“Maiden Without Hands” is arguably one of the most fascinating fairy tale types. It is magical yet corporeal, gruesome yet powerful in its portrayal of a woman’s struggles with the patriarchy. One would think that it has a distinct origin in the Middle Ages when tales of magic rose in popularity, yet there are at least two different explanations for the origin of the tale type that explore self-mutilation, the empowerment of women, and Christianity in its eclectic and uncertain journey.
Laura Alandis Hibbard Loomis has tracked down a magical origin of the tale type with her research of works falling under the romance type Emaré, which is a part of what she calls the “Constance Saga” after the first name of a maiden in one of the “twenty-three literary and more than forty popular versions” (Hibbard Loomis 23). Hibbard Loomis claims that “the direct source of Emaré must have been a French lay, which may or may not have been of Breton origin” (Hibbard Loomis 28). In spite of this specificity, early versions “localize the story in England, Scotland, or Wales, and commonly in the ancient kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia” (Hibbard Loomis 30). The original romantic tale spread from England into five French and three German renditions by the thirteenth century and then into seven Italian and three Spanish renditions by the fourteenth century; its form survived most prosperously in Italy until around the seventeenth century (Hibbard Loomis 26-28). The earliest versions use motifs popular from the twelfth century, including Innocent Persecuted Wife, Incestuous Father, Catskin, and Swan-Maiden (Hibbard Loomis 29). In particular, three of the earliest versions of the Maiden Without Hands tale type include: a text found in the Vitae Duorum Offarum from author John de Cella (1195-1214) called Vita Offae Primi in which the hands and feet of the maiden’s children, born from the union of the King of York and his own daughter, are cut off and later magically restored (Hibbard Loomis 23-24); a version from between 1334 and 1347 credited to Nicholas Trivet in his Chronique Anglo-Normande which lacks the incest motif but makes up for the loss by accusing the maiden and namesake, Constance, of witchcraft (Hibbard Loomis 24-25); and finally the romantic Emaré epic poem from the late thirteenth century which played a part in inspiring the tale type (Hibbard Loomis 25-26). Hibbard Loomis proceeds to outline an average early rendition of the tale. An innocent girl either runs away from or is banished by her “unnatural father” and finds her way to a foreign land where a prince marries her and, “usually through the machinations of her wicked mother-in-law,” proceeds to banish her; afterward, forged letters expose the wife in a forest or otherwise she is “set adrift in a rudderless boat” before she finally rejoins her family member, whether it be her husband or her father (Hibbard Loomis 23). In these early versions, the heroine is known for her “unearthly beauty” and “her strange reluctance to explain herself even to her rescuers” (Hibbard Loomis 29), which may explain why the maiden’s name usually translates from French to “outcast,” “afflicted,” or “one of rare worth” (Hibbard Loomis 28).
This may provide support for the characterization of Penta in Giambattista Basile’s rendition of the tale type, La Penta Mano-Mozza, or Penta of the Chopped-Off Hands. Newly a widower, the King of Pietrasecca wants to marry his sister Penta because he “knows her character” and “a man of sound judgment never allows anything of value to leave his house,” because she fits his desires, and because he doesn’t trust strangers in his house (Basile 512). To the King of Pietrasecca, Penta is indeed “one of rare worth” (Hibbard Loomis 28). Petrified, Penta locks herself in her room for a month leaving her brother ashamed for days desiring her beautiful hands. Penta asks a servant to lob off her hands into a bowl to serve to her brother. After he stuffs her into a chest of tar and throws her into the ocean, the chest floats to the island where Nuccia and her son live with their family of fishers. Her husband Masiello brings in the chest and asks Nuccia to take care of Penta, but she instead throws her back into the sea in the chest which makes its way to Terraverde. The dying queen requests that the King of Terraverde take good care of and marry their new lady-in-waiting because she had grown fond of her. Penta and the King of Terraverde have sex, and nine months after the King of Terraverde embarks on an expedition, Penta bears a son and sends her husband a letter about his birth via a messenger ship. The ship makes it to Nuccia’s island after surviving a strong storm and Nuccia gets the captain of the vessel drunk, having the letter read to her and editing it out of jealousy stemming from having had her own son. The councillors know that the King of Terraverde does not actually want to burn Penta and their son alive, so they ask her to run away to a distant, foreign place which ends up being Lagotorbido, the kingdom reigned by a magician who decides to hold a contest of misfortune narratives for kings including the King of Terraverde and the King of Pietrasecca, who has waxed Nuccia and turned her into a candle upon learning about the forged letters. They both share their woes about Penta, with whom they rejoice afterward, to the effect that the King of Lagotorbido grants his entire kingdom to the King of Terraverde as the King of Pietrasecca, having apologized in shame, returns home (Basile).
Basile’s tale, as with many to most of the other tales in the Maiden Without Hands tale type, can be broken down into four main plot divisions which constitute an analysis which can be called the “revenge and reunion summary” for clarification. First, there is the action which requires subsequent restoration. Penta has a servant cut off her hands and put them into a bowl for the King of Pietrasecca, who responds by stuffing her into a chest of tar and sending her across the ocean. As a consequence, secondly, the king later feels terrible when he meets her new husband, the King of Terraverde. For the purposes of redemption, Nuccia is waxed and turned into a candle. Finally, in an act of emotional closure, the magician-king of Lagotorbido restores her hands. Not only does this tale incorporate magical restoration akin to the magic of some of the earliest versions of the tale type, but also it closely matches Hibbard Loomis’ description of the generalized tale. Penta is innocent by all accounts and is banished by her incestuous brother, who stands in as her “unnatural father” (Hibbard Loomis 23). She and the King of Terraverde, her new husband, have a son. Nuccia, who is not explicitly described as related to anybody in the tale yet nevertheless fills the role of “wicked mother-in-law” (Hibbard Loomis 23) forges the letters and gets Penta banished, for her own protection, by the councillors. The King learns of her fate not through letters but through his own men, only one minor difference. The married couple rejoices in Lagotorbido just as Hibbard Loomis describes.
Meanwhile, J.W. Knedler also tracks the origins of this tale type in the Breton lai tradition. Writing in 1942 that the fifteen earliest versions of the tale originated in Scotland, France, Belgium, Ireland, and places as geographically varied as Mauritius, Chile, and Martinique, Knedler adds that Breton sailors “have, notoriously, been carriers of tales” (Knedler 318). Thirteen of them, the ones that were not Breton lais, were not fully developed (Knedler 317, 318). Six are French, four of them originating in Brittany, which Knedler claims to be “the center of distribution” (Knedler 319). All fifteen of these versions of the tale that Knedler researched share the thorn motif, which stands as Knedler’s focus. Knedler proceeds to detail the typical structure of the tale type with the addition of the thorn motif. A woman’s brother abandons her in a thorn grove, but as he leaves, he steps on a thorn. Later, after “further trials” (Knedler 317), she is reunited with her royal husband. When she goes to visit her brother, she finds him “sitting in a chimney corner, surrounded by thorns which have grown from the one in his foot;” she cures him and forgives him afterward (Knedler 317). In all of these renditions, the first prosecutor of the heroine is a woman. In fourteen of the versions containing the thorn motif, except for one Irish version, the heroine is falsely accused of committing the crimes of her female prosecutor and is punished by her father or brother. In the one Irish version that Knedler found, the heroine is punished by servants who reprimand her under the father’s command. There are various minor differences present throughout these renditions. Interestingly, in ten of these variations, upon her first “exposure,” food is provided to the heroine by a dog (Knedler 317-318). Knedler claims that this thorn motif is “foreign to the cycle as a whole” despite how it appeared in its purest form in medieval Breton lais (Knedler 316; 318). Since Knedler’s synopsis of early versions of the tale type include the thorn motif yet still ultimately account for the tale type as a whole, it follows that the synopsis should apply relatively equally to all or most of the tales in the tale type and not only the select few containing the thorn motif. He and Hibbard Loomis are situated in the same critical plane of analysis as they both contend that their tales, which are claimed to have originated within approximately the same time period, are the original incarnations of the Maiden Without Hands tale type. Both methods of fairy tale etiology are formed from a purely structural perspective. However, Knedler inherently shows promise because according to Geneviève Massignon a splinter motif is “typical of French folklore” and in Brittany, the source of the Breton lai, “it is generally a thorn which takes root and grows in the foot of the guilty person” (Massignon 267).
The rendition of the tale type edited by Geneviève Massignon equally features both Knedler’s thorn motif and Hibbard Loomis’ romantic magical restoration motif. However, Knedler’s research does not capture a primary magical motif of the tale, the magical severing and restoration of a body part. This may be in part because the thorn motif is a minor motif in comparison, thereby “foreign” to the Maiden Without Hands tale type. This is one French rendition collected by Richard M. Dorson for his Folktales of the World series, titled in English The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, in which the thorn motif features alongside the magical restoration motif (Massignon 117), yet neither ultimately comes out on top. A brother, who moves away from his sister to live with his new wicked wife, visits her every day for five or six days yet does not ever mention to her the nightmares that his wife had been having about her strangling their mares, spilling their wine barrels, and murdering their young child with a knife; once he finds the bloody knife under the door of his child’s bedroom, he finally accuses her of doing these things only to hear her reply that one day he will maneuver over a splintery hedge “with the help of a ladder” and get a thorn stuck in his body that only she can remove (Massignon 116-117). Upon his first accusation against her, he cuts off one of her hands; upon hearing her reply, he cuts off the other. The king catches her wandering in rags into his garden one night and pulling pears and apples from their trees with her mouth in order to eat; after notifying his mother, he spies on her one midnight and the next day requests that his mother give him clothes so that he can provide the stranger with them and marry her. She had been banished by her mother-in-law (Massignon 117-118). Upon returning from battle after seven years, the king meets a stranger in the woods soon realizing that she is his wife with restored hands and their two taller twin sons; she then remembers her promise and runs to her brother’s disheveled property where for that seven years he had been lying in bed sick with an incurable swelling from a thorn, removing the thorn and forgiving him for his wife’s lies. They burn his wife (Massignon 118-120). As with Basile’s tale, first in the “revenge and reunion summary” comes the action which requires subsequent restoration. The brother, through the false accusations crafted by his wife, cuts off his sister’s hands because she would not say anything about her purported crimes. As a consequence of this, his sister gets her revenge on him when he gets a splinter which only she can remove. They burn her sister-in-law as punishment for redemption. The sister’s hands are restored by The Holy Virgin, the godmother to the two twins, in an act of finality.
In comparison to Hibbard Loomis’ outline, the innocent sister, who is falsely accused of the crimes of her sister-in-law, runs away from her brother. The king marries her, and his mother does not want to see her and banishes her to the woods. The king finds out that she had run away by physically going to the forest himself, again not through the letters. In another inversion, she rejoins her husband before restoring her brother’s body. This rendition holds up for the most part, perhaps because of the connection between the tale’s French origin and Hibbard Loomis’ research on early renditions of the Maiden Without Hands tale type which according to her were inspired by the French lay. As for Knedler’s generalized structure, there are more critical differences. This tale explicitly features the thorn motif except there is no vine of thorns growing from the brother’s person. The brother abandons her (i.e. she runs away) and he gets struck with the thorn outside of the context of the story and swells up in bed for seven years. Meanwhile, his sister is banished to the woods by her husband’s mother and they rejoice. However, nobody is accused for what the king’s mother did. She merely lets her son know that his wife ran away seven years ago. The brother is not found in a chimney corner but rather in his bed, yet the sister still pulls out the thorn and forgives him. Knedler’s outline also fails to accurately describe the events of Basile’s rendition. Penta’s brother definitely abandons her, yet Penta’s first prosecutor is Nuccia and the king rather than Penta is falsely accused for what Nuccia did. Once the king is alone, he feels bad, perhaps as if he had stepped on a thorn, but he does not step on a thorn. When they rejoice, Penta sees that he has felt guilty and “cures” him of his guilt with forgiveness and love. So far, Knedler’s origin hypothesis is not holding up to that of Hibbard Loomis because it does not appear to hold up well for the tales which it is meant to describe.
A fundamental property of the Maiden Without Hands tale type is the mutilation of the maiden. In the case of Basile’s rendition of the tale, one may call the act which is illustrated in this tale, the servant cutting off Penta’s hands upon her request, an act of self-mutilation in spite of how she had somebody else engage in the act of cutting off her hands. One may retort that if Penta cuts off her own hands, only then is it to be classified as self-mutilation. Self-mutilation can also potentially be applied to The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, as some readers may wish to comment that the sister asks for it when her brother cuts off her hands through her silence. If it can be applied concisely, then it can also be applied loosely. Cheryl Cowdy has described the prime incorporation of the term “self-mutilation.” She has noted that self-mutilation stands to define and represent in a “graphic” and discomforting manner “the symbolic demands” of the patriarchy, namely that of Western culture, made on “the female adolescent body” present in fairy tales and exposed to children, namely young girls, early on in their lives (Cowdy 43). Whether it is magical or purely physical should not matter because universally it is defined as the expressive, “deliberate, direct, nonsuicidal destruction or alteration of one's body tissue” (Cowdy 43-44). In Basile’s tale, Penta’s action may be precisely perceived “as an act of self-sacrifice” (Cowdy 44), considering that Penta intends to save herself from her brother’s incestuous desires by presenting only her hands to him rather than her entire femininity which can be construed into a means of achieving these sinful desires.
From this it should become clearer that the sister in The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off would not want to do this to herself since her brother means no harm against her. Even if she had initially possessed the knowledge that her sister-in-law was behind her brother’s mutilation of her hands and thereby manipulating her brother with ill intent, she would not want to willingly sacrifice her unique magical ability to heal otherwise incurable bouts of swelling. After all, she is not the one who needs to be healed; that would be Penta. The corporeal nastiness of the severing of a limb is not expressed in either of these tales yet, namely in Basile’s tale for Penta, the blood released from the act of self-mutilation is “‘associated with the cure of illness, preservation of health, salvation and resolution of social conflict’” (Cowdy 47). It can be said that Penta was intending to resolve most or all of these afflictions presuming that she was physically sickened by her brother’s desires. The sister in The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off did not deserve the right to secure “‘a means of survival in the wake of physical trauma’” as did Penta (Cowdy 43). The hypothesis held by Hibbard Loomis still surpasses that of Knedler since Hibbard Loomis focuses on tales that feature similar acts of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice which are representations of “a significant motif of feminine experience” and “a complex motif in literature” (Cowdy 42-43) while Knedler holds onto tales which feature the inferior mutilation of the masculine figure as represented by the thorn motif.
Hermann Suchier summarizes a medieval version of the Maiden Without Hands tale type from 1370 composed by an author of the name Petrus. It can be found in a publication called Euvres poétiques de Beaumanoir, or The Poetic Works of Beaumanoir. The tale is called in Latin Incipit Ystoria Regis Franchorum et filie in qua adulterium comitere voluit, which approximately translates to The Start of the Story of the Frankish King and His Daughter In Which Adultery Is Carried Out (Suchier 61). The King of France falls in love with his own daughter and wants to marry her one morning. At first, the maiden refuses him, but she later promises that she will submit to him after four days. That night, disguised as a man, she flees far away to the city of the king’s count vassal, where a stout woman who embroiders with silver gives her refuge and work. The count notices the stout woman and instantly falls in love with her, trying to get the maiden to persuade her to love him back. When he fails at this, he marries the maiden instead to his nun mother’s fierce reproach. When the King wants to hold a great feast, the count attends leaving his wife behind with their two sons. She notifies the count through joyous letters which get replaced by the count’s mother with harsh threatening letters instead. Fearing how her husband will respond, she flees to Rome where she continues to work as an embroiderer. He becomes angry at his cruel fate once he gets home and sees that his wife has run away. Twelve years later, a cardinal wants to take possession of the countess’ sons, and she approves because he offers to handle their educations. Once the pope holds a feast, the count and the cardinal meet and room together, having been friends for a long time. By chance, the countess sees them there and makes her two sons go with her to the house so that she can apologize to her husband. The family rejoices and later the count, having interrogated his messengers, learns about the letter scandal (Suchier 62-63). Oddly enough, Suchier classifies this as a member of the Maiden Without Hands tale type, but the count’s mother is not punished for her forgery, the countess never returns to her father, and most importantly, there are no magical bodily restorations. In fact, there is no magic at all, yet the core of the story still suits the tale type in a markedly similar way.
Since this is ostensibly a member of the Maiden Without Hands tale type from around the same period as those tales which Knedler and Hibbard Loomis investigate with their synopses, this medieval rendition still merits to be investigated through the same process endowed by the “revenge and reunion summary” as were the previous tales. In this version, no body parts get cut off, and the count’s mother is not punished for forgery. The countess seems to be falsely accused of the forgery merely through circumstance and the count is angry at fate, and not at the countess, despite how she apologizes later when they rejoice. Knedler should not maintain his stance that the thorn motif is merely a vestigial member of the Maiden Without Hands tale type if he wants to hold that this same motif is superior to that of the magical restoration of limbs. However his analysis, held in comparison to this medieval rendition, exhibits strength over that of Hibbard Loomis. This is true in spite of how the count abandons the countess and in her absence he receives falsified letters from his own mother and blames his mother rather than the countess. Notably, she finds the count by chance rooming with the cardinal and apologizes to him, and they rejoice. He is “cured” of his emotional ailment once he finds out from his messengers that the letters were forged by his mother. The analysis which would be conducted by Hibbard Loomis fails to capture the traditional aura of the Breton lai present in that of Knedler because hers leans more toward emotional romantic themes. The countess abandons her incestuous father, not vice versa. We never hear about her incestuous again after the beginning of the tale, so there is no way to know if he has been punished or feels guilty in any way. She marries the count, but he does not banish her because of the letters; he has abandoned her to go to the king’s festivities. The roles are reversed as he rejoices with her before discovering the forgeries.
In his collection The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè, Jack Zipes edits and translates into English the tale Lu Tradimentu, or The Betrayal. A sacristan preparing to say mass with the chaplain notices a poor girl bundled up in a shawl on the church floor, who they baptize and name Maria. The chaplain begins to take care of Maria by himself as soon as Maria is old enough to no longer require a nanny and sets her up to marry the prince who is so grateful that he lets the chaplain live with him in the royal house. Soon after the prince passes his inheritance down to the chaplain, Maria bears a son. In the castle’s chapel in preparation for saying mass, the chaplain sends a messenger valet for Maria, the new queen, three times before the queen verbally abuses the messenger valet provoking him to slash the throat of her baby and hide the knife in her housecoat. Soon the king orders for everyone to be searched for the lethal weapon, which they find in Maria’s housecoat which she threw on in her time of agony. She is banished to the woods where “the Blessed Mother herself” (Zipes 474) restores the baby’s head. With some of his men and his messenger valet on a hunt in these woods, the king, who has almost died in shame and guilt, encounters the Blessed Mother disguised as Maria. The son points out the messenger valet as his murderer and the Blessed Mother tells the men that “‘innocence wins in the end’” (Zipes 475). Maria comes out of her hiding and rejoices with her husband who has banished the messenger valet from the royal house.
One final runthrough of the “revenge and reunion summary” shows that the Queen is falsely accused of decapitating her own infant son because the messenger valet did it. In the end, the King almost dies of guilt and the messenger valet is banished from the royal house. In the forest, the Blessed Mother restores her baby’s head. The application of Knedler’s synopsis of Lu Tradimentu would run as follows. The original home of the queen is uncertain because she is simply abandoned in the church, but nevertheless she is still abandoned there. She is falsely accused of decapitating the head of her own baby son, but only because the messenger valet frames her. The King feels guilty and reunites with her in the woods on a hunt. There is nobody for her to cure because she is the one being cured yet she is not the one who had been decapitated. Knedler does not completely epitomize the tale with his synopsis. At the same time, this does not correlate with its deficiency in personifying The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, in which the “Holy Virgin and St. John and St. Paul” help the sister as godparents of her twin sons by respectively providing the restoration of the sister’s hands, a “fine castle,” and servants and furniture for this castle (Massignon 118). Hibbard Loomis does not do much better as it claims The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off along with Basile’s tale while neglecting Suchier’s collected medieval tale which distinctly does not present any strong notions of feminine self-mutilation or self-sacrifice outside of the countess passing her children to a cardinal. It is unclear if the queen has an “unnatural father” since she is married to the prince. She is banished from the kingdom but after being framed; there is no incest in this story. She is already married before she is banished, and the closest thing to an in-law is the valet. The false accusation is merely akin to the letters because of the aspect of accusation; it does not come from a wicked feminine figure. On the hunt, her husband finds her purely by chance and they rejoice as a result. Why does Knedler’s synopsis succeed in one instance, notably with its indirect concentration held on a tale not containing the thorn motif, and Hibbard Loomis in the other instance, which represents a conservatively chivalric tale rather than a romantic magical one? Is it possible that neither of these methods of fairy tale historical etiology can claim itself as the victor when it comes to the Maiden Without Hands tale type? Perhaps one synopsis holds the strongest when it looks into fairy tales inspired by Christianity. Perhaps the other’s hold on the literary value of self-mutilation motivates its strength over the other. Notwithstanding, it does not seem to matter for the dominance of either method whether Christian elements are prominent in the tale as they clearly are in Lu Tradimentu. Although Knedler had a Christianity-oriented lead with The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, he did not claim the victory over Hibbard Loomis.
Joanna Ludwikowska compares The South English Legendary Life of Saint Agnes to the class of tales under the Maiden Without Hands tale type. This is a thirteenth century inversion of “the Greek tale of Cupid and Psyche” (Ludwikowska). Ludwikowska compares this story to the Maiden Without Hands tale type because it is akin to the “story of a virgin who, when she finds herself attacked by the devil, draws a magical circle to protect herself within its boundaries” except here, Agnes uses her magical hair to protect herself (Ludwikowska). This cloak restores Agnes from her nudity as if restoring a severed body part. It is rare for a hagiographical story to centralize parts of the female body that are not prone to torture, namely breasts, and this account does not treat its portrayal of Agnes’ defensive hair as the standard hagiographical story would treat women (Ludwikowska). Saint Agnes, a woman not of noble descent, angers the Constable by declaring to his son that she “will never agree to be defiled” by the Roman pagan and man “of a higher social status, wealthy, and thus theoretically a worthy candidate” (Ludwikowska). The Constable commands her to be publicly stripped naked. Taken to a chamber in a brothel in order to wait for the Constable’s son to arrive for her, she prays for help and “an angel appears to her, giving her ‘a roket’ to cover herself” (Ludwikowska). It is likely that “roket” relates strongly to hair since Ludwikowska clarifies that “Agnes covered herself with hair as if it was a cloak” (Ludwikowska). The room fills with light so powerfully bright that she becomes invisible to the Constable’s son, who is “immediately struck dead” by the luminescence. This light comes from Saint Agnes’ “destructive and wild” supernatural power which she possesses in virtue of her virgin martyrdom. Ludwikowska comments that while this is not an extraordinary characteristic of Christian hagiography, this power of bright light acts as “a very clear reminder that the female body can be used by a divine or devilish agency for disruptive and defiant purposes” and lets Saint Agnes kill an innocent nobleman, a crime “punishable with death” (Ludwikowska). It is notable that in this story, Agnes kills a man with her supernatural power for her own protection and is later canonized.
The sister in The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off is endowed with some type of superpower for she is the only one who is able to pull the thorn from her brother’s body. Basile’s tale features a magician king who restores Penta’s hands. Lu Tradimentu and The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off respectively have the Blessed Mother restore the head of the queen’s infant son and the Holy Virgin restore the sister’s hands. In Suchier’s tale, there is no magic, religious or not, yet the tale is set in the Middle Ages when Christianity was a dominant religion of Europe. The religious motif of the Maiden Without Hands tale type, which is that of mutilation and restoration of the body, may not have had a stable Anglo-Saxon origin (Hibbard Loomis 31-32), yet it “made the greatest appeal to the mind of the Middle Ages and may thus be held to account for the popularity of the legend and the saintly character of its heroine (Hibbard Loomis 33). It is apparent that the events of all four of these renditions of the Maiden Without Hands tale type were inspired by interpretations of an overwhelming healing power. To Medieval audiences, magic was “a perversion of religion, yet for the non-scientific and non-scholastic audiences of, for instance, romances, as well as those busy with a mundane life, magic was in fact more interesting because of what it could do and less where it came from” (Ludwikowska). Remarkably, only in Basile’s tale is the magician male. In the other three, the sorcerer is a strong female with agency, either a goddess, an angel, or a human endowed with a special healing power.
Massignon, the collector of the most directly religious of the three tales, The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, writes in her collection that this tale “reflects the influence of Christianity, as do many stories recorded in this area, which was influenced by the Langue d’Oc civilization” (Massignon 267). Both of these tales probably originated near an area called Marche. Part of Basile’s tale takes place in the magician’s kingdom in “Lagotorbido,” or Lake Torbido in northeastern Italy in the region of Emilia-Romagna, the region just north of Marche, Italy. Massignon states that The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off is from Lower Marche (Massignon xlvi) and notes that she has found versions of the tale in Upper and Lower Brittany in the northwest (Massignon 267). The tale likely started in Brittany and migrated toward central France over time according to this pattern. Hibbard Loomis claims the latter tale as a member of its collection of romantic magical tales, as it clearly comes out on top with its magnetic Medieval appeal. In any case, ultimate power was handed off to women during the undisputed era of the origin of these tales, during the Middle Ages. Women, including Saint Agnes, with their “female wildness” were understood to be “uncanny” by nature, which prevented them from becoming orderly members of society (Ludwikowska). Women were perceived as troublesome, “wild, unchecked, and governed by rules other than those of the world inhabited by men” because they were prone to sin while “producing pure life out of an impure act, the mixture of the sacred and profane, was what made them creatures of so much interest to medieval patriarchal societies” (Ludwikowska). Women were pigeonholed into a supernatural “female zone” because they were neither inferior nor superior to men (Ludwikowska).
Saint Agnes is otherworldly because of her natural strength and power to defend herself. The sister in The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off is the namesake, yet despite how some readers may interpret the tale, she has agency and power over her brother when she refuses to speak to him about her false crimes and since she is solely in possession of the ability to heal him. The queen in Lu Tradimentu, however, does not possess much independence and is healed by “the Blessed Mother herself” (Zipes 474). Penta in Basile’s tale has absolutely no power. It is curious that in spite of the grand amount of power offered to women in the era of these tales, the women in these tales, except for The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off, do not possess any of it. In this manner, neither Knedler nor Hibbard Loomis have winning methods of etiology when it comes to categorizing these tales, also keeping in mind that Suchier’s tale is not magical despite being set in a religious period. Perhaps neither of them looked in the right direction when it came to classifying the origin of the Maiden Without Hands tale type.
Hibbard Loomis and Knedler, while worthy competitors for the claim of knowing the origin tale of the Maiden Without Hands tale type, should have focused more on a different structural analytical method outside of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index of folktales and fairy tales (mftd.org). Basile’s tale classifies as 706B, a variation of the umbrella 706, because Penta “sends to her lecherous lover (brother) her eyes (hands, breasts) which he has admired;” the sister in The Woman With Her Hands Cut Off is difficult to place outside of 706 along with Suchier’s tale, the latter lacking the proper magical restoration; Lu Tradimentu falls under 706C prime, as the servant does the killing and not the father (mftd.org). It seems that these tales cannot cooperate under one particular category or etiological synopsis. Perhaps the only lucrative measurement of the relationship among these tales is found in their motifs listed in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature (Massignon 293). The seven themes selected by Massignon which apply universally to all of the tales in the Maiden Without Hands tale type are as follows: hands restored (Massignon 295-296); slanders (Massignon 299-300); the calumniated wife, the lowly heroine marrying the prince, the prince finding the maiden in the woods and marrying her (Massignon 300); the outcast wife reuniting with her husband and children (Massignon 301-302); and finally twins (Massignon 302). Even so, all four of these tales, excluding the story of Saint Agnes, share the theme of the calumniated wife and of the reunion; as for the other themes, they are spread out in different orders among the tales. Although this is the most promising avenue for classifying these tales, it does not explain their precise origin, nor is it even completely reliable in practice.
Perhaps the “Maiden Without Hands” tale type is too special for categorization like the powerful women that most of them feature, and the only way in which its origin is to be properly understood is through the imagination, the mind’s ability to mix the enigma of magic and the fantasy world of literature into the harsh world of reality, hoping to find an explanation for why humans are not invincible.
Works Cited
“706: The Girl Without Hands.” Multilingual Folk Tale Database, Aarne-Thompson-Uther
Classification of Folk Tales, mftd.org/index.php?action=atu&act=select&atu=706.
Basile, Giambattista, and Jack Zipes. “The Maiden Without Hands.” The Great Fairy Tale
Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, edited by Jack Zipes,
Norton Critical Edition ed., W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., New York, NY, 2001, pp.
512–518.
Cowdy, Cheryl. “Resistant Rituals: Self-Mutilation and the Female Adolescent Body in Fairy
Tales and Young Adult Fiction.” Bookbird, vol. 50, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2012, pp. 42–52.
Hibbard Loomis, Laura Alandis. “Emare.” Mediæval Romance in England: A Study of the
Sources and Analogues of the Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances, Burt Franklin, New York,
NY, 1924, pp. 23–33. Burt Franklin Bibliographical and Reference Series #XVII.
Knedler, J.W. “The Girl without Hands: Latin-American Variants.” Hispanic Review, vol. 10, no.
4, Oct. 1942, pp. 314–324.
Ludwikowska, Joanna. “Uncovering the secret: medieval women, magic and the other.” Studia
Anglica Posnaniensia: International Review of English Studies, vol. 49, no. 2, June 2014,
p. 83+.
Massignon, Geneviève, editor. Folktales of France. Chicago, Illinois, The University of Chicago
Press, 1968.
Pitrè, Giuseppe. “The Betrayal.” The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè,
edited by Jack Zipes and Joseph Russo, 1st ed., Routledge, Abingdon, United Kingdom,
2008, pp. 472–475.
Suchier, Hermann. “La Fille Sans Mains - Ystoria Regis Franchorum Et Filie In Qua Adulterium
Comitere Voluit.” Romania, vol. 39, no. 153, 1910, pp. 61–76.
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