Legendary Women in Folk Tradition

From the holy well to the battlefield, from the cradle to the throne, folk tradition has remembered women whose stories could not be contained by the official histories. The woman warrior who leads an army, the wise woman whose herbs and charms save the village, the dangerous beauty whose love destroys the hero, the woman who disobeys the king and wins — these are the legendary women of folk tradition. They are not always saints, and they are not always honoured. Often they are feared, often they are punished, often they are remembered in a form that the official culture tried to suppress. But they are remembered. The folk tradition, in this as in so many other things, refused to be silent.

This page is part of the wider survey of Folk Heroes and Legendary Figures. It explores the legendary women of folk tradition in two companion articles: one on the folk traditions around Joan of Arc and one on the legend of Lady Godiva, and it connects to the wider currents of Medieval European Heroes, Celtic saint lore, the Slavic Baba Yaga, and the West African Mami Wata.

The Recurring Patterns

The legendary women of folk tradition can be roughly grouped into a small number of recurring patterns, each of which performs a different cultural function.

The Woman Warrior

The woman warrior is the most obvious folk heroine. She fights, leads, dies. The Greek tradition remembers Atalanta, the virgin huntress who would only marry a man who could beat her in a footrace, and who lost the race — and her life — by stopping to pick up the golden apples that her lover Melanion had dropped. The Chinese tradition remembers Hua Mulan, the young woman who took her father’s place in the army and returned unrecognised after twelve years of war. The Japanese tradition remembers Tomoe Gozen, the female samurai who fought beside her lord Yoshinaka in the late twelfth century, and whose beauty was said to be enough to make the bravest warrior stumble. The Norse remembered the shield-maidens — Brynhildr, Lagertha, the unnamed women of the sagas who fought alongside the men — and the Valkyries, the choosers of the slain upon the battlefield. The Celtic tradition remembered Boudicca, the Iceni queen who burned Camulodunum and very nearly drove the Romans out of Britain. And the French tradition remembered Joan of Arc, the seventeen-year-old peasant girl of Lorraine who led the French armies to victory at Orléans in 1429 and was afterwards burned at the stake.

The woman warrior is, in the folk tradition, almost always a figure of the exceptional moment. She is not the common soldier: she is the daughter who stands in for her father, the prophetess who leads an army, the queen who avenges her daughters. Her appearance in the tale is a sign that ordinary life has broken down and that the world needs a saviour. She is also, in many cultures, the figure through whom a community is able to imagine the unthinkable: a woman in command of a male army, a woman on horseback, a woman in the council of war.

The Wise Woman

The wise woman is the keeper of herbs, of charms, of small everyday magic. She is the village healer, the midwife, the one who knows the right day to plant, the right charm to cure a fever, the right prayer to keep the fairies from stealing a baby. She is honoured, but she is also feared, and she often stands on the boundary between the human and the divine. The Celtic tradition remembers the wise woman of the Celtic otherworld as a figure of ambiguous power. The Greek tradition remembers Medea, the granddaughter of the Sun, who helped Jason to win the Golden Fleece and was afterwards abandoned by him. The Slavic tradition remembers Baba Yaga, the witch who lives in a hut on chicken legs, who can be helpful or deadly, and who is the keeper of the waters of life and death. The medieval European tradition remembers the fée, the fairy mistress, who gives a knight the love of his life and the ruin of his honour.

The wise woman is not always a healer in the gentle sense. She is also the figure through whom the human community has contact with the unseen. She sees what others do not see. She knows what others do not know. She is the medium, the prophetess, the interpreter of dreams.

The Dangerous Beauty

The dangerous beauty is the woman whose love brings ruin. The Greek tradition remembers Helen of Troy, the face that launched a thousand ships. The Norse tradition remembers Gudrun, the wife of Sigurd, whose marriage to Atli leads to the destruction of the Burgundians. The Irish tradition remembers Deirdre, the woman whose beauty was prophesied to bring ruin to Ulster, and whose flight with Naoise was the cause of the great war. The Japanese tradition remembers the kitsune, the fox-woman whose beauty is the bait for a deadly seduction.

The dangerous beauty is the figure through whom a culture tries to explain the destructive power of sexual desire. She is also the figure through whom a culture can blame a war on a woman rather than on the men who actually fought it. The folk tradition is rarely fair to her: she is the cause of the ruin, while the men are merely the instruments.

The Woman Who Disobeys the King and Wins

This is one of the most beloved patterns of folk tradition. A woman is told by a king or a father or a husband to do something, and she refuses. She defies, escapes, returns triumphant. The Greek tradition remembers Antigone, the sister of Polynices, who defied the order of King Creon to leave her brother’s body unburied. The Indian tradition remembers Draupadi, the wife of the five Pandava brothers, who was humiliated in public and whose humiliation was the cause of the great war of the Mahabharata. The Japanese tradition remembers the Crane Wife, who is a crane by day and a woman by night, and who weaves the cloth of her own body to save her husband from poverty, and is then discovered and driven away. The Chinese tradition remembers the Lotus Lantern, in which the goddess Sansheng Mu saves her mortal husband from the gods.

This pattern is, in a sense, the most subversive of all the patterns of folk tradition. It is the figure of the woman who, against the explicit order of the male authority, does what she knows to be right. The folk tradition approves of her, even when the official culture condemns her.

The Women of Specific Traditions

The Greek Heroines

Greek tradition remembered a remarkable number of legendary women. Atalanta the huntress. Antigone the sister. Medea the granddaughter of the Sun. Helen the face that launched a thousand ships. Clytemnestra the wife who murdered her husband. Electra the daughter who mourned her father. Persephone the maiden who spent half the year in the underworld and half in the upper air. Cassandra the prophetess who was never believed. The Greek tradition is, in this sense, much richer in legendary women than many other traditions, and the comparison between the Greek heroines and the heroines of other cultures is a small study in itself.

The Norse Shield-Maidens and the Valkyries

The Norse tradition remembered the shield-maidens with great vividness. Brynhildr of the Völsunga saga is the valkyrie who is imprisoned in a ring of fire on the mountain Hindarfjall, and who is woken by the hero Sigurd. Lagertha of the early Danish chronicles is the wife of the Viking Ragnar Lothbrok, who fought beside him in his campaigns and was afterwards abandoned by him. The Valkyries — Brynhildr, Sigrún, Sigrdrífa, the host of the slain — were the choosers of the warriors who would die in battle, and they were the lovers and the teachers of the chosen heroes.

Boudicca and the Britons

Boudicca (also Boadicea) was the queen of the Iceni, the tribe of what is now East Anglia, in the year 60 or 61. Her husband, King Prasutagus, had named the Roman emperor co-heir to his kingdom, hoping thereby to protect his family. When he died, the Romans ignored the will, stripped the family, and publicly flogged Boudicca and raped her daughters. Boudicca raised an army, burned Camulodunum (Colchester), Verulamium (St Albans), and Londinium (London), and very nearly drove the Romans out of Britain. She was finally defeated by the Roman general Paulinus, and she poisoned herself rather than be taken alive. The later tradition, from the Welsh bards to Queen Victoria, made her a national heroine.

The Baba Yaga of Slavic Tradition

Baba Yaga is the great witch of the Slavic tradition. She lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs, she flies through the forest in a mortar and steers with a pestle, and she keeps a mortar of water and a pestle of milk. She can be helpful: in some tales she gives the hero a magical horse, or a ball of yarn that shows him the way. She can be deadly: in other tales she eats the children who come to her door, or she imprisons the heroine in her oven. The Baba Yaga is one of the great ambivalent figures of European folk tradition, and her tale has been the subject of important work by the folklorist Vladimir Propp and by the structuralist school of comparative folkloristics.

Mulan of Chinese Tradition

Hua Mulan is the great warrior maiden of the Chinese tradition. The earliest known version of her tale is the Ballad of Mulan, a folk poem composed in the Northern Wei dynasty, sometime in the fifth or sixth century. A young woman disguises herself as a man, takes her father’s place in the army, fights for twelve years, returns home, and is recognised by her comrades only when she puts on her women’s clothes. The tale has been the subject of countless later versions, the most famous of which is the 1998 Disney animated film. The figure of Mulan has become, in the last two decades, a symbol of the independent woman in modern Chinese culture.

Tomoe Gozen of Japan

Tomoe Gozen was a female samurai warrior of the late Heian period, the companion of the warlord Minamoto no Yoshinaka. She is remembered in the Heike Monogatari of the thirteenth century as a woman of extraordinary beauty, courage, and strength, who rode into battle beside her lord and was said to be worth a thousand ordinary warriors. Her story has been retold in countless later works, and she is a major figure in the modern Japanese popular imagination.

The Indian Draupadi

Draupadi is the great heroine of the Indian epic Mahabharata. She is the daughter of King Drupada, won by the Pandava prince Arjuna in a great archery contest, and married to all five of the Pandava brothers at once. She is publicly humiliated in the court of the Kauravas, when the prince Dushasana tries to disrobe her in front of the assembly, and she is the moral cause of the great war. She is a figure of fierce intelligence, religious devotion, and unbreakable will, and she is one of the great complex female figures of world tradition.

The Mesopotamian Inanna

Inanna (the Babylonian Ishtar) is the great goddess of the Mesopotamian tradition, the queen of heaven and of love, the goddess of the morning and the evening star. She descends into the underworld, is killed, is brought back to life by the tears of the gods, and is the goddess of the cycle of the seasons. The Descent of Inanna is one of the oldest stories in the world, and it is the deep ancestor of the Western goddess traditions that run through Aphrodite, Venus, and the medieval Morgan le Fay.

The Survival of the Legendary Women

The legendary women of folk tradition have not gone away. Joan of Arc is now a major figure of French national identity, and her image has been used, in complicated and controversial ways, in modern French political rhetoric. Lady Godiva is now a name known in every part of the English-speaking world. Hua Mulan has been the subject of a 1998 Disney animated film, a 2009 Chinese live-action film, a 2020 live-action Disney remake, and a great many stage works. Boudicca has been the subject of a great many novels, including Manda Scott’s Boudica quartet, and a 2003 film. Baba Yaga has become a major figure in the modern fantasy imagination, appearing in films, novels, video games, and even a famous McDonald’s advertisement in the 1990s. The Valkyries have been the subject of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, of the recent film Thor: Ragnarok, and of countless other modern retellings. The legendary women of folk tradition are still doing the work they have always done: they are reminding us that the world is not as it has been told, and that the great stories of the past include the stories of women.