For my blog: Plato's Nightmare / Aesop's Dream (Discovering images of disability in folklore and classics of literature), I'm considering writing an entry on the image of the disabled story-teller as a recurring motif in stories, themselves -- stories about storytelling.

I have seen mention in several places that the "original Mother Goose" was Bertha Broadfoot, or, in Latin: Regina pede aucae (The Queen with the Goose-foot), the Eighth Century Queen of the Franks.

I find this excruciatingly tantalizing, because of my emerging theory about the role of "monsters" as living omens, and how "monsters" were originally those born with deformed or missing limbs (and also as creatures who were "mixes" of different animals in one). The problem is, all the references I can find lead back to the same Wikipedia article, which is both a stub, and lacking in references.

So I was hoping someone here on Mudcat could point me to more fleshed-out legends of the queen, and how she became linked to "Mother Goose."

Whether or not there is any historical basis for the legend, or whether the figure of fairy tale and nursery rhyme could ever be attached to a living woman is unimportant to me. What I'm after is the role she's played in the imaginations of people through the centuries.

Help?