The knight travels all over the world. He travels high, he travels low, he travels near, he travels far. He asks lots of different people for their help, the old, the young, men and women. They all give him lots of different answers but none they can agree on. The knight has nearly run out of time and still hasn't got an answer to the question. He decides to return home, feeling very disappointed.
On his way home, the knight meets an old and ugly woman. The old woman tells the knight that she will give him the answer, but in return he has to agree any one thing she demands. The knight agrees and the old woman whispers the answer to him. He takes this answer back to the queen - "the thing that women want most in the world is to be able to have power over their husbands". Neither the queen nor any of the other women of the court disagrees, and so they accept the knight's answer.
The old woman appears at the court and makes her demand - the knight must marry her! The knight doesn't want to do this, but agrees to marry her because he promised he would repay her for helping him. On the night of their wedding, the knight and the old woman had an argument. He tells her she is old and ugly, but instead of getting upset she offers the knight one of two choices; she can either stay old and ugly and be faithful to him forever, or she can be young and beautiful and unfaithful. The knight cannot decide which one he wants, as he wouldn't be entirely happy either way. He tells his wife that she can decide. The old woman is delighted to hear this because he has let his wife have control over this decision - this is exactly what women want, to have control over their husbands. As a reward, the old woman transforms herself into a beautiful young lady and promises the knight that she will always be his forever, much to the his delight.
And so they live happily ever after.
Commentary
The purpose of this composition is relatively simple. I had to write a short fairy tale story that would entertain an audience consisting of three to five year olds. Although the task seems straightforward, writing a story to suit a group of pre-schoolers is not an easy feat. This is quite an adult storyBecause I have a much wider range vocabulary, it was quite a challenge to narrow down every word used into simplistics terms so that these young children can understand. For example, the knight in question was sentenced to death in the tale of "The Wife of Bath" for raping a young woman. Of course, I could not say this in a young children's fable, as they are far to young and naive to even contemplate the theory of rape. I also didn't want to create ideas which could influence a child's behaviour, i.e the subject of rape and a death sentence could possibly contribute to abusive behaviour towards their peers. In order to avoid dissension, I decided to be very vague at this point of the story and say that the knight simply did a bad thing and the king wanted to punish him for it. It is most likely that young children will fill in the blanks at this point and perceive that the wrong deed committed was something they themselves see as a bad thing, like stealing or another petty crime.
Because my target audience is so young, I have tried to stick to a certain type of sentence structure. I have mainly concentrated on using declarative sentences that just make simple statements - I thought that this would be best used in a children's story. Although it could be argued that using simple sentence structures would have been best for this target audience, I have been unable to do that. Instead I have used a mixture of compound and complex sentences. I am reasonably happy with this decision; had I used simple sentence structures it is most likely that the story would not have progressed. By using compound/complex sentences I am subconsciously developing the young child's understanding (well, somewhat anyway).
