In this folktale, a strange looking little old man asks a nurse to come to his house to help his sick wife look after their baby boy. The man’s wife gives the nurse some ointment to put on the baby’s eyes. Being curious, the nurse puts some of it on one of her own eyes. The family seemed normal enough up to this point. However, the ointment helps her to learn their secret. The nurse pays a heavy price for her actions when the old man finds out what she has done.
Fairy Ointment Original Text / PDF (803 words)
Our source was a children’s book called English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890. Jacobs’s source was the 1836 book The Tamar and the Tavy, which dealt with scenery, life and folklore in the area surrounding the Tamar and Tavy Rivers in Devon, England.
A similar story from Ireland, The Fairy Nurse, is recorded in Andrew Lang‘s Lilac Fairy Book, published in 1910. This version is longer and involves the rescue of a neighbor who had been kept prisoner by the pixies.
The Fairy Nurse Original Text / PDF (1,544 words)