Just back from a cracking wee trip where we were enraged by environmental vandalism, eaten by many many flying and crawling insects, had some quality hill time and slept in very clever lightweight sleeping bags that will get launched in Friedrichshafen in a couple of weeks.
Plenty to talk about, so I’ll start with the Legend of the Jellyfish. The Jellyfish was originally a real fish, but with legs, and this is truncated as much as possible, it was tricked by the dragon king in going to the jungle to bring back a monkey so that the dragon queen could eat its liver because she was “sad”.
The monkey wasn’t daft, it got out of the deal and the Jellyfish went home monkeyless. The dragon king was raging and ordered his men to beat the Jelly fish and break every bone in his body, which they did.
The Jellyfish was horribly mutilated, right down to DNA level and that’s where the present jellyfish come from. They gloss over the whole initial breeding partner bit.
The good news was that the dragon queen was much amused by all this and felt much better.
This is from one of my fairytale books which we found at my folks and now terrify Holly with. The tone of the stories are a little different to current versions, possibly due to being written by someone fresh back from a tour in ‘Nam.
The illustrations are brilliant and fit the publishing date of 1969 very well. The whole thing makes current kids stuff look like the beige adventure it really is.
Any chance you could tell us the title and author?
My First Colour Book Of Fairy Tales, published by Purnell in 1969.
How I originally missed this comment I do not know, thanks to a WordPress update it sprung up again!