Fairy Tale Spotlight: A Legend of Bottle-Hill [Short Story Review]

[This blog completely spoils the story from beginning to end.]

"A Legend of Bottle-Hill" is a short Irish fairy tale written by T. Crofton Croker. I'm not particularly sure when it was first published, but it was likely somewhere in the 19th century.

I have actually covered a couple of Croker's works before. He's really quite good a weaving clever stories. This particular one has a "Jack and the Beanstalk" vibe to it, but without there being a beanstalk or a giant. The formula is still the same with a poor farmer trading a cow for a magical item.

In this case, the fairy offers the farmer a bottle for the cow, but he explains that the bottle is magical and will make him a rich man. The wife understandably is furious when he just comes home with a bottle, but it turns out to be the one thing they really needed. It pretty much provides them with everything they could ever want until they were all rich.

Stupidly, once the farmer gets a bit too complacent, he sells the bottle to the landlord for the ownership of the farm itself. This was dumb because he could have used the bottle to produce the money to simply buy it out right. He then spends money like mad and becomes poor again.

Whelp, it's time to sell another cow to a fairy to get another bottle! That's just what he sets out to do, and just like magic, he finds the fairy and gets a new bottle. What is this fairy doing with all these cows anyhow? Hmm.

Well, feeling pretty lucky, the farmer proceeds to activate the new bottle, but this time angry men pop out and beat the ever-loving crap out of the entire family before jumping back into the bottle. The farmer scrambles to get everyone help first and then he decides to pay the old landlord a visit.

Once he sees his old bottle that actually does the right sort of things, he activated the bad bottle so that the men pop out and begin beating up the landlord and his servants. The farmer says that the men will stop beating him up if he gives him his old bottle back, which the landlord agrees to so that he won't... I dunno... die?

And so the farmer and his wife live the rest of their lives rich and die happy. Shortly after their death, some servant accidently breaks the magic bottle, but I guess it served its purpose.

I totally recommend "A Legend of Bottle-Hill," for its cleverness and wit. I am really beginning to enjoy these T. Croker stories. They are a lot of fun to read.

This blog was written on June 26, 2023.

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