Reading Notes: English Fairy Tales, Part A

English Fairy Tales Unit from the UN-Textbook
(http://mythfolklore.blogspot.com/2014/03/myth-folklore-unit-english-fairy-tales.html)

Visual of a skein

This unit begins with a woman making five pies in her kitchen with her daughter and when the mother took the all of the pies out of the oven she noticed that they all had been overcooked. Because of this, the pies all had too hard of crusts to eat, so the mother told her daughter to go and set the pies up on the nearby shelf so that they could go soft over time. The daughter instead decides that since the pies were going to eventually soften up then surely she could eat them now despite their hard crusts. After only a moment the daughter ate up all five pies with their hard crusts and it was not until dinner that the girl's mother called her to bring a pie as they likely had softened up by now. When the daughter went to go check the shelf that her mother told her to set each of the pies on, she looked and saw only the five plates that they were supposed to be on top of. She turned to her mother and lied to her saying that none of the pies had softened up yet to save herself. The mother decided she was going to have one of the pies regardless of the softness of the crust, and the daughter finally cracked telling the mother that she had in fact eaten all of the pies. The mother began to spin around and sing that her daughter had eaten the five pies. The king was heading down the street and overheard the singing only to ask her if he could marry her daughter. His only caveat was that she had to spin five skeins everyday or he would have her killed. The daughter did get to enjoy the high life until it came time to make the five skeins until an imp came to try and help, but was eventually banished with a simple rhyme.