Reading Notes
As I stated in my last post, I really wanted to read the More English Fairy Tales section of the British and Celtic unit in order to find inspiration for the retelling of a fairy tale since my portfolio does have the term fairy tale in the title. Anyways, in the second part of the reading I really enjoyed the story Rushen Coatie as well as King O' Cats.
Rushen Coatie
The story of Rushen Coatie is yet another retelling of the classic Cinderella story. In this version the fairy godmother is a calf that helps Cinderella, or the Rushen Coatie, get food as well as clothes to attend church where she meets the prince. Like the other classic Cinderella stories, the Rushen Coatie loses a shoe at church in a rush to beat her evil stepmother home and the Prince searches for the owner of the shoe. This version was a bit more gruesome because the stepmother actually cut off the toes of one of her daughters so that the shoe would fit. If I were to retell this story I may keep some classic aspects like the shoe and the wishes but I might change how the story is written. I could tell the story from a first person perspective or I could do a complete perspective change and tell the story from the side of the actual daughter. Maybe she disagrees with her evil mother and could try to help the Rushen Coatie but in the end gets her toes cut off.
The King O' Cats
The King O' Cats is not a typical or well known fairy tale but I really enjoyed reading it. The story was about a man who works in a graveyard and saw a funeral for a cat by cats and was freaked out. When he is retelling the story to his wife, who has a cat on her lap, the cat jumps up and shouts that he is the King of the Cats now and runs off. If I were to retell this story I may go into more detail on this secret cat community and maybe even form the story into a comedy about the cats trying to cover up what the old man saw in order to keep their society secret.
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| (King of Cats, photo from flickr) |
Bibliography
More English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1894) link
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