Queens: H

Habetrot (Fortune)

My daughter’s spun seven, seven, seven,
My daughter’s eaten seven, seven, seven,
And all before daylight.

We who live in dreary den,
Are both rank and foul to see;
Hidden from the glorious sun,
That teems the fair earth’s canopie:
Ever must our evenings lone
Be spent on the colludie stone.

Cheerless is the evening grey
When Causleen [the star] hath died away,
But ever bright and ever fair
Are they who breathe this evening air,
And lean upon the self-bored stone
Unseen by all but me alone.– Habetrot and Scantlie Mab

British goddess of spinning and healing. The wearer of her garments would never suffer from sickness. She basks in the sun and lives in a flowery knoll in a field by a stream shaded with woodbine and wild roses. In Habetrot and Scantlie Mab she takes the form of an old, disfigured woman weaving lint into yarn for a young girl with her sister Mab: Intoxicating One, an old woman with grey eyes and a long hooked nose who reels in the yarn, and a group of spinsters all seated on colludie stones, busy with distaff (staff on a spinning wheel for holding wool or flax) and spindle (rod or pin that turns around used in spinning to wind and hold thread) under the earth. When the girl brings the yarn home she attracts the attention of a laird (landowner under grant of the king), and he marries her because he needs a good spinner. Habetrot tells her. ‘Bring your bonny bridegroom to my cell,’ said she to the young bride soon after her marriage; ‘he shall see what comes of spinning, and never will he tie you to the spinning-wheel.’ The bride leads her husband the next day to the flowery knoll, and tells him look through the self-bored stone. He sees Habetrot dancing and jumping a rock, while the weavers kept time with their spindles. She opens a door concealed by the roots of an old tree, and invites the pair to come in and see her family whose lips are all disfigured by spinning. At least they tried to say so, but one grunted out ‘Nakasind [Cotton] ’, and another ‘Owkasaánd’, while a third murmured ‘0-a-a-send.’ The laird promises his wife will not spin and so become disfigured. (45, 73, 236)

[French Ministry of Education Site: Centre national de documentation pédagogique]