#anne in ireland

[aimeedaisies]

Princess Anne at the Department for Business and Trade’s Northern Ireland Business Summit Reception held at Hillsborough Castle, Northern Ireland on 13th September 2023.

[aimeedaisies]

Princess Anne is wearing the Empress Marie Feodorovna’s Sapphire brooch!

Empress Marie received to brooch from her sister and brother in law, the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) on her marriage to the future Emperor Alexander III of Russia in 1866.

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Marie’s family was in tatters. Her son, Emperor Nicholas II, was murdered alongside his wife and children, and the Russian monarchy was abolished completely. Minnie managed to flee to Denmark, and this brooch was one of the jewels that remained in her possession after the revolution.

After she died in 1928, Marie’s daughters, Olga and Xenia, were tasked with handling their mother’s extensive jewelry collection. They decided to sell numerous pieces at auction. The sale was handled by Hennell and Sons, an English firm. Appropriately, one of the auction’s interested buyers was Queen Mary of the United Kingdom, wife of Marie’s nephew, King George V. Mary purchased the sapphire, diamond, and pearl brooch from the estate on October 3, 1930, paying £2,375 for the piece (which exceeded the brooch’s auction estimate, set between £1400 and £1900).

The brooch became a part of Queen Mary’s own extensive royal jewelry collection. She liked to wear these types of brooches pinned at her throat.

In 1953, Queen Elizabeth II inherited all of Queen Mary’s jewels, including the brooch. She wore it to several occasions;

The Epsom Derby in both 1963 and 1964

Several times to the Chelsea Flower Show

In 1977, HM for one of the festivities celebrating a very important milestone: her Silver Jubilee.

In 1995 for a landmark visit to New Zealand, during which she delivered a formal apology in person for the nineteenth-century Invasion of the Waikato.

Empress Marie Feodorovna’s Sapphire Brooch | The Court Jeweller

2 December 2022 Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Patron, the Mary Peters Trust, attended a Dinner to mark the Fiftieth Anniversary of Dame Mary Peters’ Olympic Gold Medal Win, Europa Hotel, Great Victoria Street, Belfast, and was received by Dr Nigel Carr (Deputy Lieutenant of County Borough of Belfast). 📸: Local Women Magazine

[strawlessandbraless]

Ireland while the whole Monarchy celebrates the coronation of King Charles III

[alexiasleftoversalmon]

Proud to be Irish!!! SO HAPPY FOR THESE GIRLS 🥹🍀🇮🇪

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Becoming Jane (2007, Julian Jarrold)

28/09/2024

[princesssarisa]

I've still been reading Heidi Ann Heiner's Cinderella Tales From Around the World. I've just finished reading all the variants from Ireland, Scotland, and England.

Here are the patterns:

*In Gaelic variants (e.g. two Irish versions and one Scottish), the heroine and her two sisters typically have names that describe their appearance or demeanor, with the sisters' names implying that one is blonde and the other brunette. For example, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, or Fair-Hair, Brown-Hair, and Mangy-Hair, or the Fair Maid, the Swarthy Maid, and the Snow-White Maid.

*As usual, it varies whether the heroine is abused by a stepmother and stepsister(s) or by her own mother (or both parents) and sister(s), or just by her sisters alone, and whether there are two (step)sisters or just one. In the three Gaelic versions with hair-themed naming, the girls are biological sisters, though in The Snow-White Maid, the Fair Maid, the Swarthy Maid, and Bald Pate Their Mother, they're half-sisters and Balt Pate is the Snow-White Maid's stepmother.

*It seems far more common in these versions for the heroine and her (step)sister(s) to be princesses. This has sometimes turned up in other countries' variants so far, most notably in Finette Cendron, but so far the British Isles seem to have the biggest number of Cinderellas who are princesses by birth.

**In the Irish Fair, Brown, and Trembling, not only is Trembling seen by her own prince at church, but the fame of her beauty spreads throughout the world, and all the princes of Ireland come to see her, as do princes from other countries like Spain and Greece. They all want to marry her and agree to duel for her hand after the slipper fits her, but after four days of fighting they all concede to the prince who first fell in love with her.

*The heroine's magical helper is either an old woman or an animal in these variants, and if it's an animal, it's almost always either a black sheep or a red calf. The beginning of one Irish version explains that black ewes were considered good luck.

**In almost all the versions with an animal, as in the Grimms' One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes or French tale of The Blue Bull, the (step)mother sends the heroine out to pasture each day with barely anything to eat, hoping to slowly starve her, but the animal magically provides her with good food.

**As usual, the animal companion tends to be killed by the (step)mother, but unusually, it doesn't stay dead in these variants. Instead, after the heroine gathers up the bones, the animal comes back to life, limping because the heroine lost one shank bone, but otherwise none the worse for wear. There are also some variants where the animal doesn't die at all. In one Scottish version, the heroine is ordered to behead the calf herself, but instead she kills her sister (!), takes the calf and runs away.

*In both Irish and Scottish versions, the special event the heroine attends is always church, not a festival or party. Several versions take place at Christmas and have her attend the special Yuletide Masses.

*The old woman or animal typically not only provides the girl with finery and a horse to ride, but cooks the family's dinner for her by the time she gets back. In one Scottish version, Ashpitel, the black lamb doesn't even give her finery – she just dresses herself in her own fine clothes that she rarely gets to wear, while the magic the lamb provides is just to cook the dinner for her.

*In the Gaelic versions, the prince rides after the heroine the third time she rides away from church, and grabs her by the foot, but only succeeds in pulling off her shoe. Whereas in the Scots versions, she just loses her shoe by accident.

*In Scotland, the story (and the heroine) is most often called Rashin Coatie (a.k.a. Rashie Coat, or Rushen Coatie), because the heroine wears a coat made of rushes, or "rashes" in Scots dialect.

** It varies whether Rashin Coatie is simply forced to serve her (step)mother and (step)sister(s) at home, or whether she runs away, to escape either from a cruel family or from an arranged marriage, and becomes a servant at the prince's castle, a la Donkeyskin.

*Both Irish and Scottish versions tend to include the motif of foot-cutting to make the slipper fit, just like the German versions do. A bird alerts the prince, typically in a rhyme which says that "nipped foot and clipped foot" is riding with him while "pretty foot and bonny foot" is elsewhere. But it's not always the (step)sisters who do it. In the Donkeyskin-like versions of Rashin Coatie, where the heroine runs away and becomes a servant at the prince's castle, the rival who tries to trick the prince is a henwife's daughter instead.

**Henwives are ubiquitous in these variants. But in the Gaelic versions (both Irish and Scottish), the henwife is benevolent, often serving as the heroine's magical helper, while in the Scots-dialect Rashin Coatie variants, she's a secondary villain, with the above-mentioned daughter who aspires to marry the prince.

*The Gaelic versions usually continue the story after the heroine's marriage, and have her eldest sister (the blonde one) throw her into the sea or a lake, then take her place. But either the princess's bed stays afloat so she doesn't drown, or she's captured by a whale or a water monster that keeps her a prisoner in the deep, yet briefly lets her onto the shore now and then. A cowherd sees her and alerts her royal husband, who rescues her, slaying the whale or monster if there is one, and the sister is executed.

*There doesn't seem to be a strong tradition of localized, oral Cinderella stories in England the way there is in Ireland and Scotland. But this book does include an English literary version: The Cinder-Maid by Joseph Jacobs, the folklorist who gave us the best-known versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs.

**As usual in Jacobs' retellings of folktales, he borrows motifs from various different oral versions in an attempt to write down the "definitive" version of the tale. So The Cinder-Maid is basically the Grimms' Aschenputtel, with the three-day royal festival, the heroine getting her finery from a hazel tree on her mother's grave, the prince smearing the palace steps with tar to catch her golden slipper, and the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet. But Jacobs also includes the motifs of "finery from a nutshell" and "hollow tree opens to reveal gifts" from other versions – each dress and pair of shoes comes from inside a hazelnut from the tree, and then the trunk opens to produce a coach and horses. And the bird in the tree instructs Cinder-Maid to leave by midnight, as in Perrault. (The midnight deadline is a rare motif in international Cindrellas, despite the fame Perrault gave it; in most versions she just leaves early to ensure that she gets home before her family does.)

**In his footnotes to The Cinder-Maid, Jacobs notes the existence of Rhodopis, but he argues that the entire Cinderella story (the persecuted heroine, magical help to attend an event, etc.) most likely originated in Germany, because it was a German betrothal tradition for a man to put a shoe on his fiancée's foot. He makes no mention of Ye Xian, or the more common belief that the story was born in China from the Chinese view of tiny feet as the height of feminine beauty. This reminds me of a hypothesis I once read that maybe Ye Xian isn't really as ancient a tale as it's believed to be – that maybe the story originated in Germany, then spread to China by way of the Silk Road, and that the name "Ye Xian" may derive from the similar-sounding "aschen," the German word for "ashes" that starts every German form of Cinderella's name (Aschenputtel, Aschenbrödel, etc.). Personally, though, I don't see why the reverse can't be true: couldn't the story just as easily have travelled from China to Germany? Maybe the heroine's association with ashes started when Germans heard the name "Ye Xian" and thought it sounded similar to "aschen"!

But I'm getting ahead of myself talking about China. The next several Cinderellas I'll be reading come from Scandinavia.

@adarkrainbow, @ariel-seagull-wings, @themousefromfantasyland

[innervoiceartblog]

BEANNACHT

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The gray window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

When the canvas frays

In the curragh of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours.

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

~ JOHN O'DONOHUE

From his books, To Bless the Space Between Us (US) / Benedictus (Europe)

Ordering Info: https://johnodonohue.com/store

Cliffs of Moher - 2024

County Clare, Ireland

Photo: © Ann Cahill

[voguefashion]

Dinah Shore, Burt Reynolds, Al Pacino, Marvin Hamlisch, Ann-Margret, Roger Smith, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Susan George, Jack Jones, Felicia Farr, Jack Lemmon, Jill Ireland, Charles Bronson, Linda Blair, Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Raquel Welch & Damon Welch at the 46th Academy Awards at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, California on April 2nd 1974.

[mostunderratedawards]

Most Underrated Supporting Actress

Julianne Moore in May December

Rosamund Pike in Saltburn

Florence Pugh in Oppenheimer

Jurnee Smollett in The Burial

Anne Hathaway in Eileen 

Allison Oliver in Saltburn

Penélope Cruz in Ferrari

Marin Ireland in Eileen

[aimeedaisies]

Princess Anne unveiling a new British Legion memorial bench in Market Square, Dromore, Northern Ireland on 13th September 2023.

📸 Dromore Chamber of Commerce on Facebook

[tracksuitlesbian]

Look at us doing things! The balls of it.

[moviemosaics]

Eileen

directed by William Oldroyd, 2023

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1697 – Birth of pirate, Anne Bonny, née Cormac, in Co Cork.

Born in Co Cork, Anne Bonny was the illegitimate daughter of lawyer William Cormac and his housemaid. They immigrated to America after Anne’s birth and settled on a plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. A headstrong young woman ‘with a fierce and courageous temper’, she eloped with James Bonny against her father’s wishes. James took her to a pirates’ lair in New Providence in the Bahamas,…

[tianalaurence1]

The Lord-Lieutenant of #CountyAntrim ☘️ has received HRH The Princess Royal at @GlenarmCastle. HRH, Court Member @FishmongersCo, visited @glenarmsalmon. The Earl of Antrim, DL, the High Sheriff, Patricia Perry, & @Mayor_MEA were also in attendance @RoyalFamily #PrincessAnne

The Lord-Lieutenant of #CountyAntrim ☘️ was accompanied by his #LordLieutenantCadet, Cadet Cpl Logan Beckett of @1_NI_ACF. HRH The #PrincessRoyal also presented Adrian Morrow, Estate Manager @GlenarmCastle, with his #BEM🎖️ #AntrimLieutenancy #royalvisitni

From Twitter X-Antrim Lieutenacy

[heatherfield]

Finally watched "The Quiet Girl" and now I'm definitely tearing up.

Such a lovely, gentle movie, that's very "Anne of Green Gables" set in rural 1980s Ireland.

[princesssarisa]

In Heidi Ann Heiner's Cinderella Tales from Around the World, I've now read the few Donkeyskin tales from Spain and Portugal, followed by the more numerous versions from the British Isles.

*The book features two Spanish variants: The Ass's Skin, which strongly resembles the French versions and has the heroine become a goose girl while disguised in a donkey's skin, and The Golden Chest, which is a "princess hides in a hollow object" variant, in this case a golden chest.

**In The Ass's Skin, the princess's finery is just described as "the loveliest and most costly dresses and jewels," while in The Golden Chest, she asks her father for a gown of multicolored feathers, a gown of fish scales, and a gown studded with stars made of diamonds and pearls.

*The one Portuguese variant, The Princess Who Would Not Marry Her Father, reads like a slightly unwieldy composite of various French, German, and Italian variants. The king chooses his daughter as his bride because only she can wear her late mother's ring. Advised by an old woman who's really a fairy, she demands gowns with the themes of stars, flowers, and many colors, then finally runs away disguised in a wooden dress, which secretly holds the gowns. Calling herself "Maria Wood," she finds work tending another king's ducks; every day, when she's alone with the ducks in a field, she puts on one of her gowns. Three days in a row, the young king sees her from afar, but when asked who the "beautiful lady" was, "Maria Wood" pretends not to know. Meanwhile (whether accidentally or on purpose, it's not clear), she kills a duck each day, until the king decides she's not fit to be a duck herder and brings her into the castle as a maidservant instead. Soon afterward, three balls take place; each time Maria Wood asks to go, the king refuses and throws some object at her, and when she later attends the balls in her gowns, she claims to come from "the land of Boot," "the land of Towel," and "the land of Walking Stick." But then, after the balls, every night she secretly puts on the gowns in her bedroom. One night the king sees her through the keyhole, so he has a new key to the room made, and on a subsequent night he opens the door, catching the princess unawares in her finery. Thus the whole truth is revealed and the king and princess are married.

Next we move on to the English variants.

*Heiner includes Joseph Jacobs' Tattercoats in this section of the book, though I'm not sure why: it's not really a Donkeyskin tale, but more of an unconventional Cinderella. The orphaned heroine lives with her grandfather, a rich lord, who shuns her because his daughter died giving birth to her: he sits day and night by his window, weeping for his daughter until his tears form a channel to the sea, and letting his hair grow so long that it binds him to his chair. She grows up neglected and bullied by the servants, who call her "Tattercoats." Her only friends are her old nurse, who feeds and clothes her, and a boy who tends the geese, who plays music on a pipe that always makes her happy. One day the king gives a ball to find a bride for his son. The grandfather refuses to let Tattercoats go, but the gooseherd comforts her and suggests they at least go into town to see the lords and ladies on the way to the ball. Along with the flock of geese, they set out, dancing all the while as the gooseherd plays music on his pipe. As it happens, the prince comes riding along, and he falls in love with Tattercoats at first sight. (This is a very rare Cinderella tale where the prince falls for the heroine in her rags, though it's implied that the gooseherd's magic pipe causes it.) He brings her to the ball and proclaims her as his bride-to-be, and at that moment, the gooseherd's magical music transforms her rags into a beautiful gown and the geese into attendants for her. Thus she marries the prince, although the ending has two bittersweet notes: the gooseherd disappears and is never seen again, and the grandfather refuses to reconcile with his granddaughter, but still sits and grieves.

**I remembered this tale when I saw the concept art for Disney's Encanto that showed Abuela Alma sitting sadly by her window, with her long hair seeming to form a river. Since both stories have the theme of a troubled grandparent/granddaughter relationship that stems from the grandparent's grief (whether for a lost daughter or a lost husband), I wonder if at that early point in production, the Encanto creative team drew some inspiration from Tattercoats.

*Next, the book features three versions of Catskin. This English tale is a more straightforward variant of Donkeyskin, though without the attempted incest. It exists not only as a prose tale, but as a sung ballad: this book includes two versions of the ballad's rhyming lyrics and one prose version.

**In this tale, a rich lord wants a son, but his wife only gives birth to daughters (or, in the prose version, just one daughter), and when their youngest (or only) daughter is born, he's so disappointed and angry that he wants nothing to do with her. The girl is raised by a nurse in the country, and though her father sends her fine clothes and has her educated, he otherwise ignores her.

**When she grows up, in the two ballad versions, she just sets out to find work because her father doesn't want her and she has nowhere else to go. In the prose version, her father decides to marry her off to the first man who proposes, and he turns out to be a nasty old man, so she runs away. In all versions, though, she bundles up her elegant clothes, dresses herself in a catskin coat, and becomes a scullery maid at a young nobleman's castle.

***When three balls are held, Catskin asks to go each night, but either the bad-tempered cook or the young lord's snobbish mother refuses, and first throws water on her, then hits her with a ladle, then with a skimmer. At each ball, she claims to live at "the Sign of the Basin of Water," "the Sign of the Broken Ladle," and "the Sign of the Broken Skimmer." The fact that the young lord himself isn't the abuser obviously makes the romance more palatable for modern readers, though it means we lose the element of irony and satire from the variants where he is.

**On the third night, the young lord manages to follow the mystery lady into the forest unnoticed, where he sees her change from her gown into her catskin robe. The next say, he asks his mother for Catskin's hand in marriage, but she refuses, so he becomes gravely ill (or, in one ballad version, he feigns illness) and insists on having Catskin nurse him. She comes to his room in her beautiful gown, confirming her identity.

**Meanwhile, back in Catskin's birthplace, her mother and (in the ballads) her sisters have all died, leaving her father alone in the world. He deeply regrets having sent her away, but at last they reunite (either Catskin and her husband come to him or he learns of her marriage and comes to her), and Catskin forgives him.

*The one Irish variant included in this book, The Princess in the Catskins, is like a cross between the English Catskin and the European Donkeyskin tales. The princess's wicked stepfather seeks to marry her after her mother dies, but a fairy disguised as a horse advises her first to demand gowns of silver, gold, and diamonds and pearls, and then to hide them in walnut shells and run away in a catskin disguise. She becomes a scullery maid at another castle, attends three balls, wins the prince's love, and is identified in the end by a ring the prince slipped onto her finger.

**There's no abuse theme in this variant. Instead, the prince notices "Cat-skin's" resemblance to the lady at the ball and tries to question her, but each time she plays dumb. Then at the second and third balls, she pretends to be annoyed with the prince because she's heard that he's been speaking sweetly to a maidservant.

*There are also two Scottish variants, The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter and Margery White Coats. In both, the princess is expected to marry her father because her late mother's clothes fit no one but her. In The King... her godmother advises her to ask for gowns of swan's down, cottongrass flowers, and gold and silver, for a silver shoe and a gold shoe, and for a chest that can float on the sea. Then she sails across the sea inside the chest, reaches another country, becomes a scullery maid in a wealthy house, and wears her gowns to church on Sundays, where a prince falls in love with her. In Margery White Coats, her uncle advises her to ask for gowns of birds' down, silver, and gold, and for glass shoes, and then helps her escape to another king's palace, where she becomes a scullery maid wearing only her white petticoat and shift, but attends three royal feasts. In both, Cinderella-style, she ultimately loses a shoe, and the prince tries it on every maiden until he finds her.

*Compared to the continental European Donkeyskins, I notice that none of the British versions have the heroine's love interest abuse her in her servant disguise. If the running abuse gag is included at all, the one who inflicts it is always a woman instead, either the love interest's mother or the cook. But several British versions have the heroine be abused and insulted by her fellow servants – whether just by the cook, as in Catskin, or by the whole staff, as in Tattercoats, or as in The Princess in the Catskins, where they can see her regal bearing and bully her for "putting on airs" and where the manservants sexually harass her. This theme is much less common in the versions from continental Europe.

Next on the list of Donkeyskin tales: the versions from Scandinavia.

@ariel-seagull-wings, @adarkrainbow, @themousefromfantasyland