While I was desperately knitting clue 3 of the Stephen West Mystery Knitalong so that I would be ready to knit Clue 4 (dropped this week), I was reminded of the fairy tale about the princess who had to rescue her six brothers from the swan form into which they had been turned by an evil witch, by gathering nettles at midnight from cemeteries and weaving them into six shirts, all the while without being able to speak. Long story short, she was subsequently married to the king who’s mother disliked the girl and persuaded him that she was a witch (all that hanging out in cemeteries collecting nettles). He reluctantly condemned her to be burned at the stake. As the smoke was rising from the wood, she was frantically sewing the sixth shirt and was rescued by the swans to whom she gave the shirts so they transformed back into men after which she was finally able to speak and tell her story. Obviously I do not have quite the same sense of urgency as I am not about to be burned at the stake, but I hope you might understand why the story came to mind.
I began to think about other fairy stories involving yarn. So far I have come up with Rumpelstiltskin (spinning straw into gold) and Sleeping Beauty, obviously, although it was more about the machine than the product. Then there is the tale (with variations) of the lazy girl who a king marries, believing her to be an amazing spinner and who is saved by three ugly women whose deformities come from too much spinning, so that when the king sees them, he forbids his new wife to ever spin again. I am not quite sure what the moral of that tale is. Further back we have the Greek myths – beginning with the Three Fates who spin the thread of our lives, measure it and cut it. There is the story of Arachne who stupidly claimed that she was a better weaver than the goddess Athene and ended up transformed into a spider. Homer tells us of Penelope who resisted re-marrying while her husband Odysseus was fighting the Trojan war (and cavorting with Calypso) by refusing to make a decision about who to marry until her weaving was finished. Of course she wove during the day and unravelled it every night for twenty years and amazingly no-one realised what she was doing. There is also the story of Ariadne who helped Theseus escape from the Labyrinth by giving him a ball of yarn to unwind behind him. (As a side note, I see that there is a bit of a trickster element to all these stories – an association between spinning and cleverness?). Of course spinning was such an important part of women’s lives for so long – after all you have to spin before you can create most fabrics – that it is not surprising that it is woven into the tales we tell. I do wonder now how many children hearing those stories today have the faintest idea about the skills involved. I will say that my desire to learn to spin has one hundred percent come from my reading of fairy tales and myths, but I am probably a bit unusual in that respect.
I was going to have a look into Marina Warner’s excellent book From the Beast to Blonde to remind myself (after nearly 40 years) what she has to say about these stories from a feminist perspective, but luckily for all of you, my daughter has taken it to university with her. I seem to recall that part of her thesis was that fairy tales were originally told by women to girls and may well have been a teaching tool. I quite like the idea that they may have been teaching girls to be a little bit clever, dare I say it, even devious, rather than just to be perfectly behaved wives and mothers.
It is interesting to note that West Yorkshire Spinners have chosen to call their most recently launched yarn Fable (the accompanying pattern book is called Folklore and contains some wonderful patterns designed collaboratively by Debbie Bliss and Chloe Elizabeth Birch). I cannot emphasise enough how soft and fluffy this yarn is, made as it is from British wool, mohair and alpaca. We also have the lovely Laine Publishing’s book Knitted Kalevala (I and II) which contain beautiful patterns based on Finnish mythology. No matter how modern we think we are, when it comes to hand crafts we do seem to find ourselves drawn back to myths and fairy tales and the old skills which were once so valued. Or as Jenna Kostet puts it:“Most knitters would agree that crafting increases your happiness. Even if we aren’t rune singers, we are still part of an endless chain of tradition.”
