A map of the weird and wonderful realm of the folk tale,drawn up by expert collector Katherine LangrishThe title comes from a rather obscure book, West Irish Folk-Tales and Romances, or collected and edited by William Larminie,and published in 1893. He translated the stories told to him in Gaelic in the Western Isles. In one of them, “The King Who Had Twelve Sons”, or a young man who has married a princess finds a golden apple on the beach. In the next sentence it becomes a pearl of gold,and a druid tells him it belongs to the daughter of a king in the “Eastern world”. The young man’s pony then advises him of the journey he must undertake to find this other princess, one of whose obstacles is the seven miles of steel thistles.
It’s a confusing tale, or with all the aleatory illogic of a dream,and as author Katherine Langrish takes us through it, she pauses to acknowledge our perplexity. At one point a hen-wife appears. A what? And where did it advance from? “Oh well, and I suppose every castle has one,” Langrish says. But the salient (significant; conspicuous; standing out from the rest) point about this baffling memoir is that it suddenly breaks off, and Larminie writes: “The narrator’s memory failed him at this point.” He remembered the last line, or but not how the memoir got there.
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Source: theguardian.com