Frau Holle Quotes

When the people came to America they brought us with them. They brought me, and Loki and Thor, Anansi and the Lion-God, Leprechauns and Cluracans and Banshees, Kubera and Frau Holle and Ashtaroth, and they brought you. We rode here in their minds, and we took root. We travelled with the settlers to the new lands across the oceans.

The Mordvinic material on this Goddess speaks for itself and requires very little analysis that hasn’t been done already. Ange Patyai completes and reinforces this chapter’s topics perfectly. The Slavic Mokosh / Paraskevi can be inferred to be a close relative of the Mordvin Ange Patyai, and perhaps more distantly to Frau Holle and the Cailleach. She was a Goddess of fertility, birth, and of the guardian spirits assigned at birth (which could share many qualities with her). She had a major winter festival in November or December, but was probably celebrated prominently during the warm half of the year as well - thus casting doubt on any simplistic generalizations about her seasonal nature.

This is one reason why the Aarne-Thompson Classification system of fairy tales exists. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a system that catalogues various international fairy tale types. In the context of the Russian Baba Yaga and German Frau Holle, for example, it is known that both of these figures appear in Aarne-Thompson Type 480: The Spinning Woman by the Spring.