This Scottish fairy tale has three stories within it and it is said to have been told to John Francis Campbell by a blind fiddler named James Wilson.
The story follows Conall who must tell a king tales of times he has been in trickier and trickier spots in order to save the lives of his sons. In the first tale, Conall is chased by a band of singing cats until he hides up a tall tree. The leader of the band is a fox-coloured, one-eyed cat who orders them to dig at the tree's roots. When Conall cries out, a passing priest and his men hear and come to look. They see the cats attacking the tree and attack the cats and they all fight until they are all dead and Conall can escape. In the second tale, Conall is caught by a one-eyed giant. Conall pretends he can cure a one-eyed giant & instead blinds him. He then tricks the giant by wearing the skin of the giant's much-loved buck in order to escape his cave. The giant throws him a ring as a reward for his steadfastness but when Conall puts it on, he asks, 'Where are you, ring?' and the ring answers, 'Here I am'. The giant follows the sound, but Conall cuts of his finger with the ring and throw it into a deep loch. The giant follows the sound again, leaps into the water and drowns. In the third story, Conall must trick cannibal giant in order to save the life of a baby. He must then use the giant's own weapon to kill him, and stabs him in the one-eye he has in the centre of his face. Conall then gets the mother and baby back to safety. The King's mother then announces that she was the woman and the baby was the King. Conall's sons are freed and he is rewarded with riches and returns home to his wife. Sources: 'Conall Cra Bhuidhe' by John Francis Campbell in Popular Tales of the West Highlands. Illustration by John D. Batten for Joseph Jacob's collection Celtic Fairy Tales (1892).
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In ‘The Girl without Hands’ collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, a careless father thinks he is promising the devil an apple tree but accidentally promises his daughter instead. When the Devil comes to claim the girl, he find she is so free of sin that he cannot take her. The Devil threatens to take the father unless he cuts off his daughter's hands, so the father does so. But the daughter is so morally pure that when she weeps on her stumps, it keeps them clean and the Devil still cannot take her. The girl leaves her father's home and with the help of an angel, manages to get fruit from a royal garden to eat. The second time she does this, she meets the King and they marry. As a gift, the king has a pair of silver hands made for his wife. The couple are expecting a child when the king must leave for battle. When the baby is born, a message is sent to him with the good news. However, the Devil swaps the note so it instead says that the baby is a changeling. Receiving this note, the King says that they shall keep and care for the baby all the same, but the Devil swaps this message so that it orders his wife and child to be expelled from the castle. The King's mother helps her daughter-in-law and the child escape. The angel leads her to a remote cottage in the woods and also restores her real hands to her. When the King returns from war he realises the trick played on them and searches for his wife and child. He stumbles across the remote cottage but at first does not recognise his wife, for her hands have been restored. Only when she shows him the silver pair which she no longer has a use for does he believe her, then they return home to live happily ever after. Many of the early illustrations of this tale depict the maiden's hands concealed behind her back because it was thought too gruesome to show children.  The Girl Without Hands by Philipp Grot Johann (1892).
Seven league boots allow the wearer to move seven leagues with each step. Little Thumbling steals these boots from an ogre. When he puts them on, they shrink to fit him and he uses them much like a magical mobility aid to make his family's fortune.
Sources: Hop-o'-My-Thumb (or Little Thumbling) by Charles Perrault (1697). Image: Gustave Doré 1862.
In the 1698 French fairy tale, The Green Serpent, a princess is cursed to be the ugliest woman alive and a prince is cursed to be a hideous dragon. This story explores the stigma of visible difference (even from those who have experienced such stigma themselves). It features characters of varied appearances and abilities, and references the adaptations made to accommodate them. The tale begins: 'Once upon a time there was a great Queen, who, on giving birth to twin daughters, invited twelve fairies, residing in her neighbourhood, to come and see them, and endow them, as was the custom in those days,—and a very convenient custom too, for the power of the fairies generally made up the deficiencies of nature, though it certainly did sometimes spoil what nature had done her best to make perfect.' The mother invites twelve fairies to a celebratory feast but forgets to invite Magotine who arrives and curses one child to be the ugliest person alive. Other fairies intervene before the second child can be cursed. The children are subsequently named, Laideronnette (the ugly one) and Bellotte (the Pretty one. Laideronnette voluntarily retreats to a remote tower and grows up there. When roaming in the surrounding land she meets a talking dragon and is terrified of him. The dragon says: 'You would fear me less if you knew me better.' However, even when Laideronnette is on a boat drifting out to sea and in risk of drowning, she refuses the dragon's help. She wakes up on the shore of a faraway land. The dragon is the cursed king of this land but the Laideronnette does not know this. Admiring the beauty of her surroundings, she leaves to see the view from her balcony and then hears a noise from her room. 'She re-entered it, and saw advancing towards her a hundred Pagods, formed and dressed in a hundred different fashions. The tallest were about a cubit in height, and the shortest not above four inches,—some beautiful, graceful, and agreeable; others hideous, alarmingly ugly. Their bodies were of diamonds, emeralds, rubies, pearls, crystal, amber, coral, porcelain, gold, silver, brass, bronze, iron, wood, and clay; some without arms, others without feet, others had mouths extending to their ears, eyes all askew, broken noses; in a word, there is not more variety amongst all the creatures that inhabit the world than there was amongst these pagods. The pagodines say they her every whim will be catered to if she only remains with them and they bring her gifts in baskets 'proportioned to their own size' and they play instruments similarly adapted to their size: 'Some had theorbos made out of nut-shells—others, bass-viols made out of almond-shells; for it was, of course, necessary that the instruments should be proportioned to the size of the performers. But everything was so perfect, and harmonized so completely, that nothing could surpass the delight experienced at their concerts.' She marvels the kindness of her reception: "I was on the brink of destruction—I awaited death, and could hope for nothing else; and, notwithstanding, I suddenly find myself in the most beautiful and magnificent place in the world, and where I am received with the greatest joy!" At night, an unseen King speaks to her and love sparks between them. The king makes Laideronnette promise not look upon him because he is under curse for seven years that will start over if she sees him. She agrees and they marry without her ever laying eyes on him. However, persuaded by her visiting family, she sneaks a look at him and realises her is the hideous green dragon she was so afraid of. War breaks out in the kingdom and the wicked fairy, Magotine, sends the King into Hades to start his penance from the start and takes Laideronnette as her prisoner. Laideronnette must complete numerous trials, but is helped by the good fairy Protectress. 1. To spin cobwebs into hair and then the hair itself into fishnets strong enough to catch salmon. 2. To climb a mountain wearing iron shoes and a millstone around the neck. 3. To find the "Fount of Discretion" and to bring back its water with her in a pitcher full of holes. When she drinks from the Fount of Discretion she becomes discrete - i.e. no long curious. And when she washes her face in the water she washes away the fairy's curse and becomes beautiful. Laideronnette is renamed by the good fairy as Queen Discreet and she hides in an enchanted forest until the King has done his seven years of penance. When she returns, Magotine is angry at her transformation and sets her a final trial she is sure she'll fail - to go into Hades to retrieve some 'Water of Long Life'. With the help of character called Love, Queen Discreet retrieves a flask of the water and, cured of her curiosity, she does not drink from it. Love uses his powers to transform the King back into his human form and his is finally reunited with Queen Discreet. Love takes the couple back Magotine and gets her to break her spell, allowing the King and Queen to live happily ever after. Or rather: 'They returned to it immediately, and passed the rest of their days in as much happiness as they had previously endured afflictions and anxieties.' The moral of the tale is then summed up in a poem. In essence, curiosity can be dangerous, and no matter how many times experience teaches this or tales tell of it, humans never learn.
From a disability perspective, what might the moral lesson or lessons be? Comment below! Sources: The Green Serpent by the Countess d'Aulnoy Image: Le cabinet des fées - ou, Collection choisie des contes des fées, et autres contes merveilleux (1785)
The ancient Greeks marked the flesh of those considered to be morally deficient and these marks were called 'stigma'. But with the growth of Christianity in Europe, natural marks on the body came to be seen as 'stigma', too. For example, during the witch hunts in the sixteenth century, witches were believed to carry a visible mark on their bodies that would confirm their witch status. To have a 'witch's teat' was used as proof that the devil visited the woman in the night to suckle and was seen as a form of maternal perversion. In Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and maternal Power in Early Modern England, Deborah Willis writes: 'Witches were—or were believed to be-mothers "gone bad," women past childbearing years who used their mothering powers against neighbors who had enraged them. To acquire their magic, women fed and cared for demonic imps as if they were children. In exchange, imps would bring sickness and death to other households-often the households of younger mothers.' Sources:
'Examination of a Witch' by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853). An Ancient Stigma, Ancient World Magazine. 'Stigma and Social Identity' in Deviance and Liberty by Irving Goffman. Malevolent Nurture: Witch-hunting and maternal Power in Early Modern England by Deborah Willis.
This marginal illumination of a disabled beggar child appears in the Luttrell Psalter, a manuscript created for Sir Geoffrey Luttrell in the 1330s.
The suspicion that disabled people may be faking their disability goes back a long way. Medieval elites often suspected that beggars were pretending to be ill or else deliberately changing their appearance in order to receive more pity, and therefore more money. Sometimes disabled people begged to raise money for a pilgrimage in the hope of being cured. For instance, in one canonization testimony a disabled child and her father begged in London for ten years before collecting enough money to complete their pilgrimage to St Thomas Cantilupe's shrine in Hereford. This image shows the boy using a wheelbarrow as a mobility aid. This would allow father and son to travel further afield and avoid repeatedly begging alms from the same people. Despite the general suspicion of disability, this image appears to highlight the virtue in almsgiving. Source (including detailed image description): Feminae: Medieval Women and Gender Index: Disabled Beggar Child
After the Black Death, a plague that ravaged Europe between 1346 to 1353, sheep farming largely replaced crop farming due to the lack of labourers.
The nursery rhyme 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' is often misquoted and was about the surviving (but starving) farm hands left without work… ‘Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir. no sir, three bags full. Two for my master and one for his dame But none for the little boy who cries down the lane.’ Had you heard this before? Let us know your favourite nursery rhyme origin stories in the comments below. Source: Disease and History: From Ancient Times to Covid-19 by Frederick F Cartwright and Michael Biddiss. |
Disability in Traditional Folk and Fairy TalesDelve in to the history of disability! This blog explores the wide-ranging depictions of illness, disability and difference in traditional tales from around the world. ArchivesCategories
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