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| (Page 78 illustration in the book: Owen O'Mulready, via Wikimedia Commons) |
This unit includes a really wide range of genres in its tales, from the extremely tragic and poetic Children of Lir to the almost slapstick Story of the McAndrew Family. All of the stories struck me as completely retell-able, too--any of them would be really fun to do through a tighter point of view, or switched between that time and now, or told from the point of view from an unexpected character in the story...here were some of my ideas...
The Vision of MacConglinney: there is so much food in this story. I was hungry while I was reading it, and I had to get up and get a snack halfway through because my stomach kept growling and distracting me. Besides the victuals therein, though, the protagonist of this story is actually really funny--he describes an entire vision world constructed of food in order to lure a gluttonous demon out of the king, where it has been causing the king to basically eat his kingdom out of house and home. I don't know exactly what I would do this, but maybe it would work as a metaphorical story?
Dream of Owen O'Mulready: this is a short one, but it's really weird: a man who has never dreamed before tells his neighbor that he wishes he could dream, and the neighbor tells him that he should sweep out the fireplace and sleep there that night, and he'll be sure to have a dream...and boy, does he! It's a nightmare...and he wakes his wife up from trying to climb up the chimney in his sleep...I feel like this would have to be a really surreal-feeling story to work--or maybe it could be told by a narrator who was excessively practical and dry-humored? I feel like that would provide a funny contrast...
Source: More Celtic Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1895).
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