Tale of the Spinning Wheel — Section 2

Here we see the spindle as the emblem of human destiny, and always in the hands of women.

Witness the three Norns, likewise, of our own northern ancestors, who sit around the tree Igdrasil and spin out the world’s life on their whirring spindle.

If we ask more we need only turn to Homer, the inimitable reflector of the customs of his day.

In his verse the spinner lives again, as she spins the fine white linen and gorgeous colored wool.

Beautiful are the pictures she weaves into the cloth, stories of gods and demi-gods and heroes.

Odysseus, entering the feasting hall of the Phæacians, is transfixed with wonder at its splendor; its seats, throughout all their length, were spread with the marvellous work of the Phæacian maidens, showing radiant in the torchlight, for the Phæacian women far exceeded all others in this household art.

Did not the Phæacian queen recognize on Odysseus the very garments she herself and her maidens had made?

And all the while loyal-hearted Penelope sat at home and wove her web to keep off suitors, not to catch them, though Shakespeare rather sneeringly remarks that “all the yarn she spun in Ulysses’ absence did but fill Ithaca full of moths.

” Evidently spinning and the making of the household garments were not beneath the dignity of royal fingers in those old Greek days.

Queenly indeed were these occupations, and right royal these distaffs of ivory and gold, the gifts of kings and poets, the symbols of woman’s dominion.

Was not the wool basket even of Helen of Troy lipped with gold?

And in the excavations on the site of Troy to-day are found innumerable spindle-whorls of terra-cotta;

and in the later excavations Dr. Schliemann found, twenty-eight feet below the surface in the Royal Mansion, a distaff eleven inches long to which a quantity of blackened woollen thread was still adhering.

In those days of war and pillage the garments a man wore were the best tokens of his identity; the handiwork of the matron and her daughters was an individual seal set, as it were, upon the lives of their male relatives; home-made and home-spun were their garments, not turned out by the dozen, ready-made from a factory.

Penelope sees through the wiles of the false Odysseus when he describes the garments she had made for the real one.

This custom of the matron weaving the household cloth has thus given the Greek poets a favorite means of recognition of lost relatives which is certainly more poetic than the worn-out device of the “strawberry-mark” on the “long-lost brother.

” Even the water nymphs practise weaving; Circe also, and Calypso; mortals and immortals; yea, the mighty Hercules himself threw down his club and spun for love of Omphale: thus do Greek mythology and literature reflect the importance of spindle and distaff in the home-life of the Greeks, who, as we have learned, recognized the value and the dignity of woman’s labor in believing it to be under the particular tutelage and protection of the dread daughter of Zeus.

The Romans copied the Greeks in this as in many other things.

They borrowed the spinster-goddess outright and called her Minerva to hide the plagiarism.

Our friend Poor Richard says: “When great Augustus ruled the World and Rome, The Cloth he wore was spun and wove at Home, His EMPRESS ply’d the Distaff and the Loom.

” Richard is borne out by another authority, who states that “Cæsar Augustus wore clothes made by his wife or daughter.

” The hapless Lucretia, wife of Collatinus, Tarquin’s nephew, and Consul of Rome in 509 B.

C.

, “was found spinning when her husband visited her from the camp.

” Gracious pictures these, of haughty Roman matrons, wives of consuls and emperors, spinning and weaving their husbands’ togas.

It is not often that we get such cosy and homelike thoughts of Rome, whose very name recalls naught but flashing legions and the clash of swords on brass.

And the women of the north, where the family was the unit of society and the village was a cluster of homesteads knit together by the ties of kindred—was the spinning-wheel heard in this land of our own ancestors?

In the poetic diction of the Norsemen, with its expressive double substantives, we find that the maiden is called the “linen-folded,” that is, she who is clothed or draped in linen.

In the saga called “Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue,” it is written: “Dead in mine arms she droopeth, My dear one, gold-ring’s bearer;

For God hath changed the life-days Of this lady of the linen.

” She who was folded in linen was the maker of that linen; and the beautiful flowing draperies of Norse and Saxon women and the tunics of the men are as true witnesses to their homely occupations as the drapery of the Greeks.

Was it not the doom of the warrior maiden Brynhild, the disobedient Valkyr, to become a woman and sit by the fire and spin?

For the rough nature of the North revolted from feminine occupations, and this warrior daughter of Wotan saw in spinning only deep humiliation and disgrace.

Thus the ancient northern literature is also full of pictures of the women spinning their household linen, spinning their wedding linen, spinning the linen of husbands and sons.

Noble ladies in the halls of earl and thane, wives in the lowlier homes of simple freemen, and in the cots of peasant and thrall—they all spun and wove for the needs of the home.

What music-lover can ever forget Wagner’s picture of the northern maids of later days assembled in a spinning-bee to spin the wedding linen for one of their number?

The merry hum of the wheels so exquisitely copied by orchestra and chorus, interrupted now and then by Senta’s plaintive song of the supernatural lover who has drawn her thoughts away from her betrothed,—surely this spinning-chorus from the “Flying Dutchman” will live as long as music lives, and will remain a representative instance of this beautiful northern custom.

Again, in the rush-strewn hall of mediæval knight or baron hung with tapestry, the work of his lady and her dependants, depicting his deeds and those of his ancestors, we read the same tale of the spinning-wheel and distaff with its allied arts of weaving and embroidery.

Nay, did she not write history, too, this noble spinster, with her spindle and loom, “Who, as she plied the distaff, In a sweet voice and low, Still sang of noble houses, And fights fought long ago”?

[Illustration: TROOPS FOR THE INVASION OF ENGLAND, FROM THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY.

] As Helen embroidered the combats of Greeks and Trojans, so now, two thousand years later, Queen Matilda and her maidens are seen spinning and weaving the Norman Conquest of England into the Bayeux Tapestry.

Surely the muse Clio might wield spindle as well as stylus as a symbol of her patronage of history.

It was no shame to those high-born women to ply the distaff and figure in the songs of chivalry as the makers of all manner of household fabrics.

“My love to fight the Saxon goes, And bravely shines his sword of steel;

A heron’s feather decks his brows, And a spur on either heel;

His steed is blacker than a sloe, And fleeter than the falling star;

Amid the surging ranks he’ll go And shout for joy of war.

“Twinkle, twinkle, pretty spindle, Let the white wool drift and dwindle;

Oh!

we weave a damask doublet For my love’s coat of steel.

Hark!

the timid turning treadle Crooning soft old-fashioned ditties, To the low, slow murmur of the Brown, round wheel.

” So sang an Irish maid of long ago, and to-day we still look to Ireland for some of the finest spinning and weaving in existence.

It would be trite to refer to Margaret, dreaming of Faust over her spinning, were she not eminently typical.

What maiden of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries did not sit in the garden idly spinning her allotted tasks while her thoughts were far away?

It is a picture based on fact, as all great literary pictures are.