From the Forest (2 page)

Forests to these northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories (or, as they are perhaps better called in German, the
Märchen)
, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and the source of these tales.

Modern scholarship has taken a number of approaches to this material, which presents a delightfully insubstantial and tricky body of work. Two approaches that I will mention here have been a Jungian psychoanalytic approach (arguing that the tales resonate for children, and adults too, because they deal in archetypes, in universal experiences, usually sexual ones), and a global ethnographic approach, which finds tropes from the tales in every culture everywhere; both these and other ways of looking at the stories are illuminating, but tend to lose the specificity of place. What is interesting to me is not the ways in which the tales of the Arabian Nights or of the Indian sub-continent or of the indigenous Americans of the Great Plains are the
same
as the stories collected and redacted by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and published initially in 1812, but the ways they are
different
.

The fairy stories from, for instance, the Arabian Nights do demonstrably have many of the same themes and narrative sequences as those in the Grimm brothers’ collections, but they are not the same stories. One of the great services that the great Grimm expert Jack Zipes
⁴
has done is to show how ‘site specific’ fairy stories are. To put it at its most basic, in the Arabian Nights the heroes do not go out and get lost in the forest, or escape into the forest; this is because, very simply, there aren’t any forests. But it goes deeper than this – they do not get lost at all; the heroes either set off freely seeking adventure – often by boat, like Sinbad the Sailor – or they are exiled, escape murder (rather than poverty), or are abducted. Children do not get lost in deserts; if they wander off, which they are unlikely to do because of the almost certain fatal consequences of being lost alone in deserts, they can be seen for as far as they can roam. Children get lost in cities and in forests. As I will discuss later, forests are places where a person can get lost and can also hide – losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies.

Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention.

It cannot be by chance that the three great monotheist religions – the Abrahamic faiths – have their roots in the desert, in the vast empty spaces under those enormous stars, where life is always provisional, always at risk. Human beings are tiny and vulnerable and necessarily on the move: local gods of place, small titular deities, are not going to be adequate in the desert – you need a big god to fill the vast spaces and speak into the huge silence; you need a god who will travel with you.

It cannot be simply accidental that Tibetan Buddhism emerges from high places, where the everlasting silence of the snows invites a kind of concentration, a loss of ego in the enormity of the mountains.

It cannot be totally coincidental that the joyful, humanistic polytheism of the classical Mediterranean – where the gods behave like humans (which means badly), and humans may become gods, and heroes (god-human hybrids) link the two inextricably, and metamorphosis destabilises expectation – arose in a terrain where there was infinite variety, where you can move in a matter of hours from mountain to sea shore, where islands are scattered casually, and where one place is very precisely not like another.

Less certainly, but still suggestively, the gods of the Vikings, far north in the land of the midnight sun and its dreadful corollary, the six months night, are unique in being vulnerable. Most myths and legends look forward to a final triumphant consummation at the end of time; but Viking gods and heroes cannot offer much reassurance for all the noise they make, and they will march out to Ragnarok with only a slim chance of victory and a tragic certainty of loss.

I am not comparing the forms of religious myth, legend and folk tale (although sometimes, as in Ovid’s
Metamorphosis
or some parts of Genesis, we can see all three merging together). I am just trying to give some better-known examples of how the land, the scenery and the climate shape and inform the imaginations of the people.

I believe that the great stretches of forest in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonishing biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get to anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairytales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is – over and over again – the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to ‘happy ever after’.

These themes informed the stories and still inform European sensibility, sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, concepts of freedom and rights, and particularly the idea of meritocracy – that everyone, regardless of their material circumstances, has an inner self which is truer than their social persona, and which deserves recognition – are profoundly embedded in the fairy story. You may be a beggar, but truly you are a princess; you may be seen to be a queen, but truly you are a wicked witch; you may have been born a younger son, but your real identity is as a king. Intellectually, these are modern radical ideas of the Enlightenment, but imaginatively they are already there at the core of the fairy stories. With them, growing out of the same root, I think, goes the ideal, so baffling to many other cultures, that romantic love, as opposed to parental good sense and a dowry system, is the best basis for marriage. Or at a less high-flown level, even up to the present day, stepmothers, despite so many people growing up with them, are still
always
wicked: culturally, to be a birth mother is good and to be a stepmother is at best highly problematic.

In Britain we often like to see ourselves as Sea People, island dwellers, buccaneers and Empire Builders; most British people like to emphasise their Celtic or Viking origins – and this self-image is probably enhanced by the new Britons who have more recently come across the oceans and settled. We tend to obscure the fact that, essentially, most of us are predominantly Germanic. This denial is made easier for us by the fact that until the modern period there was no Germany; but the waves of settlers who pushed the Celts westward were all Germanic – among them, the Angles and Saxons whose language is the basis of English. We share deep roots and cultural similarities with the people of northern Europe, as politically we are beginning to acknowledge. To help with this, I tend to use the word ‘Teutonic’, a wider, less nationalised term than ‘Germanic’, to describe those cultural phenomena we draw from this tradition. This includes our fairy stories. At our deep Teutonic roots we are forest people, and our stories and social networks are forest born.

Now the forests themselves are at risk. About 5,000 years ago the process of deforestation began. With the discovery of iron working, the process speeded up because wood in its raw state does not burn hot enough to smelt; charcoal, however, does. To produce sufficient charcoal, as well as to meet the other human needs like grazing, hunting and timber production, forest management began. Overall, the earlier phases of such management reduced the area covered by the forests but extended their biodiversity. Over the following centuries the forests came under increasing pressure. The growing population and its needs required ever-increasing quantities of both arable land and fuel. The agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century increased the value of ploughed land, and through enclosure, agriculture encroached further on the forest and radically changed the psychological experience of space and view. The Industrial Revolution destroyed forests to create cities, transport systems, mines and factories – and the development of coal mining did not relieve this latter need because so much timber was needed for pit props and subsequently for railway tracks. In the UK, deforestation reached its limits immediately after the 1914-18 war. There is now very little ancient woodland still flourishing.

Nonetheless, the forests that remain are strange and wonderful places with a rich natural history, long narratives of complex relationships – between humans and the wild, and between various groups of human beings – and a sense of enchantment and magic, which is at the same time fraught with fear.

One problem about forests, especially ancient ones, is that they are chaotic from even a fairly short distance away. Their inhabitants knew intimately both the value and beauty of their woods, as well as the real dangers that lurked there. But from the point of view of an absentee landlord, ancient woodlands are non-economic; grubbing out patches of useless old trees and bringing the area under the plough was an obvious way of increasing rental income. The Industrial Revolution needed the wood but not the forests: well-managed plantation was an obvious way of increasing productivity. An unexpected development was the introduction of two opposing forms of ‘fake’ forest – the supposedly economically viable monoculture of mass forestry tracts on land that was never going to prove sufficiently profitable agriculturally; and the beauty of ornamental woodland – the parks, large gardens and arboreta of the rural upper classes. But forests, like fairy stories, need to be chaotic – beautiful and savage, useful and wasteful, dangerous and free.

Somewhere I picked up some of that horror about forests. When I was writing
A Book of Silence
I discovered that I was avoiding forests and their silences because I was frightened. Startled, I took myself off to Glen Affric – one of the remaining fragments of ancient pine forest in Scotland – to challenge and examine my fear. The forest was very beautiful, in a weird and ancient-feeling way. I discovered that, in reality, it was not ‘fear’ that I experienced, but something rather stranger. Glen Affric is famous for its lichens; they trailed from the birch and rowan trees like witches’ tresses, long, tangled and grey. Perhaps initially it was that image which triggered an unexpected response: the forest gave me the same set of feelings and emotions that I get when I first encounter a true fairy story. For me, this is a visceral response and hard to articulate – a strange brew of excitement, recognition and peril, with more anticipation or even childlike glee than simple ‘terror of the wild’ because of the other sense that this is somewhere I know and have known all my life. The hairs on the back of my neck do not actually rise as the cliché would have it, but I know exactly what the phrase is trying to express.

I have always had a strong imaginative reaction to fairy stories. As an adult, I have read a lot of them and a lot about them. It was not hard to recognise the almost identical feeling that the Glen Affric forest gave me, but it was surprising. Naturally, then, I was intrigued by my so similar responses. I started to think about this, and have come to realise that these feelings do have a real connection, lying buried in the imagination and in our childhoods, as well as in the more regulated historical and biological accounts.

I grew up on fairy stories. Luckily for me, from early childhood my parents read to us widely and they also told us stories. Although, like all oral storytellers, they moulded and edited the stories to their own ends, they did not – as I remember it – make up new stories for us, but gave us a wide range of traditional ones – history stories,
⁵
Bible stories, and, particularly in my father’s case, classical myths. But fairy stories have some big advantages for parents with six children because they are age appropriate for nearly everyone; they can be shifted and altered to match the moment’s need; there is a fairly even balance of male and female characters; they are mercifully short; and they are memorable.

‘Once upon a time,’ the stories would begin . . . no particular time, fictional time, fairy-story time. This is a doorway; if you are lucky, you go through it as a child, aurally, before you can read, and if you are very lucky, you become a free citizen of an ancient republic and can come and go as you please.

These stories are deeply embedded in my imagination. As I grew up and became a writer, I found myself going back to them and using them, retelling them ever since, working partly on the principle that a tale which has been around for centuries is highly likely to be a better story than one I just made up yesterday; and partly on the deep sense that they can tell more truth, more economically, than slices of contemporary social realism. The stories are so tough and shrewd formally that I can use them for anything I want – feminist revisioning, psychological exploration, malicious humour, magical realism, nature writing. They are generous, true and enchanted.

My parents also gave us an unusual degree of physical freedom and space. We were allowed to go out into the big bad world and have adventures, both rural ones and – more surprisingly for middle-class children in the 1950s – London ones. I have not fully worked out the connection here, but it feels important to make a note of it.

I honestly do not remember when I became aware that there were mediators of these parental gifts – printed fixed versions of these stories. At some point I must have learned that they were different sorts of stories from Joseph’s coat of many colours, from Helen’s great beauty, and from Drake’s game of bowls. By the time I reached that recognition I had also begun to separate out the different strands. Well into early adulthood I thought of the Classical Myths as being somehow superior to the fairy stories, more important and more dignified; more grown-up indeed, because adults around me read Greek mythology, admired and encouraged references to it, and thought the acquisition of Latin a necessary part of education, but to the best of my knowledge then, fairy stories were for the children. I suspect that this was both a learned response to my adults’ preference for high over popular culture, but also, with the best will in the world, it is impossible to tell Greek mythological stories without at least hinting at sexual shenanigans of a pretty exotic kind, while this element can be much more efficiently repressed in fairy stories. Sex seemed highly grown-up and sophisticated to me then. It probably was not until 1979, when Angela Carter’s
The Bloody Chamber
taught me a thing or two, that I realised just how sexy the bog-standard fairy story could really be.