really known today because of it’s length and it’s brief end neither in English nor in Romanian editions.
Sources:
viewtopic.php?f=28&t=209#p928http://www.mftd.org/index.php?action=atu&https://archive.org/stream/folktalesofb ... 4/mode/2up[/color]
Adriana Groza
LECT I
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