Mammadraga
Sicily · The islands
Sicily, the Palermo area and the centre-west
Mammadraga — man-eating ogress of the Sicilian fairy tales: a gigantic and voracious old woman who threatens to devour the children and the young protagonists, lives in isolated houses, gardens and caves, possesses magical objects, and can be outwitted by the heroine's cunning.
- Variants and dialect names
- Mammadraga, Mamma-draga, Mammadràa; sister figures: the Vecchia dell'Orto, the Sicilian orca
- What is told
- Man-eating ogress of the Sicilian fairy tales: a gigantic and voracious old woman who threatens to devour the children and the young protagonists, lives in isolated houses, gardens and caves, possesses magical objects, and can be outwitted by the heroine's cunning.
- What it was forthe author’s reading
- Interdiction of the outside and unknown space for children; dramatisation of the passage to adulthood; at times a substitute figure for the stepmother or the mother-in-law, carrying the hostile charge that in rural society could not be expressed directly.
- Where it is attested
- Giuseppe Pitrè, Fiabe, novelle e racconti popolari siciliani, four volumes, 1875, collected directly from the popular women narrators — the most famous of all Agatuzza Messia.
- Caution
- The material available online comes from a blog that reproduces Pitrè's texts: the ultimate source is sound, but I have not checked the Pitrè text in the original. The comparison with the Greek Empusa is an interpretative juxtaposition, not a documented filiation.
The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.