watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=_ktcmV-3NaI
If you’re in search of a good summer read, try Thomas McNeal’s Far Far Away. Jacob Grimm comes alive (well, as a ghost) in ways that I could never have imagined. Gothic in its sensibilities but intimate and engaging in its narrative style, the novel kept me awake and reading until 2am. Wonderfully informative about the Brothers Grimm (there’s even a Grimm quiz show), it also gives us a richly complex “Hansel and Gretel” hypertext, with two adolescents who have to escape the clutches of the witch. You’ll figure things out halfway through but that’s part of the sheer pleasure of this pulse-pumping story.
I am the spinning wheel (sheep to shawl) demonstrator at the Louisiana Renaissance Festival. While doing research for my preliminary plans to include a flax demonstration this year; and the what or how was Sleeping Beauty really spinning; I came across some information I wondered if you could verify, or point me in the direction for a good source to confirm it? It pertained to a European Medieval custom for an unmarried girl to keep a bundle of flax in her hope chest, and to re-hackle it every year (making it finer), in preparation for making her wedding veil when the time should come. So every year she remains unmarried, she will have that much finer and more valuable flax thread from which to spin and weave her eventual wedding veil. (To me this mirrors that she, in each additional year of age and wisdom before marriage, is that much “finer” herself, having that much more to offer; and, one could say, in need of finding a “finer” mate, as well!) This seems to me a lovely tradition, if it is true, but I can no longer find the original source, nor any other source to verify it. Might you be able to please help me?
Many thanks,
Kelli Miller