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Swedish Blonde Girl Shows Off On The Brown Antique Couch
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In the Middle Ages, blonde was usually associated with a seductress; for example, until the late 14th century depictions of Eve are usually blonde, while the Virgin Mary is usually brunette.
In the prologue to the Prose Edda, both Thor and his wife Sif (from Norse mythology) are described as fair-haired. In the Poetic Edda poem Rígsþula, the blond man Jarl is considered to be the ancestor of the dominant warrior class. In Northern European folklore, fairies value blonde hair in humans. Blonde babies are more likely to be stolen and replaced with changelings, and young blonde women are more likely to be lured away to the land of the fairies.
In European fairy tales, blonde hair was commonly ascribed to the heroes and heroines. This may occur in the text, as in Madame d'Aulnoy's La Belle aux cheveux d'or or The Story of Pretty Goldilocks (The Beauty with Golden Hair), or in illustrations depicting the scenes. One notable exception is Snow White who, because of her mother's wish for a child "...lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow, hair as black as ebony," has dark hair. This tendency appears also in more formal literature; in Greek mythology, Aphrodite, is the goddess of love and beauty and also had "golden hair" (e.g. according to an Oxyrhynchus Papyri attributed to Ibycus, Hesiod's Theogony, and also centuries later in Coluthus' "Rape of Helen").
In Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, the ideal beauty is Dulcinea whose "hairs are gold"; in Milton's poem Paradise Lost the noble and innocent Adam and Eve have "golden tresses", the protagonist-womaniser in Guy de Maupassant's novel Bel Ami who "recalled the hero of the popular romances" has "slightly reddish chestnut blond hair", while near the end of J. R. R. Tolkien's work The Lord of the Rings, the especially favourable year following the War of the Ring was signified in the Shire by an exceptional number of blonde-haired children.
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