Tom Tit Tot & Sequel: The English ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ Folktale
About this ebook
In this classic English folktale, our heroine eats too many pies - which leads to her marrying a king who only wants her for her skills as a spinster - which leads to her making a deal with a diminutive, magical creature in order to save her life! Can she guess the name of her helper in time? Or will he succeed in claiming her as his own?
The sequel, ‘The Gipsy Woman’, is set a year later and finds the queen once more charged with the task of spinning five skeins, daily, for a month. Help arrives in the form of a gipsy woman but can she be trusted?
This book contains two versions of the each tale: one in modern day English, and the other, as told originally, in the dialect of East Anglia.
[Folklore Type: ATU-500 (The Name of the Helper)]About the author
Anna Walter Thomas (1839-1920) was an English linguist, poet, and educator. The daughter of Thomas Fison by his second wife, Charlotte, she was the youngest of his twenty children. Born on 14 February 1839 at Barmingham, Suffolk, she was educated in London, at Cheltenham, and on the continent. She went to live with one of her brothers at Oxford, and became proficient in the Classics and a number of modern languages, and took an interest in Welsh.
In 1871, Anna married David Walter Thomas, a Welsh clergyman who was instrumental in founding a Welsh church in the Welsh settlement of Argentina. They had three daughters and two sons, one of whom was the priest and scholar, Evan Lorimer Thomas. Anna threw herself into Welsh life, holding night classes for the local quarreymen, and was instrumental in aiding many of them pursuing their studies further. She also competed in eisteddfodau (Welsh festivals of music, literature, and performance), and at the National Eisteddfod in Cardiff in 1883, she won the prize for a poem (in English).
In 1884, Anna was a candidate for the chair of Modern Languages at the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and was nearly elected. She died on 12 February 1920 and was buried at Holyhead.
Rachel Louise Lawrence is a British author who translates and adapts folk and fairy tales from original texts and puts them back into print, particularly the lesser-known British & Celtic variants.
Since writing her first story at the age of six, Rachel has never lost her love of writing and reading. A keen wildlife photographer and gardener, she is currently working on several writing projects.
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