Reading Part B "More Celtic Tales"

The first story, called The Farmer of Liddesdale, gives a familiar tale of a man being tricked out of work and reward by a fairy-like creature that works and ploughs his whole field, then harvests everything perfectly, and tricks the farmer into taking all of his harvest. The farmer prays and is blessed with seeing the trickster's bag break and his crops staying in his field. It was strange.

A field in Ireland (Source)

The next story tells the tale of a small humpback, who, although ugly, sings sweetly and weaves beautiful baskets. One day his beautiful singing impresses some fairies, who bless him by taking away his hump and transforming him into a handsome man. When the townspeople hear about this, one of them becomes greedy and goes to sing the same song to the fairies, hoping for a similar reward. Instead they are offended by his terrible singing and curse him with the same hump that the hunchback had.
Another tale recounted the story of a small boy who runs away from the seminary here he was studying to become a monk and finds a magical land inhabited by small people who live surrounded by riches. He is very happy there, but eventually returns to his mother for a brief time before going back to play with his friends. His mother tried to persuade him to steal gold from them, but upon doing so was unable to ever return. This teaches a nice little moral lesson and then it throws in a strange twist of how the little men are actually Greek descendents.
The next tale is what I think I will be basing my story off of. In this story, an Irish king agrees to trade his wife and children for a magical branch (not sure why he decided this would be a good idea, but he did it anyway). The branch is able to make anyone feel happy as long as it is shaken. I want to rewrite the story to give a little more depth to the characters and make it more emotionally impactful.

Story Source: More Celtic Fairy Tales, by Joseph Jacobs (1895)

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