my next cloth clay doll idea....

A fairy Tale doll....

I love the idea of a creation of a fairy tale..goddess called Idun....

Nordic....Iðunn

Iðunn (possibly meaning "ever young"or "rejuvenator") is a goddess in Norse mythology.

a keeper of apples and granter of eternal youthfulness

Iðunn is identified as descending from elves,

as one of "Ivaldi's elder children" and as a dís who dwells in dales.

In the dales dwells,
the prescient Dís,
from Yggdrasil's
ash sunk down,
of alfen race,
Idun by name,
the youngest of Ivaldi's
elder children.

Iðunn is introduced in the Prose Edda in section 26 of the Prose Edda book Gylfaginning

keeper of an eski

(a wooden box made of ash wood and often used for carrying personal possessions)

within which she keeps apples.

The apples are bitten into by the gods when they begin to grow old and they then become young again

Gangleri states that it seems to him that the gods depend greatly upon Iðunn's good faith and care.

In the book Skáldskaparmál, Iðunn is mentioned in its first chapter (numbered as 55) as one of eight ásynjur (goddesses) sitting in their thrones at a banquet in Asgard for Ægir.

Iðunn is referred to as "the maid who knew the Æsir's age old cure",

"the gods' lady", "ale-Gefn", "the Æsir's girl-friend"

Iðunn appears a final time in the Prose Edda in chapter 75, where appears in a list of ásynjur.

notes:

Apples and fertility

"Brita as Iduna" (1901) by Carl Larsson.

Some surviving stories regarding Iðunn focus on her youth-maintaining apples. English scholar H. R. Ellis Davidson links apples to religious practices in Germanic paganism.

She points out that buckets of apples were found in the 9th century Oseberg ship burial site in Norway and that fruit and nuts

(Iðunn having been described as being transformed into a nut in Skáldskaparmál)

have been found in the early graves of the Germanic peoples in England and elsewhere on the continent of Europe which may have had a symbolic meaning and also that nuts are still a recognized symbol of fertility in Southwest England.

Davidson notes a connection between apples and the Vanir, a tribe of gods associated with fertility in Norse mythology, citing an instance of eleven "golden apples" being given to woo the beautiful Gerðr by Skírnir, who was acting as messenger for the major Vanir god Freyr in