For Valentine’s Day enjoyment, here is a fairy tale about forbidden love, The Gay Goshawk. It is a love story between an English lady and a Scottish Lord. They figure out a clever way to be together against her family’s approval, with the help of a goshawk.
It takes a true lady to deliver such a stinging ‘screw you!’ to the people who failed her. It’s interesting to see a father’s failure actually addressed for once, instead of being piled entirely onto the nearest stepmother. The Gay Goshawk is taken from Sorche Nic Leodhas’s collection Thistle and Thyme, which is full of young women figuring out how to get past stupid obstacles, but the sheer cunning of this Romeo and Juliet inversion is very hard to beat.
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