Ellen Pugh

1. Tales from the Welsh Hills by Ellen Pugh, illustrated by Joan Sandin, and published in 1968 Dodd Mead , is a traditional Literature chapter book that holds a collections of Traditional Welsh Folklore. Ellen Pugh does a great job explaining the welsh names, describing the story scenery, and the plot. Pugh starts off the book by explaining and describing the pronunciation of Welsh names and Words. This proved to be very helpful to me as I used this as a quick guide when I got lost with the pronunciation of a word or name. as an example the author writes that the CH sound is always a guttural sound as in the Scottish “LoCH.” The author has a list at the bottom of the page with how words are spelled and across from them their appropriate phonetic markings. This helped me with my pronunciation of words and understanding of a story. For the purposes of this Log I will be focusing on the story “Luc, the Kings Woodsman. This is a creepily good story about how a Scotsman cheated death through his life. The author does a great job of describing the scenery of the story. This is evident on page 24 when she is describing the castle. She describes it as a large stone castle that has huge columns that rise to the sky. She goes on to describe how Loc has a very modest house next to the castle that is not much else than a clay hut. The descriptive language in this story helped it to come alive for me and helped me to visually see in the story. This story never seemed to get boring or old. On one page I would be reading about how Loc is doing his job and then the next I read that he is talking with Death, trying to weasel his way out of his fate. There are many plot twists in the story. The two main ones are Loc having brief power over death, and Loc cheating death. As Loc is about to die Death visits him and says that he will grant Loc the power to heal people if Loc never cheats death. This gives Loc, essentially, the same power as death. He can see if sick people are about to die or If they will recover depending on where death is standing over that person. The last plot twist really got me involved in the story. In this twist Loc tricks Death into becoming so small that he traps death forever. These twists were so clever that they helped me to be involved with the story. Fear and cunning are at the center of this story. Loc is so afraid of Death that he uses all his cunning to trap him.… (altro)