forthegothicheroine: russianladieshistory-daily: @historicwomendaily celebration week: Favorite My
forthegothicheroine: russianladieshistory-daily: @historicwomendaily celebration week: Favorite Myth or Mythical Woman ↳ Vasilisa The Beautiful Vasilisa The Beautiful is a folk and fairy tale about the girl of the same name. According to it a merchant had a single daughter, who was known as Vasilisa the Beautiful. When the girl was little, her mother died. On her deathbed, she gave Vasilisa a tiny wooden doll with instructions to give it a little to eat and a little to drink if she were in need, and then it would help her. After a time, her father remarried; the new wife was a woman with two daughters. Vasilisa’s stepmother was very cruel to her, but with the help of the doll, she was able to perform all the tasks imposed on her. One day the merchant had to embark on a journey. His wife sold the house and moved them all to a gloomy hut by the forest. One day she gave each of the girls a task and put out all the fires except a single candle. Her older daughter then put out the candle, whereupon they sent Vasilisa to fetch light from Baba Yaga’s hut. The doll advised her to go, and she went. While she was walking, a mysterious man rode by her in the hours before dawn, dressed in white, riding a white horse whose equipment was all white; then a similar rider in red. She came to a house that stood on chicken legs and was walled by a fence made of human bones. A black rider, like the white and red riders, rode past her, and night fell, whereupon the eye sockets of the skulls of the fence began to glow. Vasilisa was too frightened to run away, and so Baba Yaga found her when she arrived in her mortar. Vasilisa had to perform multiple tasks for Baba Yaga to earn the fire - such as cleaning the house and yard, washing Baba Yaga’s laundry, and cooking her a meal. She was also required to separate grains of rotten corn from sound corn, and separate poppy seeds from grains of soil. The doll completed the task for Vasilisa. When Baba Yaga returned she explained the riders’s identities: the white one was Day, the red one the Sun, and the black one Night. She sent Vasilisa home with a skull-lantern full of burning coals, to provide light for her step-family. Upon her return, the coals brought in the skull-lantern burned Vasilisa’s stepmother and stepsisters to ashes, and Vasilisa buried the skull according to its instructions, so no person would ever be harmed by it. Later, Vasilisa became an assistant to a maker of cloth in Russia’s capital city, where she became so skilled at her work that the Tsar himself noticed her skil and later married Vasilisa. I love this story. It’s like if Cinderella’s fairy godmother was Baba Yaga. -- source link
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