Week 12 Reading Notes Part B: English Fairy Tales

Fairy Ointment.

A nurse is woken in the middle of the night by a man who asks her to take care of his baby because his wise is too ill.  They make it to their house and the woman gives the nurse ointment and tells her to put it on the baby's eyes as soon as he opens them.  Curious to what it does, the nurse also puts the ointment on one of her eyes.  When this happens, everything gets better.  The nurse and the baby become more beautiful.  The rest of the family was still quite ugly and usually up to no good.  When the woman is better, the nurse asks to be taken home.  The next day she goes to the market and notices the same man as before stealing things from everywhere and nobody seemed to notice.  She walks up to talk to him and he freaks out that she can see her and realizes that she must have put the ointment on her own eyes.  It turns out the ointment allows you to see pixies and the family were all pixies!  The man smacks her on the side of the head and it blinds her.  The end.

Ointment sourced via Flickr

This story was really strange and interesting to me because of the seemingly "normal" way pixies were portrayed.  It made me wonder how popular the pixy myth is in this culture!  I would love to recreate this story keeping the same classical time period but with a different mythological creature that becomes seen!

Bibliography:
English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs