(Illustration by Saba Joshaghani from Otherworld: The woman in the green cloak came to him smiling, but she raised a horsewhip and struck him)
My review of Otherworld is now up at Shiny. A lovely little book, funny, strange, sad. I enjoyed it so much.
‘Habetrot’ is an Anglo-Scottish version of ‘Rumplestiltskin’ (Brothers Grimm) or the East Anglian ‘Tom Tit Tot’; I read it in The Virago Book of Witches, edited by Shahrukh Husain (the original source is A Dictionary of Fairies by Kate Briggs and if anyone would like to republish this so I could afford to buy a copy please do, I would be so happy). Funny and female centred, it is now definitely my favourite version.
In both ‘Rumplestiltskin’ and ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the heroine is brought to the attention of a king through the vain boasting of a parent, and in both these stories the king is hardly ideal husband material since he threatens the girl with death if she fails to spin either straw into gold or five skeins a day for a month each year. The girl’s saviour demands a high price: Rumplestiltskin wants her first-born child; Tom Tit Tot wants her. In each case, the girl can avoid this price if she discovers the creature’s name – which she does, by accident and via someone else.
‘Habetrot’ is very different. The story has a very domestic and even comic feel to it, with a lassie who hates spinning and instead scampers about the countryside, and an exasperated mother who needs her to earn some money so locks her up until she’s spun seven skeins. After a day of failing to produce anything decent, the lassie escapes and discovers Habetrot, who offers to spin the skeins for her. The price? There is no price. Habetrot swears the lassie to secrecy and tells her to call on her if ever she needs help.
(Illustration by Morris Meredith Williams from Elizabeth W. Grierson, The Scottish Fairy Book; London: Fisher Unwin, 1910; found here)
‘Habetrot’ seems to be either in explicit conversation with one of both of the other versions of this tale, or truncated. The lassie discovers Habetrot’s name herself quite easily, but there is no especial reason why she shouldn’t know it as Habetrot is kind and helpful and never seeks to take advantage of her. So this seems an odd detail to include. Perhaps there was once a longer version where it was significant? Or perhaps it is because the tale is built on one of the other versions, and this detail has persisted.
After Habetrot has spun and delivered the skeins, the lassie, feeling peckish, cooks and eats seven black puddings. On discovering this her mother rushes out and shouts:
‘My dawtie ha’ spun se’en, se’en
My dawtie ha’ ate se’en, se’en
An a’ afore daylicht.’
This catches the attention of the young laird. In ‘Tom Tit Tot’, the mother sings ‘My darter ha' ate five, five pies today’, but quickly changes it to ‘My darter ha' spun five, five skeins today’ out of embarrassment when the passing king shows an interest. The clear difference here is that the East Anglian mother lies out of shame over her daughter’s greed, but the Scottish mother is equally proud of her daughter’s spinning and her appetite. The joke presumably is that the appetite is not for eating black pudding but for another activity which might prove attractive to a young man. And as soon as he sees the lassie he asks to marry her.
But it is the ending that particularly pleases me. The laird never threatens his fiancée but he does witter on about all the lovely skeins she’ll spin for him after they’re married, so Habetrot tells her to bring him down to the burnside. She then lets the couple into a chamber where she and her friends are. The laird is horrified at their long lips, and they explain that although they were once bonnie, their lips have grown long from spinning. Habetrot tells him,
‘Yir ain lassie’ll be the same, bonnie an she is noo, for she’s fair mad about the spinning.’
‘She’ll not!’ said the laird. ‘Not another spindle shall she touch from this day on.’
And so everyone gets what they want. The laird marries the pretty lassie, she can roam the countryside with him instead of spinning, ‘and every head of lint that grew on that land went to old Habetrot to be spun’, presumably enriching her.
(Illustration by John D. Batten from Joseph Jacobs, More English Fairy Tales; London: David Nutt, 1894; found here)
It is hard to know, without being aware of the story’s origins, whether the differences of ‘Habetrot’ from the German and East Anglian tales are intended to be directly compared with them, or not. It is definitely tempting to see this as a consciously female ‘retelling’ of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ or ‘Tom Tit Tot’ but I don’t have any evidence for this.
In the other versions, there is a real power imbalance between the king and the girl and he threatens with death; in ‘Habetrot’ the laird seems amiable and with the help of Habetrot the lassie can manage him and achieve the life she wants. In this version, laziness (or dislike of domestic tasks) is rewarded – after all, isn’t the point of marrying a rich man to get out of having to do those tasks you don’t like? – and apart from being locked up for a day the lassie suffers very little.
The lone male imp or little man of the other two stories is replaced in ‘Habetrot’ by a small community of women who are ready to help the lassie rather than exploit her. While we might not be delighted at the reinforcement of the primacy of female beauty as currency in the world, the sly way in which Habetrot uses it against the laird to help the lassie feels like a victory. So too does the idea of a secret group of magical little women hidden on the other side of a self-bored stone who feel no need to aspire to beauty. With female characters driving the story and with humour, ‘Habetrot’ strips out the darkness of the other tales to give our female characters a more unequivocally happy ending.