I was over at a friend’s house the other day and they were playing Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty for the kids. It was approaching the pivotal scene where Aurora pricks her finger on a spindle and falls into a deep sleep. This had been one of my favorite Disney films when I grew up (I even had the record) so I sat down to watch a bit. Aurora is called into the room in a trance and a spinning wheel materializes out of thin air. She approaches it, stretches her hand out, and pricks her finger on a…distaff! Yes, that’s right, in the film it’s not the spindle but the distaff that invokes the curse.
I’m guessing the idea of Maleficent proclaiming “And on her 16th birthday, the princess shall prick her finger on a distaff and die!” didn’t go over too well with the writers and would have left audiences going “Huh?”. How many people know what a distaff is? I’m betting about as many as know what a spindle is, but at least people recognize that “spindle” and “spinning wheel” somehow go together. “Distaff” is much more confusing.
Spindle (left) and Distaff (right)
So what is a distaff? It’s a tool with one flat end and one narrow pointed end. It has most commonly been used to spin flax into linen. After a rather arduous process to extract the fibrous parts of the stems out and soften them, flax was tied to the distaff. Women would then tuck the wide end into their belt and use a hand spindle (shown on the left in the picture at right) to spin thread. On a spinning wheel, the distaff is visible as the tall spire which holds the fibers that the spinner drafts onto the spindle (which lies horizontally on a spinning wheel).
Distaff also has another meaning. Because this chore was traditionally the duty of the women, the word “distaff” also came to refer to the female gender. For example, the distaff side of the family or the Breeder’s Cup Distaff (fillies and mares only).
If you’re wondering why only women performed this duty, there’s an excellent explanation of the process of preparing flax at Rootsweb.com that will make you look at linen with new appreciation. I think the men decided they’d rather be doing something funner like plowing through rock hard soil than this tedious process.
But back to Sleeping Beauty. In my imagined correction, Aurora approaches the spinning wheel in a trance. As she nears it, her hands stretches out of its own volition. Her eyes widen in futile resistance as she is pulled inexorably closer and closer…and then she bends over, overextends her wrist. and manipulates her finger so it can be flush against the spindle. Nah… I didn’t think that would work.
The Pacablogger 