We see a lot of spinning in fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty pricks her finger on a spindle or spinning wheel, Rumplestiltskin spins gold for helpless a girl, the girl in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” uses a golden spinning wheel to win her husband’s freedom…you get the idea.
Every culture had spinning, and even today spinning is still a requirement for cloth. It’s simply done by machines now. But before industrialization, spinning was the work of women all across the world. You couldn’t have clothing without cloth, cloth without thread, and thread without women spinning it into existence from raw materials like wool or flax.
So how was it portrayed in fairy tales? I think you’d be surprised at the range of opinions you can find in fairy tales across the world. Some, like “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” gives spinning a good reputation. Some portray spinning as a bad thing fraught with consequences, like in “Sleeping Beauty.” And others, like “The Three Spinning Women” or “Tarandandò,” making spinning and its consequences sound downright ugly.
So what is the truth? Let’s take a look at some of these fairy tales and see what the good, the bad, and the ugly is.
But first, a very brief overview of the nature of spinning and its history. Spinning is the process — art, really — of twirling a fluffy material like wool or flax into threads. For most of history up until the Industrial Revolution this was done with a drop spindle, a thin stick often with a circular sort of weight on one end, and a distaff, a bigger stick that you would tie your raw materials to. A spinner would simultaneously pull sections of raw material away from the bunch and spin the drop spindle so it would twist the threads.
Later the spindle was attached to a stand containing a wheel and thin ropes connected the wheel and spindle so when you turned the wheel, the spindle would turn as well. This was called a great wheel or a walking wheel. This spinning wheel idea was modified and improved over time with little pulley systems and such so the spindle would revolve more with each turn of the wheel, which allowed the spinning wheel to be made smaller and more portable, as well as more efficient.
Buuut as you can see, even the master spinners had their work cut out for them. Spinning was a tedious, time-consuming job, and even though it looks like it makes a lot of thread, remember this thread isn’t meant for stitching cloth together or embroidering. The majority was meant to be woven into cloth. So there had to be a lot of thread.
It’s assumed by many scholars that women spun yarn and thread less as a daily chore and more as something they just picked up every time they had a moment. Drop spindles could be kept in a pocket, and a distaff could be tucked under your arm and into your belt, so you could spin and walk at the same time. Or you would spin while taking breaks from other jobs, and use these moments to share stories with one another.
Is it any surprise that some of these stories were the fairy tales we know and love? Or that spinning often finds a place in these old wives’ tales?
Because it was a daily task of women, in stories it’s equated almost entirely with women’s labor and work effort. Though women did other things, like cooking, laundering, field work, raising families, etc, spinning is most often seen as the main chore or job of a woman in these stories, and many tapestries and illuminations make spinning out to be a gentle, almost pious job of a woman. Even Eve and the Virgin Mary are depicted as spinning in some illustrations.
But is it all it’s cracked up to be?
The Good
In some stories, spinning is a saving event. In fact, spinning, at first, seems to bring good luck or good fortune to women. In some of the Rumplestiltskin stories we looked at last week, spinning (or the illusion of it) brought women rich husbands. Assuming they completed their spinning tasks. This was likely because an industrious spinner was an industrious woman as a whole.
But there are other stories were spinning plays an almost entirely positive role in the story. In “Spindle, Shuttle, and Needle,” the poorest girl in the village catches the eye of a passing prince. He seeks a wife who is both the richest and the poorest, so asks around the village who the richest and poorest girl is. The richest stands on her doorstep for him to pass in all her finery, but the poorest sits in her house, spinning thread, and is surprised when the prince arrives. But she continues to spin, and he leaves.
She sings to her tools to fetch her beloved, and the spindle leaps from her hands to catch the prince, leaving a trail of thread for him to follow, the shuttle weaves a fine carpet for him to walk on, and the needle cleans up and dresses the house in fine velvets and silks. The prince claims she is both richest and poorest and marries her.
So in this case, the implements of spinning and textiles sort of convey a good luck message. “Continue your spinning,” they seem to say, “and you will find a good husband and a good life.” Which is nice, but the story really makes me long for magic tools to clean and dress my house for me.
In “The Golden Spinning Wheel,” the younger and more hardworking of two identical daughters continues to spin and do all the work. Her mother sells her yarn to buy fancy dresses and things for her favorite daughter, the lazier one. When a prince stops by for water, he falls in love with the younger daughter, and asks her mother if he can marry her. The mother agrees, yet in an act of brutality she and the older daughter cut off her hands, feet, and gouge out her eyes, and replace her with the older daughter. They bring the younger girl’s limbs with them to the palace. The prince doesn’t suspect a thing, marrying the older daughter one day and leaving for war the next.
An old hermit or magician finds and nurses the younger daughter back to health, and sends his boy to procure her missing limbs by sending him to sit outside with golden spinning tools. First a spindle, then a distaff, then a wheel. He can only sell them for a pair of hands, a pair of feet, and a pair of eyes. The older daughter unwisely trades these things with him to obtain the items, and the younger daughter is restored back to normal.
When the prince returns home, he asks his wife to spin for him, so she sits at the spinning wheel, but when she begins to turn the wheel, it sings of her and her mother’s treachery. The prince rescues his true beloved and the evil mother and daughter are thrown to the wolves.
I just love the imagery of the spinning wheel speaking truth through a song, and that someone else’s spinning saves the day. Take that, murderesses. Outed by a pretty spinning wheel.
You see this again, briefly, in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” In her journey to find her husband, who has been torn from her after she sought his true appearance, a young woman receives a golden apple, golden carding comb, and golden spinning wheel. She uses each of these outside the palace of the sorceress or ogress who plans to marry her husband, so that when the evil princess sees them she will ask for a trade. The woman trades one night with her husband for each item, eventually saving him.
Some women just can’t resist a golden spinning wheel. I mean, it’s made of gold. I wouldn’t resist either.
The Bad
Sometimes spinning is a dangerous job, or it brings bad luck or misfortune. This is a sharp contrast to the motifs in the stories we just looked at, where spinning actually brings good things.
The most famous of examples is Sleeping Beauty. In Charles Perrualt’s version and in the Brothers Grimm version, a baby princess is cursed to prick herself on a spindle and die. In fear, the king orders all spinning spindles and wheels and similar to be burned and never seen again.
Which, considering that’s how cloth was made, seems like a bad omen in the first place. Did everyone just wear the same outfit for sixteen years? Probably.
It’s suggested in a lot of circles that this imagery of pricking her finger is sexual, or representative of a young girl’s first bleeding, either menstrual or from first sex, and the king just wants to keep his young daughter from maturing into a woman. Which still sounds really awful. Overprotective parent much?
There are a few other times where spinning is dangerous, and not just in the “one hundred year coma” way either.
In “Frau Holle,” a young girl spins every day, only to accidentally cut her hand on the spindle. When she goes to wash the blood away, she drops the spindle down the well. Outraged, her stepmother orders her to retrieve it, and when she tries, she tumbles down the well and wakes in Frau Holle’s realm, who orders her to do her chores for a while. Granted, it all works out in the end, because Holle’s just trying to reward hard work with gold (literally the girl walks home covered in gold), but still. Spinning seems to be kind of hard on the hands.
Speaking of hard on the hands, can you imagine spinning stinging nettles? That’s what the heroine of the “Six Swans” story has to do to save her six brothers from being swans forever. She has to sew together shirts of nettles. It’s unclear if she just sews together nettle leaves into shirts (which had to be torture) or if she turned the nettle plants into thread (which is possible, still slightly painful).
But if we assume the thread route, in order to make these shirts she has to gather the nettles, strip the leaves, dry the stalks, rip up the dried stalks, extract the fibers inside, comb them out, beat them into softness, and then spin them into thread. It is possible, but it must have been murder on the hands not only to deal with all the nettle leaves, but to have to condition the fibers into the softness necessary to make thread.
It worked out again for her and her brothers, though. Mostly. All six shirts were completed…except one sleeve. So one unlucky brother kept a swan wing instead of an arm.
So it looks like spinning and sewing is sometimes bad for guys, too. Sometimes physically but also because spinning might turn their wives ugly.
The Ugly
That’s right. Spinning can make you ugly. And if there’s anything a fairy tale man prefers over a hardworking, industrious woman, it’s a beautiful one.
Well, there are some exceptions to that rule, but those are tales for another day.
The point is, for all the lauding of spinning and what it means for women, showing how good they are, being productive members of the household and society despite the dangers of the evil spindle and its sharp points…it can apparently make you ugly. If you can avoid it at all costs, do.
Talk about a mixed message. Is spinning good for you and your moral character, or isn’t it?
Well, some stories suggest you ought to avoid spinning altogether. In “The Three Spinning Women,” a lazy girl is berated by her mother for being lazy, but when a queen passes by and asks why the mother yells so, the mother says her daughter has spun away all her flax and they’re too poor to buy more. The queen is impressed with this and bids the daughter spin for her, and marry her son.
The girl doesn’t know how to spin, but she’s not about to tell the queen that. So she goes with her and sees the rooms full of flax and weeps because the task is impossible. Then she spies three rather ugly-looking women, one with a giant foot, one with a stretched and large lower lip, and one with a broad finger or thumb. They greet her and ask her why she cries. She explains that she must spin three rooms full of flax, and they agree to do the work for her if she invites them to her wedding and doesn’t scorn them. When all is said and done, they arrive at the wedding, and the prince, now the girl’s husband, asks where their deformities came from.
Of course, they explain it’s from peddling the spinning wheel, licking the flax threads to smooth the thread, and twisting the thread as it goes on the spindle. The prince is alarmed and insists his wife never spin again. So, of course, she doesn’t.
Similar things happen in “Tarandandò,” which we glimpsed last week. After being assisted in spinning a large quantity of material, the girl invites her aunt over and her aunt hides a super gross dead chicken filled with blood and grease under her arm, and squeezes it when she meets the husband so it all drips to the floor. Horrified, he asks what caused her ailment, and she blames spinning. So the young wife never has to spin again. And if she’s not dead, she’s still living lazily forth, as the story says.
So is spinning good or bad?
The answer is…both? Spinning thread was literally so integral to the lives of literally everyone that some cultures, like the Vikings in Iceland, used cloth as a form of currency. A girl or woman who spun constantly provided the necessary materials needed for her family to be clothed during their lives. And it could even be an important social factor, like quilting bees, except more vital. We get the idea of “spinning tales” from this image of women exchanging stories and gossip as they spun thread and yarn.
So for some, a woman who didn’t spin was both lazy and useless, as well as possibly a sort of social outcast in some cases. A woman who did spin was a productive member of society.
So why pluck these productive members of society away and make them rich women who never had to spin again? The messages get muddled in these stories. I think it’s because that happy ending we see in fairy tales is always a sort of paradise where someone never has to work again. They become princes and princesses, kings and queens, living comfortable lives where, we assume, they’re waited on day in and day out so they can enjoy other amusements. It’s the perfect and impossible sort of life we all wish for.
So is it good to be productive, or good to be rich and lazy? I think it’s a matter of perspective and who is telling the story.
I think, in a way, spinning is most often a representation of the road to social and physical maturity. These girls spin until they’ve obtained husbands, and once they’re married their roles change to focus on wife and mother. Spinning becomes a maiden’s role, and if you do that well enough you will eventually be rewarded with the “better” roles of wife and mother. Hopefully a rich wife and mother.
It’s a bit of an antiquated thought, but marriage often meant financial stability, protection, warmth, and comfort for women. All simply because women didn’t have as much agency in a lot of ways, at least in western cultures where a lot of these tales come from. So spinning becomes this idea of women proving themselves ready for the next step, proving themselves worthy of that reward of stability, protection, and comfort.
Is that good or right? That’s debatable, and we will continue to debate the agency of women in all sorts of literature from now until…forever, I guess. It’s such a big topic that I’ll probably only touch on it in case by case bases, with individual stories.
But for now, I think spinning is meant to be this sort of mixed message conundrum. It’s so intrinsically tied with the journey of women (which we women know is a mixed bag of experiences anyway) it can hardly be diminished to one simple interpretation. I kind of like that.
What do you think? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below! We love hearing from you.