Essay Week 12: English Fairy Tales

This week I read the Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Tales  unit.  I really liked that they were all unfamiliar stories, besides the Three Little Pigs.  Although, this version of the Three Little Pigs was different then the one we all know.  In the "nicer" version, the first two pigs - the ones that live in the house of straw and the house of twigs - live and run the house made of bricks.  In the English Fairy Tale version, the first two pigs are unable to escape from the big bad wolf and actually get eaten.  I almost didn't read that story because I thought it was going to be the one I was so familiar with and I was definitely wrong.
All of these stories were short and easy to read.  Some of them though were really cutesy and rhymed or added a -y suffix which kind of made it difficult to read.  It made me feel tongue-tied a few times.  The story of Henny-Penny  was very easy to get tongue-tied while reading because of all the character's silly names and the way the story accumulates.  I really enjoy reading accumulation stories because I like how everything slowly builds on top of each other and then quickly dissolves at the end.  The ending is also usually interesting since you don't really know what to expect since everything is just building and building.  I also liked the story of the Fairy Ointment .  Fairies are very secretive creatures and people seem to dislike them, which I don't really understand why.  I was confused as to why the baby would need ointment if he were a fairy.  What does the ointment do for the fairies as opposed to humans?

                                                                  Image source: mythfolklore.blogspot.com
                                                                           The cover of the book. 

Bibliography: English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1890)