The charming fairy tale of _La Belle au Bois dormant_ is the gem of the
collection. Its popularity is as great at the present day as it was two
hundred years ago. I have called the reader's attention in a marginal
note to the first mention probably of seven league boots,[54] but I
reserved for the Appendix some observations upon the earliest mention
of Ogres and Ogresses. The Baron Walkenaër, in his letters already
quoted, has, I think successfully, combated the earlier notion that the
word Ogre was derived from a classical source. He deduces it from the
Oigours or Igours, a Turkish race mentioned by Procopius in the sixth
century. Some tribes of Oigurs established themselves in the Crimea,
and their language was called "Lingua _Ouguresca_" by the Italian
merchants who first traded with them. In the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries all Tartars were confounded under the name of Oigurs. When
the Magyars, a Tartar tribe from the banks of the Wolga, overran Dacia
and Pannonia, the names of the ancient Huns and of the ferocious Oigurs
were united to designate them. They were first called Hunnie-Gours,
and their country Hunnic-Gourie, from whence Hongrois and Hungary. The
atrocities committed by and attributed to the Oigurs spread horror and
alarm throughout Europe. Their cruelties to infants, in which they have
been only equalled by the barbarous Sepoys in the recent calamitous
events in India, took especial hold of the imaginations of those to
whose care children were specially entrusted, and the appellation of
Oigur or Ogre became synonymous with that of cannibal, or any other
ferocious monster in human form. In Roquefort's _Glossaire de la Langue
Romaine_, Ogre is also derived from the same source. That "l'Huorco"
of the Italians, the Orco of Bojardo and Ariosto, may be derived from
the Latin Orcus, according to Minucci, as Mr. Keightley imagines, I am
not prepared to dispute. Such curious coincidences are common to all
who have wandered in the mazes of etymology; but I will merely suggest
that it is quite as probable that Orco and Huorco were also derived
from Oigur, the name by which the Tartars of the Crimea were known to
the Italians as early as the twelfth century, as we have already seen.
Florio, however (1598), says, "Orco as Orca, a _sea_ monster," which
the Ogre never was.
Spinning with the distaff is the oldest form. A wheel appears in
illuminations of the fourteenth century, but the woman hent stood
to her work. The more modern spinning-wheel, at which women sit,
was invented in 1530, by a citizen of Brunswick, named Jurgen. For
illustration of the accident to the Princess, it is perhaps worthy of
remark that in the Pyrenees and western provinces of France the spindle
is sometimes pointed with iron. "It is thus," says Mr. Akerman (the
author of a paper on the Distaff in the _Archæologia_, vol. xxxvii.),
"rendered a stiletto, with which the woman could defend herself." The
same antiquary informs us that "the art of spinning in its simplest and
most primitive forms is yet pursued in Italy, where the women of Caià
still twirl the spindle unrestrained by that '_ancient rustic law which
forbade its use without doors_.'" So that the father of the Sleeping
Beauty had a sort of precedent for his "Must not spin with spindles
Act."
The Germans have a version of this story called _Briar-Rose_: vide
Grimm's _Kinder und Hausmärchen._