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, born a German princess, adopts the national costume of Romania, with distaff and spindle.]] Weaving begins with spinning. Until the Spinning Wheel was invented in the 14th century, all spinning was done with Distaff and Spindle (see those entries for technical details and history). In English the "distaff side" denotes a woman's role in the household economy. In Scandinavia, the stars of Orion's Belt are ''Friggjar rockr'', "Frigga’s distaff". In pre-Dynastic Egypt, ''nt'', ( legend of the Spider Woman , of Teotihuacan origin. In Greece the Moirae (the "Fates") and among the Norse the Norn s are the three Crone s who control Destiny , and the matter of it is the art of spinning on the distaff the thread of life. Ariadne , a consort of Dionysus in Minoan Crete, possessed the spun thread that led Theseus to the center of the Labyrinth and safely out again. In the following Age, Penelope the faithful wife of Odysseus was a weaver, weaving her design for a shroud by day, but unravelling it again at night, to keep her suitors from claiming her during the long years while Odysseus was away. Penelope has a high lineage that melds human and divine, and is she perhaps secretly Odysseus' own weaving goddess-nymph, like the two weaving enchantresses in the ''Odyssey'', Circe and Calypso . Helen is at her loom in the '' Iliad ''. Among the Olympian s, the weaver goddess is Athena , who punished the impious pretensions of her acolyte Arachne by turning her into a weaving spider. The daughters of Minyas, Alcithoe , Leuconoe and their sister, defied Dionysus and honored Athena in their weaving instead of joining his festival. A woven Peplum , laid upon the knees of the goddess's iconic image, was central to festivals honoring both Athena, at Athens, and Hera. Homer dwells upon the supernatural quality of the weaving in the robes of goddesses, and every writer reaching for a heroic style after him imitated an analogous passage. In the terrible tale of , a North French tale-teller ('' Trouvere ''), assembled a collection of stories entitled ''Les Vangiles de Quenouille'' ("Spinners' Tales"). Its Frame Story is that these are narrated among a group of ladies at their spinning. 's Iconographic choice evokes the womanly link between the two worlds.]] Romans continue to regard the processes of spinning and weaving with reported the superstition "if, while riding a horse overland, a man should come upon a woman spinning, then that is a very bad sign; he should turn around and take another way." (''Deutsche Mythologie'' 1835, v3.135) Among the Celts, the healing goddess Brigid is a spinner. The Scandinavian "Song of the Spear", quoted in " Njals Saga ", gives a detailed description of Valkyries as women weaving on a loom, with severed heads for weights, arrows for shuttles, and human gut for the warp, singing an exultant song of carnage {Link without Title} . In Germanic myth the spinner is Holda , whose patronage extends outward to control of the weather, and source of women's fertility, and the protector of unborn children, without ever losing her role as the patron of spinners, rewarding the industrious and punishing the idle. Holda taught the secret of making Linen from Flax . An account of Holda was collected by the Brothers Grimm , as the Fairy Tale " Frau Holda ". Another of the Grimm tales, "The Spindle, the Shuttle and the Needle", which embeds social conditioning in fairy tale with mythic resonances, rewards the industrious spinner with the fulfillment of her mantra: "Spindle, my spindle, haste, haste thee away, and here to my house bring the wooer, I pray." ::''"Spindel, Spindel, geh' du aus,'' ::''bring den Freier in mein Haus.''" It recounts how the magic spindle, flying out of the girl's hand, flew away, unravelling behind it a thread, which the Prince followed, as Theseus followed the thread of Ariadne , to find what he was seeking: a bride "who is the poorest, and at the same time the richest". He arrives to find her simple village cottage magnificently caparisoned by the magically-aided products of spindle, shuttle and needle. (See link.) In Baltic myth, Saule is the life-affirming sun goddess, whose numinous presence is signed by a wheel or a rosette. She spins the sunbeams. The Baltic connection between the sun and spinning is as old as spindles of the sun-stone, amber, that have been uncovered in burial mounds. Baltic legends as told have absorbed many images from Christianity and Greek myth that are not easy to disentangle. The Finnish epic, the '' Kalevala '', has many references to spinning and weaving goddesses. In later European folklore, weaving retained its connection with magic. The daughter who could spin straw into gold and was forced to demonstrate her talent, aided by the dangerous earth-daemon Rumpelstiltskin was an old tale when the Brothers Grimm collected it. , painted from 1888 - 1902]] In Alfred Tennyson 's poem " The Lady Of Shalott ", her woven representations of the world have protected and entrapped Elaine Of Astolat , whose first encounter with reality outside proves mortal. William Holman Hunt 's painting from the poem (''illustration, left'') contrasts the completely pattern-woven interior with the sunlit world beyond the roundel window. On the wall, woven representations of Myth ( Hesperides ) and Religion (Prayer) echo the window's open roundel; the tense and conflicted Lady of Shallott stands imprisoned within the brass roundel of her loom, while outside the passing knight sings "'Tirra lirra' by the river" as in Tennyson's poem. A high-born woman sent as a hostage-wife to a foreign king was repeatedly given the epithet "weaver of peace", linking the woman's art and the familiar role of a woman as a dynastic pawn. A familiar occurrence of the phrase is in the Early English poem '' Widsith '', who "had in the first instance gone with Ealhild, the beloved weaver of peace, from the east out of Anglen to the home of the king of the glorious Goths, Eormanric, the cruel troth-breaker..." In Inca Mythology Mama Ocllo first taught women the art of spinning thread. In Tang Dynasty China, the weaving goddess floated down on a shaft of moonlight with her two attendants, showed to the upright court official Guo Han in his garden that a goddess's robe is seamless for it is woven without the use of needle and thread, entirely on the loom. The phrase "a goddess's robe is seamless" passed into an idiom to express perfect workmanship. EXTERNAL LINKS
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