The doll that pooped gold coins...

 In a very interesting essay at The Guardian, Germaine Greer discusses the practical uses of "old wives tales."

The first collector of popular tales for print is known to us now as Gianfrancesco Straparola, who was connected with the Venetian publisher Comin de Trino. As "Stra-parola" means something like "crazy talk", we may be sure that this was not the real name of the author of the Piacevoli Notti (1550–1556). ..  The Straparola stories are pretty good examples of the kinds of stories old peasant women tell...

At bedtime she brings the doll close to the fire, takes off its clothes, lays it on a woollen cloth, and, putting a little olive oil in the palm of her hand, gently massages its belly and lower back. Then she wraps it in the softest cloths she can find and lays it in bed beside her. She has not finished her first sleep when the doll begins to cry, "Mamma, mamma, caca!" .. Adamantina gently asks the doll to wait until she has spread her apron under its bottom. The doll bears down and fills the apron with gold coins. This she does night after night, and the orphan girls have all their modest needs supplied...

The king, riding by on his way to the hunt, feels a call of nature, gets down from his horse and voids his bowels. His servant can find nothing better to offer his majesty to wipe his behind on than the rag doll. No sooner has the king thrust the doll between his buttocks than it bites him hard and will not let go. Try as they might, the courtiers cannot detach the doll, which not only sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into the royal rear, but uses its hands to twist and wring the king's sonagli (his hanging bells) until he sees stars. To cut the old wives' story short, Adamantina hears of the king's plight, comes to fetch her beloved doll, ends the king's agony and marries the king, and they live happily ever after...

This is not one of the Straparola stories that his aristocratic successors chose to imitate. It stems directly from rural living conditions, in which the management of human waste is essential, complex and demanding. Where there are no toilets, no nappies and no piped water, babies' attendants simply hold them clear of tables or chairs or other people as they excrete. When they can toddle, little girls are dressed in skirts with no knickers and little boys in split trousers, as they gradually learn how to tell what they need to do and where to squat to do it, but there are many accidents along the way. A story like this keys into the manifold anxieties connected with toilet training and with the management of a small baby, which often fell to an older child, when its mother was needed elsewhere...

The object is to amaze and appal, to stretch the limits of the child's imagination. The story often turns on preoccupations of women – impregnation, pregnancy, childbirth, childloss, rape and domestic violence – in various coded forms...

An old wives' tale is the same thing as a winter's tale. Winter was the season of long, dark evenings, when most peasant families had to huddle together indoors with no light but what came from the fire. When Shakespeare called his play The Winter's Tale, he was deliberately invoking the imaginative realm of the rambling tales told by firelight, of the jealous husband, the rejected child, the princess brought up as a peasant, and the king's son in disguise...

Every child attending a parish church would have witnessed the burial of women who had died in childbirth, some with their newborns in their arms, others with babies not yet born. The fact that nobody discussed such matters with children would have made the events all the more frightening. Evidence of the terror of virgins marrying men who had buried several wives can be found only rarely, and then in devotional literature. The only other place it could be expressed was in encoded form in fantastic fables. Charles Perrault is credited with the invention of the story of Bluebeard, which is clearly indebted to folk tales. If we consider that a nobleman was more likely to have married very young wives than a peasant (who needed a grown woman with her full complement of skills) and that these women endured their first pregnancies at the ages of 14 and 15, we can see at once that marriage to a nobleman was a high-risk business...

Much more at the interesting link.  Image credit (Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (Little Red Riding Hood) , 1846 - Lithograph by Jacques-Eugène Feyen) Old Book Illustrations.