From the Forest (11 page)

Outlawry is an expression of a fundamental freedom which is to be found in the forest. But it is a conservative and regressive romantic freedom; it is based on some idea of ‘natural rights’, and it ends either with the restitution of the older established order, or in tragic exile and death. The Forest Outlaw is always privileged – and is allowed, even applauded for, activities that in the poor would be regarded as criminal. This too is embedded in language – a ‘villain’ is now a bad guy, a criminal, and particularly one with malevolent intent, but originally the word meant nothing more – or less – than someone at the bottom of the tidy feudal pack – a landless agricultural labourer, a ‘low born rustic’. The poor become the crooks, but the rich become adventurers.

The high-handed and noble option of the Out Law was not easily available to the poor displaced by the development of Forest Law, although it certainly impacted on them bitterly. Their resistance took the form, as it so often does, of a dark humour, even impertinence, expressed in jokes and stories.

Kings do badly in fairy stories.

This probably feels odd, even wrong, at first reading.
Everyone knows
that fairy stories are about Princes and Princesses. But they aren’t. Jack Zipes has counted. In the Grimms’ collection, there are 29 stories (out of 256) in which one of the principal characters is either a prince or princess,
¹¹
though it is rare for both of the eventual partners to be royal. There is only one story in which a king is the protagonist. And these 30 royals are outnumbered by tailors (11), soldiers (10), servants (8), and 29 other skilled tradesmen or their children. There are 78 stories in which the protagonist is a farmer, a peasant or a ‘poor person’, or the child of one. Moreover, it is easy to forget that that the Grimms’ collection includes about a dozen stories – similar in theme and structure to the more expected fairy stories – which feature saints, most often Mary, not in biblical tales, but as hagiography. If you see Joseph as a skilled tradesman and Mary as the daughter of poor parents (although, like a fairy-tale heroine, eventually becoming the Queen of Heaven itself) – which is how they were perceived for much of the Middle Ages – then this makes another half dozen stories to add to this list.

In a great many of the stories the young and the poor set about outwitting the kings. Young princes and princesses are often complicit in their father’s downfall or in subverting his plans. In story after story the King sends the lower-class hero off on impossible quests, hoping to get rid of him and keep his daughter for more profitable marriage; in story after story young women, both princesses and commoners, outwit the King to marry his son. Kings tend to be snobbish, cruel, incompetent and – in the end – outflanked.

These are stories about ‘just deserts’, not about inherited privilege; cunning as well as industry and courage are to be admired. Proud princesses get their comeuppance and the poor get rich by trickery more often than by virtue. In no stories, however, even in the pietistic editorial hands of Jacob Grimm, does anyone find happiness by becoming reconciled to their poverty – happiness means being rich and powerful as well as beloved. These are radical, not conservative, tales; stories about overcoming distressing poverty and alienation, subverting the normal social order and achieving a new life of comfort and security.

In fact, it is not just kings who come off badly in classic fairy stories – fathers do too. Fathers are closely linked to kings – as God is to the world (both Father and King), so a king is to his country and a father to his household. They have immense power and control. Following the lines from the
Peterborough Chronicle
I quoted above, the poet concludes:

He loved the stags as much
as if he were their father.

There seems to be a strong element of satire here: a king is meant to be a father to his people, not to some deer, and his fatherhood is complicated because he is caring for the deer
in order to
kill them.

Fathers tend not to get very sympathetic treatment in fairy stories in general – good mothers die and stepmothers are evilly intended, but fathers are simply useless. Unlike mothers, fathers do not die (there are very few fatherless children), they are merely negligent or absent: what on earth was Cinderella’s father doing while his new wife enslaved his own child? Or worse, in ‘Beauty and the Beast’, as in many similar tales, the father sacrifices his daughter to protect himself: the Beast will only spare his life if he promises to send his daughter along as a substitute, and even though he believes that the Beast is going to kill her, he agrees. The king-father in ‘The Seven Ravens’ weakly marries a witch he does not love and then fails to protect his children from her; he tries to hide the boys in the forest but completely mismanages this endeavour, mainly through his own stupidity.

Above all fathers, like kings, even when they are not weak or selfish, lack wisdom and discernment. They fail to notice that the youngest of the three sons is actually the hero; or that the humblest of their daughter’s suitors is actually the bravest and the best. They favour the status quo at the expense of their own real interests.

The winners in these stories are not the powerful and prosperous, but the poor – the apparently stupid, the apparently uncouth, the apparently idle. Feminist criticism has interpreted fairy stories as inherently sexist. Between the 1812 and the 1856 editions of the Grimms’ tales, the female characters do become more passive, but even the earliest versions of the stories advocate rather different moral strategies for men and women, so there is some real truth in this charge, but it has led us to overlook perhaps how profoundly anti-patriarchal they are. Kings and fathers are incompetent and often risible; they are defeated, outwitted and trapped into marriage or forced to give away half their kingdom (and presumably the other half when they die) and their lovely daughters to those whose claims rest not in their strength or power but in their cunning, their kindness and, very often, their simple good luck.

Who are these soldiers and tailors who come up the long path through the forest and create havoc in the town or castle? In their specific forms they are social characters from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the tales were being recorded. Zipes argues that the high number of soldier heroes in the Grimms’ collection is ‘most likely a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars and the vast increase of soldiering as a profession in the European population’.
¹²
In the army of this period there was an enormous divide between officers and common soldiers, who were badly paid, ill treated and commonly despised; they were regularly punished by flogging for minor breaches of discipline and attempts to desert, and sometimes even less serious failures of obedience were met with capital punishment. Their lives were miserable, and if they were wounded or recalcitrant they were dismissed without any further support or even severance pay. In eight of the ten soldier tales the protagonists are explicit about their hatred for the army, for the king whom they ‘served’, and about their desire for revenge. Another tale is about three soldiers who have deserted, which comes to much the same thing. They are desperate, dangerous and determined. Having little or nothing to lose, no investment in living a peaceful social life and no obvious future, they are fearless, cunning and inventive. They are also outsiders – in a broadly agricultural society, soldiers were displaced in the literal sense of the word: they are tramps and vagabonds, they have spent much of their life on the road, and they arrive at the scene of action by chance and travel.

The tailors, too, are transient, rootless and dissatisfied. Although there were rich master tailors in the old cities of Germany, these are not the tailors of the fairy stories. By the time the Grimm brothers were collecting their tales, the old guild and apprentice system was breaking up. Too many tailors spent much of their life as journeymen, always looking for a better, more stable position, often forced into shoddy workmanship and cost-cutting exercises, and because they were travelling on they had little to gain by establishing reputations for high-quality work. In addition, tailoring was an attractive option for young men who were neither rich nor strong, because it needed very little capital investment to set up as a tailor and the job was not physically demanding in the way that most other skilled work was. Tailors had a reputation for being cunning, dishonest, quick witted and puny.

What the two professions have in common is that they produce deeply disgruntled characters with little to gain from social norms, landless and displaced, driven by a sense of injustice, forced to travel and live by their wits, and all because of poverty itself. Tailors and ex-soldiers are the specific late-eighteenth-century version of something more universal – the dispossessed and angry poor. They do not look like hero material in any expected sense of the word to a literate society brought up on a more romantic heroism, but in fairy stories they (as part of a larger, looser group of itinerant workmen – amongst them a shoemaker, a musician, a journeyman, and a surgeon) easily outnumber the princes and the rich merchants. And they are triumphant.

They come out of the forests seeking their fortunes; they go back into the forests to find their true identity. They trick the kings and marry their daughters. They are not the ‘lumpen proletariat’; they are skilled workers on the cusp of industrialisation. In the century following the publication of the
Märchen
they will become Chartists,
¹³
trade unionists, communists.
¹⁴
The last armed insurrection in Britain, the Battle of Bossenden, took place in the ancient sweet chestnut forest of the Blean in 1838, when the agricultural workers of Kent took up arms against the royal militia. Oddly enough, their leader, the self-titled Sir William Courtenay, believed he had the magical power of immortality. They were defeated of course: the tropes of fairy stories are inspirational or consolatory, not prophetic.

It was inspirationally beautiful in the woods that May day with the bluebells and the adder and some tiny baby rabbits and my own high-minded thoughts. In a perfectly organised world I would have heard a cuckoo as I walked. This is not a wild fantasy; May is the month when you are mostly likely to hear that familiar disyllabic call echoing through the woods, and it would have fitted very neatly into my thoughts, since the bird arrives from a long journey and sneaks into the nests of other birds, tricking them into raising its young often at the expense of their own brood. It would have made a splendid analogy. But I did not hear a cuckoo that day. I was quite glad because, although my heart always lifts a bit for the very first cuckoo of the year, which really does shout out the spring, I find the incessant repetition of that strangely penetrating call rather annoying. Once a cuckoo starts, it seems able to keep it up all day. Even without a cuckoo, though, the forest was full of bird music, celebratory, joyful, exuberant. Then, when I was nearly back to my car, I heard a sound I had never heard before, a brand new bird song – an accelerating run of crisp metallic notes, ending up with a tremolo trill. (I have read it described as the ‘sound of a spinning coin on a marble slab’.) I had to listen to an audio tape later to identify it: a wood warbler, a summer visitor from tropical Africa to deciduous woods throughout Europe where the forest floor is reasonably clear of undergrowth. And when I listened to the tape, I learned something else: the wood warbler has an alternative, completely different song that it inserts, as it were, between the verses of its main one. I had heard that too in the forest, a fast sequence of intense, soft, somehow sad notes, but had not realised it was one and the same bird singing both songs in the afternoon sunshine of the bluebell woods, the King’s hunting forest.

Histories of the imagination are hard to trace and impossible to prove, but it is surely at least provocative that in Scotland, where the Crown was always much weaker and slower to move towards the new European concept of the King, there was much less afforestation – and a different sort of fairy story. The magic of the Celtic tales is deeper and grander; the heroes come with long pedigrees and noble education and they never laugh at themselves, nor at the social systems they emerge from. Merlin may roam mad in the Great Caledonian forest, but he serves the King first and foremost; despite a less-than-grandiose childhood, Arthur always was the true king by inheritance, by blood – he was no indigent soldier, no sneaky little tailor, and certainly not the ‘child of a poor man’, a servant or agricultural labourer. Merlin’s magic is a high magic, far more powerful than the little domestic magic of the old women, the witches, and the woods themselves in the classic fairy stories; but it won’t save him or Camelot or the Kingdom. The little tailor, the sly and boastful servant girl and the surly, discontented soldier, however, will become rich, sexually satisfied and in power. The Crown’s attempts to exclude them from the forest, deprive them of their traditions and keep them in their places will fail. They will sneak back into the woods, where they will learn a thing or two and emerge to claim their rights, achieve power and live happily ever after.