“The Young Giant”
There once was a farmer who had a son no
bigger than his thumb. (That must have been common thing back then: “Tom Thumb” and “TomThumb’s Travels.”) One day, after the boy cried that he
wanted to go with him, the farmer took him out into the field. A giant came along and picked up the boy and
carried him off.
The giant suckled the boy for two years
and the boy grew. The giant took the boy
out into the forest and the boy was able to pull a small tree out of the
ground. The giant wasn’t satisfied and
suckled him for two more years. After
that, the boy was strong enough to pull an old tree out of the ground. The giant still wasn’t happy and suckled the
boy for another two years. After that,
the boy was able to tear the strongest oak out of the ground without any
trouble.
The giant was happy and took the boy back
to the field of his father. The father
didn’t think this giant man was his son, but the boy told his father to go home
and have his mother fix a large meal. He
then plowed the field by hand.
He went home ate all of his parent’s food,
but that barely satisfied him. So he
figured he would need to go on his own. He
asked his father for an iron staff that he could not break across his knee. His father goes to the blacksmith and comes
home with even bigger and stronger iron staffs – the final one requiring eight
horses to pull – but the son breaks them all.
So the son goes to apprentice for a
blacksmith to make a staff himself. But
instead of being paid, all he asked was to give the blacksmith three blows. The blacksmith was greedy, and was happy to
not have to pay someone. That is, until
he saw how strong the boy was when he drove the anvil into the ground. To “pay” him for his little bit of work, the
blacksmith let him give him a small kick, which sent him over a field. The boy then grabbed the biggest iron bar and
left.
He came to a farm and asked to be a
servant, again asking for no wages but to give the bailiff three blows. So the next morning, all the servants went out
to cut firewood, but the boy slept in, saying he would get wood but still be
back before all of them. When he finally
woke, he ate a leisurely breakfast, then went to the wood. At one point, he barricaded the road. He passed the other servants taking their
loads of firewood back. He ripped two
trees out of the ground and loaded them up.
The other servants were stopped at the barricade, and the boy just
carried his horse and wagon over it so he made it back before them.
When it came time to be paid, the bailiff
was afraid and tried to work out of the deal. He asked for a short delay and the boy agreed. After talking it over with some people, the
bailiff asked the boy to clean out the well. When the boy was down there, they rolled a
millstone in on top of him, but it didn’t bother boy. The bailiff then asked him to go to a haunted
mill and grind some corn at night. The
boy went to the mill and that night, a table, chairs, and food just walked in. The boy joined in the meal. But afterwards, the candles went out and
something hit him on the ear. This
continued, so the boy returned all the blows that came to him.
He survived the night, and this cleared up
the haunting, somehow. He took the
milled corn back to the bailiff and asked to give him the blows. The bailiff couldn’t think of another way to
distract him and the boy kicked him off into the air. He then kicked the bailiff’s wife, and the two
are floating in the air somewhere.
And the boy picked up his iron bar and
left. The end.
#
No comments:
Post a Comment