Reading Dairy A: Celtic Fairy Tales

I’m enjoying the first half of the Celtic fairy tales unit, but that last story, Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree, is an absolute delight!  But two of the big reasons: the second wife and the ending.

I love the there wasn’t any jealousy between the Gold-Tree and the second wife (who I’m just going to refer to her here on out as SW).  I feel like in a lot of other stories, there would have been a lot of fighting and maybe SW would have tried to trick Gold-Tree into leaving the Prince.  But the Irish are too chill to be playing games like that.

And the Prince is, of course, just jumps on the chance to have two wives, bless his heart.  From the little bit here, though, it seems like he genuinely loves them both. 

I absolutely loved SW’s big moment – when Silver-Tree shows up to kill her daughter and SW steps in and tricks her into drinking the poison.

That’s just so beautiful to me.

The second thing I love a lot about this story is the way it ended: “I left them there.”  One of favorite books of all time, Hannibal by Thomas Harris, ends about exactly like that.

We’ll withdraw now, while they are dancing on the terrace—the wise Barney has already left town and we must follow his example.  For either of them to discover us would be fatal.

We can only learn so much and live.

In the novel, Clarice and Hannibal run away to Buenos Aires.  Barney, the orderly who took care of Hannibal during his time in a mental facility for the criminally insane, sees them only from afar before he quickly gets away.  Not that Hannibal was going to kill him, Barney had been polite and courteous to him, never making things harder than they had to be, but Barney hadn’t wanted to risk anything.

While I always enjoy the hard-won defeat of a villain, sometimes I find myself rooting for the villain.  And when they get the win, I think it’s pretty great.

After the new Hannibal show started airing on NBC a few years back, I remember reading this Tumblr post.  It’s still pretty relevant and makes me chuckle every time I think about it!

Bless fandom.