Having spent time in Italy, he was capable of producing translations of tales from "Pentamerone" or "The Nights of Straparola" in "Fairy Mythology", and he struck up a friendship with the patriarch of the Rossetti household. Thomas claimed to be literate in twenty-odd languages and dialects in all, and published a number of translations and digests of medieval and foreign works and passages, often sparsely treated elsewhere in the English language, including the expanded prose versions of "Ogier the Dane" which conveys the hero to Morgan le Fay's Fairyland, or Swedish ballads on nixes and elves, such as "Harpans kraft" ("Power of the Harp") and "" ("Sir Olof in Elve-Dance").