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My Good Babushka

(2,710 posts)
Tue Mar 4, 2014, 07:45 AM Mar 2014

A 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.

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A poor cottager (Original Post) My Good Babushka Mar 2014 OP
I love fairy lore! frogmarch Mar 2014 #1
Nice! nt My Good Babushka Mar 2014 #2
Annabelle’s Alphabet frogmarch Mar 2014 #3
I like it! nt. My Good Babushka Mar 2014 #4
This is lovely.... CherokeeDem Mar 2014 #5
been loving your posts - keep it up rurallib Mar 2014 #6

frogmarch

(12,153 posts)
1. I love fairy lore!
Tue Mar 4, 2014, 10:24 AM
Mar 2014

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:

frogmarch

(12,153 posts)
3. Annabelle’s Alphabet
Tue Mar 4, 2014, 11:55 AM
Mar 2014

[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."

CherokeeDem

(3,709 posts)
5. This is lovely....
Tue Mar 4, 2014, 12:45 PM
Mar 2014

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.

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