From the Forest Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - March

  Airyolland Wood

  Thumbling

  Chapter 2 - April

  Saltridge Wood

  The White Snake

  Chapter 3 - May

  The New Forest

  Rumpelstiltskin

  Chapter 4 - June

  Epping Forest

  Hansel and Gretel

  Chapter 5 - July

  Great North Wood

  Little Goosegirl

  Chapter 6 - August

  Staverton Thicks

  The Seven Swans’ Sister

  Chapter 7 - September

  Forest of Dean

  The Seven Dwarves

  Chapter 8 - October

  Ballochbuie and the Forest of Mar

  Rapunzel

  Chapter 9 - November

  Kielder Forest

  Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf

  Chapter 10 - December

  The Purgatory Wood

  The Four Comrades

  Chapter 11 - January

  Glenlee

  Dancing Shoes

  Chapter 12 - February

  Knockman Wood

  The Dreams of the Sleeping Beauty

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  Copyright Page

  Also by Sara Maitland

  A Book of Silence

  For Mildred Lee Watson – the true princess.

  (No green vegetables were hurt testing this hypothesis.)

  1

  March

  Airyolland Wood

  It is dark, a soft, rustling night and not too cold. Adam, my son, and I are sitting on a moss-covered rock eating baked beans. He has pitched the small tent with the grace that goes with experience; I have heated the baked beans on the camping stove with the clumsiness that comes from lack of practice. It is dark now, and above us the branches of the trees are darker still, patterning themselves against the clouds. There is not much wind, but enough to make the branches a little restless. We can hear the burn and the branches and some other unidentifiable night noises, but it is quiet and calm. Airyolland Wood is a magical place for us and we are enjoying ourselves.

  Airyolland is a tiny triangle of ancient oak wood that clings to the side of a steep valley in Galloway. It is a little fragment of what was once a far more extensive forest and we are lucky to have it still. A small stream, crystal clear and fast, rushes down towards the river in a series of sharp little falls; each sudden drop has a miniature deep pool at the bottom of it and the sides of the pool are rich with ferns, even this early in the year. The oak trees are old and tangled, many multi-trunked from long-ago coppicing, and they are festooned with epiphyte ferns, with moss, and with epicormic twigs sprouting whiskery from the rough bark. Their buds are fattening now, but there are no leaves, and the moon, slipping out from the filigreed clouds, occasionally breaks through the bare branches. The ground is both steeply sloped and complexly humped and carved; it is scattered apparently casually with erratic boulders – some as large as garden sheds and some much smaller – pushed here by a glacier and left when the ice retreated. Immediately to the south, abutting this wood, just across the stream, is a fairly typical patch of forestry plantation, huddling up against the little wood; above it is a well-greened field with a farmhouse just out of sight. The Southern Upland Way runs through here, and – totally incongruously – the single-track railway line from Glasgow to Stranraer cuts through the bottom edge of the wood. And still Airyolland is a magical place for both of us and we are enjoying ourselves.

  As we came down from the high moor where I live earlier this afternoon, I could sense the spring pushing up the valley to meet us. There were daffodils out in the village and new lambs in the fields along the river. The hawthorn in the hedges is showing bright, pale green buttons of buds, and a wych elm on the edge of the wood is covered in tiny red-gold balls which will flower before the end of the month. In the grass on the slope as we enter the oak wood itself there are the first primroses, and underfoot the darker green shoots of what will be ransom – wild garlic – later on.

  But the trees themselves show fewer conspicuous signs: oak leafs out later than most trees, except ash,1 and the moss here is so thick and the rock so near the surface that there is surprisingly little undergrowth. The spring is coming nonetheless. Although it is still nearly ten days before we move the clocks forward, the evenings are getting longer and there are hard, pale little nubs down by the burn which will push up into fresh fern fronds over the coming month. Some of them are visibly beginning to do that exquisite fern thing: pushing up straight, sturdy stems and then uncoiling the tight spiral at the very top, so that briefly they look like Gothic bishops’ crosiers. Earlier, while it was still light, there was a new twitter of birds, and there has been no frost for over two weeks.

  We are here to catch the early sun tomorrow morning as it rises over the moor. The sun will spill light, colour and long shadows through the branches and across the green moss. That is what Adam wants to photograph. We are also here trying to learn how to work together as adults. So far so good, except that I demanded that we brought a cafetière with us, and he can hardly be expected to approve of such foppish ways, especially as he does almost all the portering.

  ‘So,’ I say, into the dark, ‘which fairy stories do you know? Do you remember?’

  ‘Goldilocks, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Snow-white. Jack and the Beanstalk.’ There’s a short pause, and then, ‘The one with the swans and the shirts, Rumplestiltskin . . . the princess with that long hair . . .’

  I am quite impressed. But it is somehow easier to remember these stories in this wood, as though the wood itself was reminding us.

  ‘Where did you learn them? Who told them to you?’ I ask.

  ‘You,’ he says. Then, ‘School perhaps. I don’t know really, I just know them.’

  We expand our list of stories, dig for the details, re-run the plots and laugh a bit at some of them – for some reason, ‘The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage’ pleases us immensely, and we chant together, giggling, a suddenly mutually recalled snippet:The bird encountered a dog and learned that this dog had considered the sausage free game and swallowed him down.

  The bird was furious and accused the dog of highway robbery, but it was of no use, for the dog maintained he had found forged letters on the sausage and therefore the sausage had to pay for this with his life.2

  This is a totally absurd little tale from the Grimms’ collection about some improbable housemates who fall out over the division of the domestic chores, and it has nothing to do with forests or magic. God knows what the psychoanalysts, or the universal folklorists, or the academic textual deconstructers, or anyone else for that matter, would make of it. It is important to remember how many of the fairy stories we do not remember; and it is worth thinking about which ones. A large number of them are funny and silly, but these do not tend to feature in the modern canon.

  Later he says, ‘OK. Tell me about the book.’

  I say, ‘Once upon a time it was all forest . . .’

  It was all forest before the last Ice Age.

  ‘Don’t call it the Ice Age,’ he says, ‘call it . . .’

  It was all forest before the last glaciations, which is why we have coal mines – every coal seam is a dead forest, but we aren’t going there now. We’re going to begin about 10,000 years ago, when the ice began to retreat. For tens of thousands of years, in places up to 3,000 metres thick, it had pressed heavily on northern Europe and America; the sea level had dropped as more and more water was frozen up in the Arctic Circle and high in the mountain ranges; glaciers had pushed down from the mountai
ns, carving new valleys with flat bottoms and steep sides. Now, gradually, it began to retreat, leaving behind a stripped land, ground down and naked.

  As the ice retreated, living things moved in from the south, opportunist as always, and greedy for space. First lichens, those great pioneers that break up land, build soils, prepare the way; and then, gradually, mosses, fungi, ferns, and, last but not least, seed-bearing plants – low scrub, flowers, and eventually, trees. It takes thousands of years to make a good forest – but they did well in this wet northern land, and flourished and spread out. And so, once upon a time it was all forest. Forest enough to be lost in it for ever.

  To be honest, this itself is a fairy story. It was never ‘all forest’. Once upon a time, before people knew how much of it had been forest, the wide open down lands of southern England and the bare hills of Scotland and the wide flat fens and the rich green shires were all thought to be ‘how it was’ – natural, timeless and somehow pure. People tended to like it, rather in the way they liked the idea that the statuary of the classical world or the interiors of the great medieval cathedrals came in pure stone, pristine and restrained, and on the whole were rather sorry to learn that originally they had been gaudily painted. More recently we realised that these open spaces had once been forested, and we took that story on board instead. Our forests grew deeper and denser – fertilised by Arthurian romances and the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows and tales of Robin Hood – until we knew that once it had indeed been ‘all forest’. And forest became the pure place of primal innocence, where children could escape from their adults, get away from the order and discipline of straight roads and good governance, and revert to their animal origins.

  But it is more complicated than that really. There was more forest than there is now, but not as much as we like to think. Oliver Rackham, the leading academic of woodland history, believes that less than 7% of Scotland was ever ancient forest and that the great Caledonian Forest is as much a story as the Merlin who ran mad in it. More importantly perhaps, large swathes of this ‘forest’ were never the untrodden tanglewood of the imagination, but were inhabited, worked, used. Much of the so-called forest was what is more properly called ‘wood pasture’ – trees more widely spaced out, standing independently in grass, like savannah, cropped not just by deer and wild boar and aurochs, but later by cows and sheep and pigs. The wild animals followed the trees and grasses northwards from Europe easily enough, because Britain was still joined to the continent by a broad band of dry land until about 7000 BCE; and by the same route, Neolithic people followed the animals. There had in fact been people in Britain before the last glaciation, but they seem to have retreated southwards, fleeing the ice and the bitter cold. Now they returned, and almost as soon as they were established they started to manage and exploit the forest – for hunting, for grazing, for fuel, for food.

  The same pattern was repeated across much of northern Europe, and indeed the people were much the same, too. The ice shrank back towards the polar regions, the forests chased it northwards as far as they could, and homo sapiens followed the forest. Right from the very beginning, the relationship between people and forest was not primarily antagonistic and competitive, but symbiotic. Until recently people could not survive without woodland, but perhaps more surprisingly, woodland flourishes under good human management – coppicing, for example, increases the amount of light that reaches into the depths of the forest, and so encourages germination and new growth and increases biodiversity. This was not wild wood that had to be ‘tamed’, but an infinite resource, rich, generous and often mysterious. The forests were protective too. Of course you can get lost in the forest, but you can also hide in the forest, and for exactly the same reason: in forests you cannot get a long view. In his history of the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar comments that the Gauls defended themselves in forts within ‘impassable woods’, although they were clearly not impassable to the Britons, whatever the Roman military made of them.3

  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 Zipes4 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.