From the Forest (7 page)

In addition, birch is used for wickerwork, for specialised articles like helms, wheels and parts of barrels; for dyes and medicines. Birch oozes a natural oil called betulin, which gives birch bark its silver colour and is also the principal ingredient of ‘wintergreen’, the old-fashioned cream for aches and pains (the botanical name for ‘birch’ is
betula
); birch is also used in the making of gunpowder and, bizarrely, contemporary omelette whisks.
¹³
Above all, its fermented sap was the original Gaelic
uisge beatha
, the ‘water of life’, a popular and potent drink before grain whisky stole the honour and the title.

Curiously, beech trees are almost entirely absent from folklore. They have little place in legend, and virtually nothing in the way of associated customs or proverbs. Birches, on the other hand, are magical trees: Druids claimed them as the sister tree to the oak; witches’ broom sticks were traditionally made out of birch, and so, in some parts of the country, were maypoles. Birch trees, together with fish, are among the very few items from the natural world that cross over, with their positive magical attributes intact, between the fairy stories of the Celtic and the Teutonic traditions.

In fairy stories, individual trees are always strongly positive forces, but there are no beech trees; there are birches, oaks, limes (linden), ash, willows, pines, larches, junipers and above all hazels, but no beeches. Given that the beech is so well established in Germany, this cannot simply be a translation issue.
¹⁴

So although I walked happily that day in the dancing spring sunshine along the limestone ridge in Gloucestershire and enjoyed myself and admired the beech woods, I recognised an underlying resentment. The beech trees were imperious and very beautiful . . . but so were wicked stepmothers. Being ‘the most lovely of all’
¹⁵
may not make you good, may not make you the heroine or the natural princess. Perhaps that is more precisely the difference I am struggling to express: the beech may be the queen, the symbol of English woodland, but the birch is the princess, the heroine of our woodland fairy stories.

Much of this, of course, is of necessity imaginative speculation, because the dissemination of fairy stories is at least as complicated as the dissemination of tree species. Oliver Rackham says that we cannot even imagine how the wildwood (the wood before any human interventions) may have looked, and we cannot reproduce or recreate it. I believe the same is true of the fairy stories. By the very nature of an oral ‘text’ you can only know how it was
this
time, the time you heard it. Field anthropologists have become sensitive to the fact that asking someone in an oral culture to tell you a traditional story will distort the story; the teller will mould the story to the listener’s expectations – at least as far as such expectations are understood. This is not deliberate deceit or secrecy; it is the job of a story teller to do so.

A written text is fixed from the moment of its inscription. Because it is a physical object, we can usually date it with some accuracy, both by the language and often, too, by its physical manifestations – its graphology and the actual materials it is made of (for example, is it carved in stone, pressed into clay, written on parchment or paper?). Because it was written into an immediately fixed form, we can also often know who wrote it and, in some cases, learn about the text through what we know about the author, and vice versa. None of these ways of de-coding the history of a written text works for an oral story, which is just a murmur of air, invisible and flexible. And since the art of oral story telling has, to a very large degree, been lost, we cannot even reconstruct such stories out of our own collective experience of telling and hearing them. Many historians believe that memory itself has changed with the shift to literacy – that we learn and remember things in a different way today from how we did in the past.

This is made more difficult still by a deep disagreement about the origins of fairy stories. As I discussed in the previous chapter, broadly similar themes and tropes emerge in stories from a number of highly disparate cultures, but the stories themselves are, so to speak, site specific. There are, basically, two schools of thought to account for the similarities: the first suggests that the stories deal with such fundamental human dilemmas, issues and problems that they arise spontaneously and independently in any given human culture. The other theory is that each of the stories is disseminated through telling, handed on from traveller to traveller, and that each new audience becomes a teller – a sort of anthropological ‘six degrees of separation’. To be honest, I don’t think either version really quite adds up, though I have no better theory to offer.

In fact, there is a good deal of disagreement about the emergence of any of the forms of expressing the imagination. Currently, anthropologists and social geographers suggest that all art began with ritual and arises initially out of a religious rather than an aesthetic response: the cave paintings of southern France or Central Eastern Africa (or anywhere else) were more fundamentally about hunting rituals than about interior decor. The idea, put too simply, is that first there was ritual, repeated ceremonies to placate, please or manipulate the gods. The life-and-death importance of these ceremonies made it crucial that they were practised correctly each time, and to make this simpler, rhythm developed – eventually supported by percussion instruments (usually some sort of drum) which punctuated the rituals and assisted their correct repetition. Rhythm developed into music. Both visual and narrative images came later – first, solid objects (sculpture), then representation (two-dimensional metaphors for three-dimensional realities); first, songs, then poetry, then stories.

As far as we can tell, oral tradition stories fell into three categories: myths, which dealt with religious matters; legends – heroic tales with some claim to historical truth; and fiction – stories that were not meant to be believed, at least at a surface or literal level, whether or not they revealed profound metaphorical truths of one kind or another. However, it is surprisingly hard to distinguish between the three.

It is, for example, impossible to know exactly how and in what way people understood the truth of some very ancient stories. Did the Hebrew people believe in Adam and Eve and the snake in the way that contemporary fundamentalists seem to? It seems unlikely: after the second chapter of Genesis, the name Adam occurs only twice in the whole Hebrew Scriptures, on both occasions in poetry, and both times meaning ‘humanity’, without any explicit moral message and no reference to the story itself. Eve is never mentioned at all, even in the laws and instructions enjoining obedience and submission on women.
¹⁶
Similarly, it is clear that many sophisticated Greeks and Romans did not believe in the myths or in the deities described by the myths, but still believed the stories were worth retelling, enjoying and referring to in a broader cultural way – as Ovid does in the
Metamorphosis
.

Because hagiography emerges in a similar cultural context and contains some surprisingly similar tropes to fairy stories, it is worth wondering exactly how medieval Christians understood these stories about saints. Some of the saints were clearly historical figures, and a good deal was known about them biographically. But others distinctly lacked plausibility. Margaret of Antioch was one of the most popular saints in northern Europe (judging by the number of Church dedications to her); did her devotees really believe that she was swallowed by a dragon, but that her purity disgusted the monster so much that he opened his mouth and let her walk out through his throat – thus making her an appropriate patron of women in childbirth? Did the women who certainly did seek the prayers of St Uncumber believe, in our contemporary sense, that this Spanish princess of no known historical period got out of her marriage by growing a miraculous beard overnight – and that she would, in exchange for a handful of oats, get rid of other women’s unsatisfactory husbands too? Certainly European hagiography shares an extraordinary number of themes and scenes with fairy stories. Are these legends, or fictions, or something in between that we lost a sense of with the rationalism of the Enlightenment?

A great deal of work has been put in over the last two centuries trying to work out exactly what we have got with the body of fairy stories; but the results are surprisingly meagre and unsatisfactory. Folklorists and anthropologists have come up with various ways of taxonomising fairy stories and their parallels in other cultures. The two most popular analyses at present are the Aarne-Thompson system, which tries to organise fairy stories according to specific motifs in their plots, and Vladimir Propp’s morphological approach, which analyses the stories by the function that various character types and actions perform. Both systems are extremely complex (the Aarne-Thompson system ends up with 2,399 different types of fairy story, which hardly seems terribly useful, although, to be fair, this does include a range of stories that might not immediately meet some criteria of a ‘fairy story’) and, more problematically for me, they inevitably look for what is common to the diverse, worldwide stories, as opposed to what is specific to any particular story. In fact, neither system has even come up with a working definition of a fairy story.

One problem, which brings our fairy stories at least back within the shades of the woods, is that we have no ‘virgin stories’, or true fairy wildwood. Once a story has been recorded in any form at all, it moves out of the oral space in which it originally evolved. Throughout the historical era fairy stories have always existed in two forms – the oral stories, and the literary versions of them. What is unclear is how much the literary versions affected the oral versions, as well as, more obviously, the reverse. Just as beech trees and, for totally different reasons, Norwegian spruce were inserted into already existing woods, so literary retellings of fairy stories may well have fed back into the existing tales, altering them in ways we do not fully understand. In her wonderful book
The Forest of Mediaeval Romance
,
¹⁷
Corinne Saunders examines the magical forests of high literary culture that shares so many elements with the fairy story, but is completely different. And not just different in tone and style – in the romances there are virtually no children (never mind children as protagonists); in the fairy stories, there are virtually no sword fights or battles. The heroes of romance have names and ‘back story’; in fairy stories, even the principal characters seldom have names, and when they do, they are often simply descriptive (Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood) or generic (John, Gretel, etc.). In the Grimms’ stories, practically no one goes mad; in the romances from Merlin to
Orlando Furioso
, madness is a regular occurrence. In fairy stories there is, ultimately, no such thing as unrequited love and remarkably little infidelity; in the romances, both of these are almost a necessity. Nonetheless, it is obvious that the two forms have affected each other. By the time the demotic fairy stories were being collected they had incorporated elements drawn from literary romance – sometimes satirically.
¹⁸

Before Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began their project, writers did retell fairy stories, but they did so in a literary and conscious manner; they did not try to replicate the rhythms, forms or morals of the oral tradition. Charles Perrault (1628 – 1703) is often treated as one of the earliest ‘collectors’ of fairytales, but he did not see his own work in that light. He was throughout his life a committed ‘modernist’, arguing the superiority of French contemporary literature over the classics (‘Even Homer nods’ was a catch phrase of his). He saw himself as laying the foundations for a new literary genre, French rather than Greek. Although his fairy stories were drawn from pre-existing oral tales, he developed them for sophisticated court-based readers in a highly literary manner. The great innovation that the Grimm brothers introduced was the attempt to replicate the form and language and rhythm (rather than the narrative content) of oral fairy stories. This is why it is slightly odd that they are so criticised now for editing and altering the stories to make them accessible to a new group of readers – bourgeois children whose reading materials were strictly mediated by adults. This is what, to the best of our knowledge, the tellers of stories within the oral tradition have always done.

I am suggesting that we walk in all the forests with a double map: a rich, carefully researched but still incomplete map of the history (economic, social and natural) of woodland that spans not just centuries but millennia; and a second map which relocates the forest in our imaginations and was drawn up when we were children from fairy stories and other tales. To make everything even more difficult, the first map is a palimpsest: the older history has been scraped off by biological scientists over and over again and rewritten in the light of new discoveries – with details like ‘beech trees were . . . were not . . . were indigenous’. The second map is a magic map, which shifts and changes every time you try to use it to find out where you are, where you came from and where you might be going.

And to add to the already heady mixture, it is so very pretty in Saltridge beech wood in the springtime. The light shifts and dances; although it is too early in the year for real butterflies, the pairs of freshly emerged beech leaves look like butterfly wings, and quiver on the wind like green butterflies. There is so much to look at, so much to learn, and yet at the same time it is all supposedly ‘natural’ and easy and our home and heritage. It feels hardly surprising that Hansel and Gretel got lost.

Suddenly, as we walked, chatting comfortably, a very bad thing happened, just like in a fairy story: a vicious dog, not very large, but necessarily a great deal larger than Solly, hurled itself down the track, growling, and for no reason whatsoever attacked the poor puppy. In the ensuing melee, including a reckless but heroic rescue in the finest traditions of medieval romance by my friend, there was a good deal of human and dog blood shed, a great deal of noise, and a real sense of shock. The attacking dog was no wolf, and no doubt his owners were not witches – although we felt they were wickedly casual about the whole episode – but the abrupt ferocity and the unexpected change of mood from golden to wild and threatening added to the confusion that the walk was making me feel.