Reading Diary A: Celtic Fairy Tales

The unit I chose to read this week was the Celtic Fairy Tales. I have always been interested and wanted to learn more about the Celtic way of life and I thought what a better way of understanding than reading stories that have revolved around the community for centuries. The story I really liked the most in the first half of the unit was The Horned Women. I really like the story because it seems like this was a tale that was passed on by generations through a family and maybe there is one family whose ancestors have handed down the mantel that one of the witches dropped. The story was about a woman who lived alone were visited by twelve witches over the course of a night and each had horns on their head (it ranged from the first witch having one and the last witch having twelve). The witches put a spell on the woman of the house and made her make cake for them. But when she went to fetch water from the well, the spirit of the well began to talk to her and helped her, telling the mistress of the house a spell that would get the witches away. Once she got the witches out with the spell, they came back to the house trying to go into the house but the well spirit wouldn’t let them in and then made them leave. When one of the witches flew away, a mantel fell and that is what is passed down for five hundred years.

Witches' Sabbath by Francisco Goya (1797-1798).