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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsA poor cottager
A poor cottager had a child who grew uncommonly peevish. The parents attributed this to the fairies and imagined that their infant was a changeling. They put it in it's cradle and left it all night beneath a tree, hoping the fairy family would restore their offspring before morning. In the morning, the child was perfectly quiet, so they went away with it, confirmed in their belief.
from W.C. Hazlitt's Dictionary of Faiths and Folklore.
frogmarch
(12,153 posts)Thanks for the fairy story.
Here's a link to free downloads of Fairy and Folktales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats:
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33887
Here's Yeats' poem "The Stolen Child" set to music and performed by The Waterboys:
My Good Babushka
(2,710 posts)frogmarch
(12,153 posts)[center][/center]
I love this unsettling story poem by Tim Pratt. I posted a link to it on DU a couple of years ago, and here it is again:
http://www.ideomancer.com/fy/Pratt-Annabelle/Pratt-Annabelle.htm
Intro:
"Annabelle's Alphabet" is the little story that could. Tim wrote it in 1998, and sent it to every magazine, big and small, that he thought might like it. After three straight years of rejections, he was ready to give up on ever selling it. Then he read a few issues of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, the excellent 'zine edited by Gavin Grant & Kelly Link, and thought "Maybe they'd like my strange little story." So he sent it, and they did like it, and published it in October 2001. The story was subsequently reprinted in the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and in Best of the Rest 3. Editor Terri Windling called it "a brief, bright, and chilling piece that falls into the interstitial realm between story and prose poem, between fantasy and horror."
My Good Babushka
(2,710 posts)CherokeeDem
(3,709 posts)I have a friend who is a fantasy writer and she had mentioned this to me but I had never taken the time to read it. Lovely, melancholy piece and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Thanks so much for posting.