Week 11 Storytelling: The Old Man and the Fairies

There once was an old man that very much enjoyed fairs. He traveled from town to town visiting all of the different fairs in the land. At these fairs, he liked to buy different small items, and them take them to the next towns fair and sell them. He made decent money doing this, but not quite enough to support his huge family. The old man had four kids, and eight grand kids to take care of, as well as his wife. He had been looking for a way to make more money to help support his family, so when traveling around from fair to fair, he was also looking for work. 

            There was a group of mountains that he normally traveled through that were known for being infested with fairies. Fairies were known as being very mischievous characters and were very rarely seen. Some people compared them to ghosts because they had never seen them.  One day the old man decided to take a nap in the mountains. While he was asleep, the fairies came and picked him up and took him to a far off land. 

            The old man awoke in a land full of gold and diamonds. The fairies had taken him to a magical place, where money was not an issue. They told him to take all that he wanted with him, but to never mention how he received his wealth, not even to his family. The old man swiftly agreed to what the fairies had told him, and was quickly on his way with more gold and diamonds than anyone would ever need. 

Gold Bars. Web source: Wikipedia

            Once he was back on the mountain where he had dozed off earlier, he hurried home to show his family the wealth he had acquired. His wife, of course, was very curious of how he had gotten all of that gold and diamonds. The old man told her harshly that he could not tell her where he got it, and never could. His wife threatened to leave him forever if he didn’t tell her, so of course the old man told his wife where he got it. To his surprise, all of the gold still remained even after he told his wife. Had the fairies tricked him? The old man went to bed, with all of his happy family under the same roof. He awoke the next morning to find out that all of his gold and diamonds were gone, because like the fairies had warned him, he told his wife how he had received the goods.

Author’s Note:

The story I wrote was based off of the original story The Old Man and the Fairies. I kept the main storyline the exact same. In the original story, it is still about a man that travels to fairs and receives gold from fairies. The man takes the gold home to his family and tells his wife how he got it. Then when he awoke the next day all of the gold was gone. What I didn't like about the original story is that it didn't give very many details, so it left me kind of confused at the end. In my story, I added a lot of details so the story made more sense. I added why the old man was traveling from fair to fair, and why all of the gold disappeared in the end. I thought adding more detail to the story made it a lot more fun to read, and did leave you feeling so empty at the end. The original story can be found here: Welsh Fairy-Tales and Other Stories by Peter H. Emerson (1894).