Talk:Tatterhood

As I heard it, the king was dying and had two sons. The crown prince proposed to the pretty sister, but she turned him down and said that Tatterhood should be the new queen. —Qit el-Remel 06:29, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

I think there's more to the girl-on-a-goat icon than this story. For example, "Count Bruhl's Tailor" is an apocryphal tale about a tailor to the famous Heinrich Count von Bruhl (see Wikipedia). The fellow contrived to get himself invited to one of the count's demimonde-famous parties, but the tailor's social over-reaching became the theme of the party and the tailor was humiliated to find an image of himself riding a goat as the centerpiece. References to tailors are sometimes an encoding of effeminate/homosexual men (e.g., a "tailor's beard" is a thin/sparse growth), so perhaps putting the tailor where a girl's likeness might be expected was a double slight. Anyway, the image seems in both instances to be a metaphor for ambition beyond reasonable expectations. Images of girls/women astride goats go back quite a way beyond the references in this entry, and I'm not sure they're confine to Scandinavia, though if they were, that would raise interesting questions. The astrological goat, Capricorn, is related to the virgin, Virgo, and the bull (or wild ox, or unicorn), Taurus, as "air" signs, meaning they combine to tell a story. Notice that the unicorn becomes very goat-like in its European evolution.-User:garybeac —Preceding comment was added at 17:26, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

This story is also the title of the book, Tatterhood and other tales, edited by Ethel Johnston Phelps and published by the Feminist Press at The City University of New York. added 5:40, 17 july 2009. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jodyberenblatt (talk • contribs)