From the Forest Read online

  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.

  And as I learned these distinctions about genre, I also learned to distinguish between different sorts of fairy stories and different ways of telling them. Quite early I discovered that I did not like Hans Andersen’s stories. I knew they were fakes: they were too pious, too complicated and often too sad as well – all traditional fairy stories, I knew, have happy endings, it is one of the central codes of the genre. Oscar Wilde’s got nearer to the real thing, but they only worked when they were read, not told; Tolkein was like that too, and also he wanted you to care about, rather than identify with, particular characters in longer sagas, and there was always an inexplicable sense that he was up to something else, even when he touched some deep roots.

  Gradually I came to recognise that the best fairy stories are very ancient and originally oral and that you are allowed to retell them at whim and in your own way. Eventually, probably not until my teens, I became conscious that a large number of the most popular fairy stories had been recorded from verbal narrators by two German linguists, brothers called Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: ‘Rumplestiltskin’, ‘Snow White’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and, of course, ‘Cinderella’. They published a first collection of 86 tales, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in 1812 and went on adding stories until the seventh and final edition, in 1857, contained 210 stories.

  The Grimm brothers have come in for a good deal of criticism more recently, and much of it is justified. Specifically, while they inferred that these stories were collected verbatim from oral story tellers, simple local peasants, particularly old women, we know now that their sources were more often second hand, the stories gleaned from their middle-class social circle, although usually with a claim that they had first heard them from a servant or old nurse. Jacob and Wilhelm themselves, despite their linguistic and ‘scientific’ ethnographic intentions, edited the stories heavily, shifting their focus and making them more Christian, more family orientated, less explicitly sexual, more nationalistic and more sexist. One nice little example of this tendency is the fact that in the 1812 version of ‘Rapunzel’, the witch learns about the girl’s princely visitor when Rapunzel wonders why she is growing fat, not having been taught about pregnancy. In the later editions, Rapunzel gives the game away by a slip of the tongue – she asks the witch why the witch is not as heavy as the prince to haul up on her long plait – thus becoming more innocent but more stupid to make the plot better suited to the nursery.6

  Another criticism is of their ‘nationalism’. They believed there was a distinct ‘German’ tradition, rather than a wider European one. They had a debate, for example, as to whether Sleeping Beauty was properly German, rather than ‘too French’ (the story had already been retold in a more literary form by Charles Perrault in 1697). Drawing on more ancient Germanic myths, they concluded that the trope was entirely Teutonic, and included the tale. Perhaps the reason why we imagine all those princesses being blonde (golden haired) is because their Teutonic character is so well embedded in the Grimm versions. Oddly enough, in the stories themselves blondness is very seldom mentioned – and many a princess (like Snow White) is explicitly dark haired. Certainly both brothers saw all the aspects of their work as a contribution to a common culture and shared historical understanding in the political cause of the unification of Germany; however they were deeply democratic and, indeed, lost jobs because of the radical tendency of their politics. We all know why individuals working at a similar period for the unification of Italy tend to be seen as heroes while their German equivalents are vilified, but we need to be careful with such a post-Nazi viewpoint.

  The brothers also had various more personal agenda which surfaced in their editing: they emphasised the good but absent father (theirs died, and this changed their lives from idyllic to penurious overnight) and the cruel, malignant stepmother, who seemed, under the pressure of poverty and bereavement, to have banished the sweet, warm mother of their infancy. The editing work continued throughout the brothers’ lifetimes, partly in response to direct requests from readers to eliminate material that was perceived as being inappropriate for children, and partly because Wilhelm, who became increasingly responsible for the work, wanted to add a wash of Christian piety to it.

  I acknowledge the basic facts behind these criticisms, but, for me, these do not outweigh the extraordinary potency of the collection. The timing was good – I suspect that within decades it would have been impossible to have collected the stories even as indirectly as they did; the capacity for such easy telling was already diminishing. There is no British collection with this sort of authority. However much the supposedly pure stream of rural peasant culture was diverted and canalised, it was not allowed to get totally lost or desiccated. As Jack Zipes shows in his powerful contemporary translation and annotation of the Complete Works (Vintage, 1987 and 2002) (from which all the Grimm quotations in this book are drawn) they captured a language so unscholarly and vigorous, as well as an authentic narrative form, that the oral origins of the stories are made transparent without fuss. One of the major claims for an oral tradition, as opposed to a literary (printed) text, is that it is amenable to change, to an editing process that makes it accessible to new listeners, over and over again: told stories are impregnable against copyright law – no one can own or claim them. Every teller may, and does, change the story in reaction to individual understanding and a particular audience. Jacob and Wilhelm started their work on the Märchen as an academic and linguistic sideline to their serious study of German etymology, but their audience wanted something more domestic, and more child orientated – and they provided it, just as many doctoral students have edited their theses to make a publishable book. This reactive process has gone on freely ever since. Even when writers acknowledge the Grimm brothers as their source, they do not feel constrained by them. In the Grimm version, Cinderella’s stepsisters were not ‘ugly’; they were ‘fair of face, but vile and black of heart’ and there was no fairy godmother, but a little white bird in a hazel tree.

  In relation to my book, the Grimm stories have a singular and important advantage: precisely because of their much-criticised nationalistic agenda, they stand a good distance away from the universalising global approach not only of modern scholarship, but of many important collections of fairy stories: Andrew Lang’s ‘colour’ (Red, Blue, Lilac, etc) series is proudly drawn from any and all traditions, stirring up a rich brew of Arabic, Indian and European tales without distinction, a notable and proper project at the height of Empire, but one which nonetheless disguises and even edits out local specificity. Because the Grimm brothers were deliberately and determinedly seeking out a Teutonic folk culture, they emphasise Germanic aspects. And one of the central aspects of the northern European fairy story is that it takes place in the forest.

  It is surprising how seldom this is noticed. When I have discussed my book with other people, even experts, they have expressed surprise at my claim that the forest is of primary importance in these tales. But in fact, over half the stories (116 out of 210) in the 1857 edition7 explicitly mention forests as the location of some part of the story, and at least another 26 have very clear forest themes or images. For example, a story about a woodcutter or huntsman who, during the story, does not actually leave his house, or about a central animal (a wolf) or a tree (often a hazel), suggests to me that a forest is implicitly the location of the story. (The others are set in a wide variety of locations – often other agricultural settings, like farms, fields or mills; a few in towns; several in castles, palaces or other houses; some in clearly imaginary non-realistic places; and a couple in heaven. There is also a substantial number of usually shorter tales where there is no clue at all about the ‘scenery’.)

  Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Colum has suggested8 that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when peop
le could read and be productive after dark, something very fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children. In this century, our projected tenderness or sentimentality towards children, as well as our somewhat literalistic addiction to scientific realism, has made us more and more unwilling to expose the young to the violence and irrationality of the forest and its stories. If we are honest, we know very well that children do not actually wish or need to be protected from this: at the physical level, one of the things that children like best is to be allowed to wander off, alone or with each other, into the woods and have adventures; and at the imaginative level, they are delighted when Hansel and Gretel push the witch into her own oven or the wicked stepmother is forced to dance in red hot iron slippers until she is dead. I suspect it is our own sense of refinement and culture, our pride (and our own self-protective fear because we do not want our children standing in judgement over or even laughing too much at us), that we are protecting, perhaps dishonestly.

  The whole tradition of story-telling is endangered by modern technology. Although telling stories is a very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats ‘narrative loss’ – the inability to construct a story of one’s own life – as a loss of identity or ‘personhood’, it is not natural but an art form – you have to learn how to tell stories. The well-meaning mother is constantly frustrated by the inability of her child to answer questions like ‘What did you do today?’ (to which the answer is usually a muttered ‘nothing’ – but the ‘nothing’ is a cover for ‘I don’t know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose a story shape on the events’). To tell stories, you have to hear stories and you have to have an audience to hear the stories you tell. Story telling is economically unproductive – there is no marketable product; it is out with the laws of patents and copyright; it cannot easily be commodified; it is a skill without monetary value. And above all, it is an activity requiring leisure – the oral tradition stands squarely against a modern work ethic. One of the unexpected things we have learned from anthropology is the extraordinary quantity of ‘down time’ that hunter-gatherer societies enjoy – the hours and days they spend just sitting around and talking, singing, chilling out. Even in medieval Europe, the most humble worker laboured for shorter hours and on far fewer days of the year than we – despite all our ‘labour-saving devices’ and regulated maximum hours – can easily imagine. Traditional fairy stories, like all oral traditions, need that sort of time – the sort of time that isn’t money. This is probably one reason at least why they were so readily handed over to children – socially, we can accept that children have ‘free’ time. Unfortunately, they do not have many of the other attributes that good story telling requires, like accurate memory, audience sensitivity, critical but affectionate listeners and good role models; the social separation of generations and age groups has added to this problem. (It is all in the telling: there is no event so thrilling that it can’t be made dull by bad narrative, and no event so trivial, senseless or petty that cannot rivet attention when narrated by a good teller.)9