All Knowledge is within the LJ-mind (or at least, within bookshelf-reach)

[lagilman]

I need examples of fairy tales wherein Human, despite warnings, make a deal with the fairy-folk and then reneges on it...

(to clarify -- I'm looking for stories where humans try to trick the fey/back out of a deal -- and fail.)

The more obscure and/or bloody, the better.

Comments

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

There's the Myddfai one:

Fairy woman comes out of lake, with cow dowry.

Falls in love with bloke.

Tells bloke she'll marry him and all her cows etc will be his as long as he never strikes her three times.

Bloke does in fact strike her three times - once a tap on the shoulder when she laughs during a funeral, another tap when she cries at a wedding, and once when she faffs about over the baby just as they're about to go out.

http://www.hiraeth.com/alan/misc/gott-nov97/myddfai.html

Don't think it is very gory: she just goes back to the lake.

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

Focusing primarily on the more or less Celtic "fae" -- can you get hold of a copy of Katharine Briggs' amazing book An Encyclopedia of Fairies? At the back of that book, she has a good topical index that she calls "motifs." There's a big section on taboos, things as simple as silence violated, or not dismounting a horse before some condition has been met (the King Herla legend), to much more vicious things, like speaking ill of the fair folk or calling them by name.

[lagilman]

Yeah, I have that book (and many others). I'm looking beyond the basics, for something that might have some new meat to it, which means probably told-me-down stories rather than collated ones.

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

Okie doke. Nothing comes immediately to mind, other than maybe mining current urban legend sources.

[quietselkie.livejournal.com]

Me again...not that I'm obsessed or anything...maybe look into some of the Appalachian legends as collected by Manly Wade Wellman, or in some of the early Foxfire books?

[mt-yvr.livejournal.com]

I've got a Scottish story at home, that I can't remember the title of, that involves a farmer's fight with the Sidhe that he loses, in the end. The story is half about him and half about his son come to find him on the side of a mountain where he's been imprisoned. There's a walking giant of stone and chains and things like the tithe of land to the Sidhe... it's all very interesting.

But I don't remember it clearly. Sadly.

The Haunted Mountain by Mollie Hunter. I can't find out, through the net so far, if it had folklore sources for the story or not. It always struck me as a good story, though, and it fits the sort of idea you're looking for. However, I'm not sure it's all that outside the normal range for people, it just was for me. I have a copy and it's the only copy I've ever seen of the book. One of those once in a lifetime books.

Sorry couldn't be more help.

[roseaponi.livejournal.com]

There's an odd one in Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales called the Little Folks' Presents about a goldsmith and a tailor who joined a party of "little folk" and were given coal that turned into gold. When the goldsmith got greedy and tried to do it again the next night, he woke up the next morning bald, with a hump on his front in addition to the one on his back,and all his gold had turned into coal.

I'll go through my books and see if there are any more.

[brownkitty.livejournal.com]

Does it have to be specific tales, or can it be the general "This is how to treat a brownie, this is how they didn't treat the brownie right, and the brownie went psycho" kind of thing?

[mikaela-l.livejournal.com]

I can think of several from swedish folklore. some sad, some funny, some gross. I'll look it up when I get back home next week.

[deza.livejournal.com]

The Irish Midwife--midwife is carried to barrow mound to assist a sidhe woman give birth. While there, she spies a jar of magic ungent and dabs it on one eye. This gives her second sight in that eye. Later, at a county fair, she sees several sidhe and bows to them. They realize she stole the sight from them, and gouge out her eye.