Mother Goose
Mother Goose,legendary female figure often associated with fairy tales. Some scholars believe her origins may lie in the stories and representations of Queen Blanche (d. 783), the mother of Charlemagne, called ‘La Reine Pédauque’ for her large, flat, goose‐like foot. Others have connected her with the Queen of Sheba (also sometimes represented with a webbed foot or a mermaid's tail), or with the classical sibyls, or with St Anne, the good, wise grandmother of the child Jesus. All of these figures are ambiguously associated with story‐telling, spinning, and female, sometimes bawdy mystery.
Whatever her origins, Mother Goose was certainly linked with fairy tales in France. They were often referred to as ‘contes de ma Mère l'Oie’ (in a letter Mme de Sévigné wrote her daughter in 1674, for example); Charles Perrault used the phrase as the subtitle of his 1697 collection
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