aprons / Grimms' fairy tales / linen

Do you wear an apron? I'm pretty sure my mother wore one when I was growing up but I didn't take the habit with me when I left home.

I wore one the year I had a job baking cakes in a restaurant, because I didn't want melted chocolate or egg yolks dripped and smeared on my clothes. The kitchen wasn't so fancy that any of us wore full kitchen whites, except for the supper chef who gave himself airs. He had trained in France. The rest of us wore jeans and aprons. That was in 1981? 82?

At home I only started wearing an apron after I splashed a beloved sweater with hot olive oil. I opted for the bibbed apron over the skirt-style apron my mother used to wear.

That's not a picture of my mother and I haven't included a photo of my apron because it's long ago acquired a patina of avocado, tomato, orange juice, chocolate, oil and whatever else I've wiped across it over the years. An apron is handy when you need to blot your hands or clean a knife fast. I do wash the apron but the stains are there to stay. That's why they're called stains. (Stay = stains?)

I've been thinking about aprons because I want to know what kind of cloth would have been used to make an apron in Grimms' fairy tale times.

As far as I can discover, the common household fibre at that time in Europe was linen. Linen is made from flax. There are a few Grimms' fairy tales about the spinning of flax--most often when an irrational monarch demands that a girl spin flax into gold.

Last year I happened to wander into a shed in Austria where I saw honest-to-goodness flax. Even in the dim light, the fairy tales about spinning flax into gold suddenly made sense.

To get flax supple enough to spin into yarn, the stalks are threshed with a flail, followed by retting, then scutching, AND THEN they are heckled with heckling combs!

If I'm ever heckled when I'm standing on stage, I hope I have the presence of mind to point out to my heckler that I am not a stalk of flax.

And here's a linguistic/textile tidbit I came across while looking up the history of cloth. When cotton was first introduced to Europe in the 1300s, people knew only that it came from a plant, and so they imagined there were trees that grew in India with tiny lambs on the ends of its branches. This myth lives on in the German word for cotton which is baumwolle. Literally: tree wool.

If you're wondering how far off the beaten path I went to find an old shed where flax used to be threshed, retted, scutched, and heckled, here's the view. The first snow had blown in the night before. Guess from which direction.

Making linen was a laborious process, but in countries that didn't have ties to cotton-growing colonies linen was still the least inexpensive textile until partway through the 19th century. Nightgowns were made from linen. Underwear was linen. Shirts were linen. Collars were linen. Skirts were linen.
When the brothers Grimm were researching and writing their fairy tales, aprons were made of linen. And people wore aprons. The word has been around in English since the early 1600s. Men wore aprons specific to their trade--carpenters, butchers, stonemasons, cobblers...

Even the witch in "Hansel and Gretel" wears an apron.

Illustrations of aprons courtesy of Fritz Fischer in Grimms Märchen (Bertelsmann Verlag, 1957) 

fairy tales, illustrations, engravings

I've fallen behind with blog writing because I've been writing. Or trying to.

I had this astounding month in Austria with all kinds of experiences I could blog about--visiting with family; staying in houses stuffed with ad hoc statuary and gold leaf and no end of surprises

A Roman senator with a mink collar

 A gold-leaf clock over the fridge

An Egyptian fresco sliding door...

I went hiking and cycling around mountain lakes.

I had a private tour of a 15th-century castle whose name I promised the countess I wouldn't reveal

Note the castle dog lower right

Innumerable interesting details. This chandelier would have been lit with real candles at one time. The little man is not added. He's part of the antler carving. 

In Vienna there was Klimt, the Prader, cobblestone streets, fountains so large you could drown a Japanese car in them, the Institute of Conservation where I had a letter of introduction.

BUT. Full stop. I don't yet know what I'll be using in fiction, so I'm keeping my notes and pics to myself. A person should be mindful of her priorities.

I will, however, tell you about a storybook my aunt has. You know I'm interested in fairytales, don't you? My blog is called Rapunzel's Hair--after the Grimms fairytale, not because I want anyone to climb up my hair.
My copy of Grimms was published in 1957 in Germany. It was a present from my grandfather who sent it to Canada so that I would read German. I read the German and picked up some odd life lessons. If a frog speaks and wants a kiss, it might be a prince. An old woman who mutters to herself might be a witch. Or she might be kindly and help you. No telling.  

I loved--and still love--the ink illustrations. They were done by Fritz Fischer, who is not the same Fritz Fischer as the German WWI historian. His drawings are expressive, funny, scary.
Here is Rapunzel's sorceress stepmother climbing her hair. Remember the rhyme? Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair. In German, Rapunzel only gets the command. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, lass dein Haar herunter."

Or how about Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's house? Best illustration of a candy and sugar house I've ever seen. Those creepy trees hovering around it.

My aunt has a book of fairytales that beats my book for scary illustrations hands down. The stories come from Perrault, a French writer who collected and published the stories in 1697, more than a hundred years before the brothers Grimm, but who never became known as well as they did.
In the 19th century Gustave Doré did engravings to illustrate some of Perreault's tales. This book, published in 1870, is what my aunt has.

The first letter of the first chapter of a story is decorated as an inhabited initial--a term I'd never heard before and makes we want to start doodling.

Here are two engravings from the book:

When this book was first published, Gustave Doré was criticized for the horror and lewdness of his illustrations, but isn't that what fairy tales are all about? Take the worst of your nightmares--a wolf in sheep's clothing, a ogre hovering over your bed--look hard at it, shiver, and then phew! Close the book!