Essay for Week 11: Imagination

In the unit that I read for this week, Celtic Fairy Tales, I found that many of the stories lacked a lot of background knowledge. This made that a bit more difficult to follow, which I was not a big fan of. The missing background knowledge did have one advantage, however. It made the storytelling assignment much easier. Without the information for why something was occurring in the story, it was easier for me as a reader and writing to imagine some elaborate story for why someone was placed in a certain position. An example of this is in the story Andrew Coffey. The story seemed to be some weird dream that the main character, Andrew, was having that included a man that everyone thought was dead, the demand that Andrew tell a story, and a wildly random adventure. What we are not given in the story is what Andrew's connection with the man was and why he so desperately wanted to hear a story from Andrew. We also are not told anything about the four men that catch the man everyone thought was dead and hang him up over a fire to be roasted. It was completely random and hard to follow, but since I am always looking for a story to retell for the storytelling post, having these open ended questions allowed me to imagine the crazy background stories for each of these characters.  Another example is in the story Brewery of Eggshells. We are given no information on why the woman in the story has her twin children taken away from her and replaced by goblin twins that do not physically change, but can intellectually grow. We also are not told why the goblin children have this strange physical restriction, but can still show a level of intellect well beyond their years.

Overall, I thought that this unit was much more interesting than the previous unit because it allowed more room for imagination for myself as a reader.

(The Creative Brain. Web Source: Video Documentary)