Reflection: Whatever Happened To That Enchanted Ball of Yarn?

Leimomi Oakes - textile and fashion historian and seamstress,
in a Ramie (nettle linen) smock she created, based on the story
of the Wild Swans and historical research.

Note: Our Fairy Tale Newshound was doing some research last month and wandered down a rabbit hole, only to find newish information that put a well-loved tale in a different light. Here are her musings on The Six Swans, weaving shirts out of nettles and that enchanted ball of yarn we lose track of after the beginning of the tale. We thought you might enjoy the thread...

Whatever happened to that ball of enchanted yarn?

Was it made of nettle-fibers, spun fine as royal linen*?

Was its thread then woven to silence your brothers?

Was it the example left for unraveling the curses' sting?

Was it all of these?

(Gypsy Thornton - March 2018)

*Nettles have a fiber which, when extracted can make something like linen, only much finer, called Ramie. It was one of the main sources of plant fiber in Europe for most of history. Many garments thought to be linen are now being discovered as made from nettles! Raime is specifically made from stinging nettles – urtica dioica - though there are many kinds of non-stinging nettles too, which could be used. The pain from the stinging nettles is clearly important to the story though, so urtica dioica is the plant it likely was. Interestingly, people who work with these fibers seem to often refer to them as 'silk'.

Nadezhda Illarionova

In the Six Swans a king secretly hides his children, six boys and a girl, from his new queen, and can only find them by unraveling and following, an enchanted ball of yarn.

I got to thinking: what if that yarn-of-secrets was more key to the story than we've thought before? What if the yarn betrayed the hiding place one day to the jealous (aka evil) queen? What if that yarn was made of the finest quality at the time, which we now know would likely have been by using nettle fibers, and inspired a cascade of tragic events?

The witch-daughter-queen makes more balls of enchanted nettle-yarn, which not only is bound to the family so the King can find his children, but she then weaves it into fine, royal-linen-quality shirts? Shirts that look like priceless gifts but are also designed to be binding, transforming traps? Being so enchanted and family-bound, the shirts bind themselves to the actual forms of the princes as they put them on, cruelly changing them to become silent swans**. The unspoken family secret, once revealed, bites them in the back and becomes their compulsive silence.

But enchantment likes to work in circles...

It may be that those magicked, fine-threaded, nettle-yarn balls also held the key to the princess finding her brothers again and unbinding them from their curse**.

Of course it would make sense that to create the reverse of this spell it would have to be done in silence! And it makes sense that the princess would have (be given/gifted/discover!) a prototype of nettle-yarn on hand so she would know when she had beaten and refined the fibers of that spell enough for it to work.

So she would know when it was time to weave the shirts.

So she could be certain her spell would work.

So she would be reunited with her family, again.

But there's one more relevant bit of history for this story, and it's related to the bittersweet ending where the youngest prince is left with one swan's wing. It's one of the reasons this story pulls at our heartstrings so very much.

Apparently, there was a revival - of sorts - in creating ramie during the 1980's, that is, linen made from nettle fibers. The linen created was finer yet more durable than hemp and creased more precisely too. One of the concerns that reportedly came up was that nettle fibers were often so long and fine that they could become nearly invisible (!º) and could easily catch alight if they came close to an open flame.

In The Six Swans (and related tales) the Princess, (Elisa in The Wild Swans^), is hurriedly working on finishing the shirts on her way to be burned at the stake for witchcraft. (Full circle indeed!) We read the story as that the shirt for the youngest prince was unfinished and only had one sleeve, but perhaps it was less straightforward than that. Perhaps it was hurriedly done so the fibers weren't woven so well together as they ought to have been. Perhaps the sleeve hadn't reversed the curse weaving quite enough and perhaps the fibers, loosely woven on that final portion, hadn't yet been transformed themselves from the fine weavings of the not-easily-visible, to the weft of obviously a finished fabric form, and so that sleeve caught alight as it neared the flames.The undoing of the spell vanished in a puff of smoke, and the consequences of those loose threads remained forever.

Anna & Elena Balbusso

** Side note: in medicine of 'yore' and now, nettles are used to treat joint pain - something I imagine would be extremely prevalent in transformation! Nettles are also used to treat hay fever, bleeding, eczema and alopecia - all symptoms easily connected to transformation.
º Invisible thread?? That sounds like the inspiration for another tale. Or inspiration for the tricksters of another tale at least.
^And The Shape of Water! Consider this an Easter Egg. ;)

Sources used: 

• Nettle-A-Long, harvesting stinging nettle yarn
• Textile materials from the Stone Age (lots of pics!)
• The Dreamstress: A Smock of Nettles
• The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm - The Complete First Edition - Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm, Translated and edited by Jack Zipes/ Illustrated by Andrea Dezsö
• 5 Proven, Remarkable Stinging Nettle Benefits

Reader Spotlight: Tale Spinner Steve Shilstone

Editor's Note: Steve Shilstone is a long time writer and shares his lovely fairy tale flash fiction for free on his blog Fiddleeebod. This gentleman tells delightful tales and when I asked if he could share a personal story about his love for fairy tales, the story he sent me was no exception. Enjoy! (I've included links to his website, which also showcases his available books, below.)

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A Yellow Fairy Book Tale

by Steve Shilstone

There it is, offered for sale on ebay, a bargain at $400, an 1894 first edition copy of Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book. It is a much healthier twin to the battered and tattered volume I discovered on a shelf of my mother’s bookcase around 1954.

If memory serves (sometimes it does), I was 10 years old and searching for something to read. Down a row of books I went, pulling, examining, rejecting, putting back, until I came to a volume so worn and tired (used and loved) that the printing on the spine was unreadable. The cover, however, though faded, beckoned. Well, have a look at it. Enticing, no? And so, like Dorothy opening the door of her house after it landed on a witch in Oz, I opened the Yellow Fairy Book and proceeded to lose myself in tales of dragons, witch-maidens, a glass mountain, and the occasional nixy.

Plucking the book, long lost now, from that shelf remains among the clearest of my memory shards. How did it come to be there on that shelf? What was its story? I don’t know, but I can take a pretty good guess.

Once upon a time, in 1894 to be exact, a newspaperman brought home the newest Fairy Book from Andrew Lang to read to his daughters. The two girls were delighted, enchanted, and pretty much over the moon about it. The fact that their father had interviewed Sitting Bull was okay, but it rated low compared to the new fairy story book. Years passed, and the book found its way from Evanston, Illinois to Los Angeles, California and later to the Ojai ranch home of the older daughter when she married. Four children and a lot of use later, the book was the beloved property of my mother, the youngest of those four children. Oh, the places it went (a bow to the good Dr. Seuss) – Colorado, Kentucky, Colorado again, the state of Washington (where I plucked it from the shelf), and back to California. And then what happened to it? Lost in the shuffle of many a move? I suppose so.

I do own this:

And all the rest:

But it’s not quite the same, is it?

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I will admit to having serious book envy right now! The Lang Folio books are on my imaginary gift registry for my personal fairy tale anniversaries... Thank you for sharing Steve!

Steve's series, Bekka of Thorns (eight books in the chronicles to date), are available through Wild Child Publishing HERE and should you have need of a tale spinner, Steve can be contacted at: steve AT bekkaofthorns DOT com.

Steve Shilstone is an elderly fellow living on a mountain in California. He has distributed mail, coached baseball, painted pointilist pictures, worked in department store stockrooms, graduated with a degree in Anthropology from UCLA, and written many a tale. His fantasy blog, featuring several flash fairy tales, is HERE.

Vestal Review: Fairy Tales Redux

by Zoe Gilbert

I first read about this on the Twice Told Tales LJ but haven't seen mention of it anywhere so thought I would highlight it here.

Vestal Review is both an online and print magazine that is "the longest-running flash fiction magazine in the world".  The latest issue is free to read (though you can donate) and, happily for us, is all about fairy tales.

Vestal Review

Web Issue 41  Fairy Tales Redux

Winter 2012

Here's the editorial (reprinted with permission), describing what the issue is about, by Ania Vesenny:

According to Italo Calvino, fairy tales are a great example of quickness in literature. It is no surprise, then, that Vestal Review’s newest issue is devoted to fairy tales.  

When I was a child, I spent hours a day reading Charles Perrault and Hans Christian Andersen. Despite the often overwhelming sadness and tragedy that infused Andersen’s fairy tales, I re-read them, year after year, with the same delight.  

As I read fairy tales to my children, instead of the joy, I often experience annoyance. How cloying these old stories have become! Disney’s “Little Mermaid” is not the same tragic, but hauntingly beautiful and gentle story written by H. C. Andersen almost two hundred years ago. Though I cried when I read the original, I was enriched by those tears. Do centuries-old fairy tales have to be rewritten to have neatly-wrapped happy endings? I search for old editions and avoid anything abridged. 

I have to remind myself, though, that the storytellers of the past routinely altered the endings so that the tales remained relevant to their listeners. The modern versions, with their syrupy simplifications, do reflect significant themes in our society. When it comes to literature, we tend to guard young children from strong emotions.   

This issue of Vestal Review, however, returns to the tradition of fairy tales being told mostly for the benefit of adults. In addition to alternate endings, you will witness your favorite characters in modern context of obsession and celebrity adulation: characters previously silent are given voices, and details or experiences formerly obscured are brought to the forefront.  

It was a particular pleasure to read for this issue. I love fairy tales, after all. I hope that you, too, will enjoy these stories.

There's a chance you'll see a familiar name or two among the authors as well.

The contents are:

• Birds by Aimee Bender
• Cinderella's Two Minute Tell-All by Jason Nemec
• Mermaid by A. A> Balaskovits
• Growth Rings by Maia Harrison
• Surface Tension by Maia Harrison
• Talking to Srangers by Cynthia Larsen
• And the Rain Kept Falling by Steven Nordhauser
• All the Hansels and All the Gretels by Stephen Ornes

You can read the current Winter 2012 Fairy Tales Redux issue HERE.