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That old woman. She is sometimes frightening, sometimes kind, always ancient, always cunning, and she always dwells deep in the woods where children become lost. She who lives in a little house in the forest is a tale character you'll have met often. Her stories are rich and dark, and hopefully quite terrifying.
This old crone has long been a fascination of mine. My years of loving folktales have repeatedly brought me back to her. I imagine myself as her one day, if not now (though I am young still).
These three drawings are three hag grandmothers, three ancient crones of fairy tale, three faces of the same old woman. Here I have drawn her as Baba Yaga, Red Riding Hood's Grandmother, and Hansel and Gretel's Witch. These are three well-recognized guises of the old lady, and my drawings are portraits of each crone with her forest dwelling, because, as I see it, the place where this old woman lives is a vital key to understanding what she represents.
She appears as an incarnation of the crone or winter aspect of the female deities of old. She is the carrier of wisdom, the guardian of the life and death gates, the overseer of the cold months, and the stewardess of story.
We talk nowadays of long, old, particularly northern tales as sagas. But in some quarters it is believed that this word, saga, was once the feminine of the word sage and that the written sagas of Scandinavia were originally sacred histories kept by female sagas or "sayers." Thus storytelling and wisdom-keeping were entwined in one person: "She Who Speaks," the Oracular Priestess. Her appearance in orally passed-down fairy tales seems to stress the importance of story...