I wish I could say more about this ...

In 1697, Charles Perrault published a small volume of folktales polished into fine literary form.

The frontespiece featured an illustration of an old woman sitting in front of a roaring fire with her distaff and spindle telling a story to a man, woman and child. On the wall above her, a plaque reads: "Contes de ma Mere L'oye" (Tales of my Mother Goose).

Andrew Lang (Famous for his 'Color' series of fairy tale books) translated Perrault's tales into English, and they were published in 1888. In his biographical introduction, he claims that the figure of Mother Goose was first mentioned in verse in 1650, and that that's what Perrault's frontespiece refers to (Here is his footnote on the subject, via Project Gutenberg's etext: footnote 14).

And ever since then, perhaps, people have been around trying to attatch the name, somehow, to an historical woman.

The most intriguing candidate, at least, in context of this blog, is: "Queen Bertha, of France."

In an article published on the Web (Dated July, 1997): The History of Nursery Rhymes & Mother Goose, Vikki Harris (Waterloo University, Ontario, Canada) wrote:

(Quote)
The first possibility is the French Queen Bertha, wife of Pepin. She was "known as ‘Queen Goose-foot’ or ‘Goose-footed Bertha’, possibly because of the size and shape of her foot which was said to be both large and webbed…The other was Queen Bertha, wife of Robert II, also of France… It was rumoured that the close blood-tie [with her husband] had caused her to give birth to a child with the head of a goose" (Delamar, 3). In each case the Queen has been represented, and is often depicted by the image of a child’s storyteller.
(Unquote)

Both of these "Queen Berthas" are thus linked with the "monstrosity" of disability -- one, through herself, and the other through the son she supposedly bore.

Ever since I've come across this paragraph, I've been trying to find out more about either of these legendary figures. But all I find are these same tidbits of "information," along with the sober reminder that none of it is historically accurate. But I don't care about historical accuracy.

What intriques me is the link, in the social imagination, between the figure of the storyteller and disability, especially since Aesop was also pictured as deformed (Dwarfish, with a severe hunchback, and ugly face); I'm starting to wonder if this is A Thing; A Motif.

So I'm putting this out there, in case any of my readers may know more of the story, or has an idea where to look.

Wherein I introduce myself, and this blog

I am an adult woman with cerebral palsy, or CP. This means that, for my entire life, I've moved through the world in a noticeably different way, and the world has responded to my presence in a noticeably different way.

I am also a woman who loves traditional folk- and fairy tales, and have, on occasion, written stories in that style, on commission.

The storyteller in me wants these two facts to be connected: maybe I'm so fond of alternate realities because I move through the world in an alternate way, looking at everything from a slightly different angle. Or maybe it's because my imagination gives me more freedom than my body does. Or maybe... or maybe... All of the reasons I can imagine are probably true, on some level. But the simplest truth may be that these two facts are just co-incidents.

Whatever the reason, these two facets about me -- one of my body, and the other, my mind, are often bumping up against each other, creating sparks and frictions and insights. Which leads to the creation of this blog.

Several years ago, I was commissioned to write a tale for a young man who also happened to have cerebral palsy. On the day I met with him to discuss the story, and learn a bit about what he wanted, he told me, straight out, that he did not want the hero of the story to be disabled, or have CP like him. I understood exactly what he meant. When you have a disability, well meaning strangers want to make that the center of everything. And his life was full enough with well-meaning strangers. But even as I was agreeing with him wholeheartedly, his reasoning stung: that "cerebral palsy doesn't belong in fairy tales."

Folk and fairy tales have been passed down through generations, shaped by lived experiences the way a river stone is shaped by the forces of the tide. They're peopled with princes and paupers, men, women, and children, farmers, merchants, craftsmen and thieves. These stories have been studied by psychologists, ethnologists, and college professors as mirrors of human existence. Why were we, this young man and I, both so willing to erase our reflections from these mirrors? The truth is, we were wrong. The disabled have always been a part of human society, so we've always appeared in stories. And I will use this space to prove that.

I've chosen the philosopher Plato to represent the denial of disability -- the idea that only the "Ideal Human" is a fit subject for stories. And I've chosen Aesop, who legend says was himself, disabled, to represent the desire to see our real selves in our tales.

This blog's central focus will be the exploration of traditional tales and fables that deal explicitly with disabled characters (including both cognitive and physical disabilities). But I will also venture out along the spectrum of where the subject of stories and the subject of disability meet, to include disability's appearence in proverbs and platitudes, "High" literary works, such as the plays of Shakespeare, literary wondertales, and more modern fantasy novels such as those by Mark Twain and George MacDonald.

My bright boundary line shall be the start of the Great War (now known as "World War I"), since my feeling is that after the turmoil of war, the Issue of Disability in Stories became capitalized, and self consciously "A Thing to Write About," and thus an issue (and an invention) of the modern world.