But, together with this discomfort, there is a more chthonic fear; forests are what Freud called heimlich unheimlich – they are uncanny. Inside most of us post-Enlightenment and would-be rational adults there is a child who is terrified by the wild wood.
Everything was very still now. The dusk advanced on him steadily, rapidly, gathering in behind and before; and the light seemed to be draining away like flood-water.
Then the faces began …
Then the whistling began …
They were up and alert and ready, evidently, whoever they were!
And he – he was alone, and unarmed, and far from any help; and the night was closing in.
Then the pattering began …
And as he lay there panting and trembling, and listened to the whistlings and the patterings outside, he knew it at last, in all its fullness, that dread thing which other little dwellers in field and hedgerow had encountered here, and known as their darkest moment – that thing which the Rat had vainly tried to shield him from – the Terror of the Wild Wood.11
Once upon a time the forest went on for ever. It is almost impossible to imagine now how continuous that forest was. In Britain the wide sweep of the downs was all forest and it ran pretty much unbroken except for the chain of naked heights along the Pennines north through most of Scotland. Every seam of coal underground represents a fallen petrified forest. In Continental Europe it was much the same: from the Mediterranean almost to the Arctic circle, except where the mountains, tundra or bog made the land so inhospitable that even alder and scrubby half-horizontal birches could not gain a roothold, the forest created a huge unimaginable sweep of silent danger. Human beings had to hack out small corners to set up home – usually clinging to the fringes, huddled on coasts or beside rivers, going into the forest as seldom as possible. Forests are enormous but they give no sense of space, because you are always in the tiny bit of forest you are in – you cannot see out. When in the eighth century Boniface went into the endless forest, which ran away beyond the Rhine through Germany, Poland and into Russia, to convert the pagans, almost the first thing he did was summon Anglo-Saxon Benedictines to set up monasteries and start singing in the silence. This was a silence that he knew needed breaking.
I knew there were wolves in the forest; there were witches in the forest; there were demons. I was haunted by the silence of the forests, which is the silence of the fairy stories. These northern European stories have their roots in the silence of the forest and are as ancient and tough as the Wild Wood itself. I did not like the idea that there was a whole silent terrain that I had not visited because I was scared. Moreover, these stories had been my territory as a writer for a long time; a great deal of my fiction, and especially my short stories, have been retelling the ancient tales, trying to pull them into the modern world and face up to what they tell us about ourselves. Thinking now about silence I had to accept that, along with feminist reinterpretation and my desire for fiction that explores universal human themes, I had been writing my own fears, my own darkness and my own profound sense that violence and beauty, risk and joy, are inextricably tangled together; and the roots lie in the forests.
I decided that I needed to challenge my fears and experience the forest and its fairy stories. The primeval forests of Europe are not monotone, and once upon a time the diverse habitats must have merged into each other smoothly from the most northern birch and alder scrub forests of Scandinavia southwards to the Via palm forests on Crete. Now, however, they tend to come in smaller and more discreet patches. I should perhaps have gone to the Reinhardswald – the great oak forest between Kassel and Göttingen in Germany. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who published their first collection of Märchen, a better name for such tales than the English ‘fairy stories’, in 1812, were professors of linguistics in Göttingen and it was here that they recorded the 800-odd local folk stories, which have become the core texts of northern European childhood. There is now a ‘fairy story route’, a long-distance walking path, through the area, leading to Sababurg Castle, Sleeping Beauty’s palace, where in the tale total silence reigned for a hundred years.
However, I found I did not want to be away for so long, and – just as I had avoided specifically religious communities when I went to Skye – I did not want my experience of the forest to be mediated too directly through a tourist-inspired interpretation. Moreover, my experience is that travelling in a country where you do not speak the language increases both the need for and the effort of communicating. Instead, I decided to go north into one of the few remaining stands of the Great Caledonian Forest, which once covered over 15,000 square miles of Scotland. There is very little of it left now and it is hard to imagine how it must have stretched on and on beyond imagination. In the north and east of its range the forest is dominated by Scots pine and in the damper west by sessile oak; but for people who have only known the modern plantations it is difficult to realise how diverse and rich the ecosystems of the forests are; ‘dominated’ should not suggest any exclusivity; the ecosystems of ancient forests are rich and diverse, with a huge variety not just of trees, but of other organisms. In Britain alone there are over 600 species of moss and as many again of lichen.
The Caledonian Forest has its own shadowy literature, particularly in the Welsh tales. Merlin, King Arthur’s magical counsellor, retreated to these woods in his madness after the battle of Arfderydd. The Caledonian Forest was, from a southern perspective, associated with madness and magic. The terror of the wild wood is older than the oldest stories, and they have grown out of it.
Now there is less than 1 per cent of the original forest, reduced to thirty-five small patches. I chose to go to Glen Affric, one of the more substantial of these remnants and famous for its isolated strange beauty – an ancient band of wood along the side of the loch and the huge ferocious hills above. It is hard to describe the isolation and harshness of the surrounding country, which somehow makes the closed-in feel of the forest itself even more intense. Among other things Glen Affric boasts the most isolated youth hostel in the country – it is eight miles from the nearest road and you are advised not even to attempt to go there without detailed maps and a compass. I was more self-indulgent, though, and stayed outside the glen in rather cosier conditions.
I walked and sat in the forest for three days. Underneath the towering scots pine there was a range of smaller scrubbier species – rowan, alders, birches, aspen, hazels, junipers. The ground under the small trees was lumpy and mossy. Some of the mosses were a vivid, even virulent green, and gave way under my feet in unexpected directions; there were clumps of fern-like fingers. Unlike a forestry plantation, there is a great deal of variety in an ancient wood – single huge pines, surrounded by lower scrub or dense thickets of spindly tangled growth, carrying a lot of skinny dead twigs. Very tiny, very fast, crystal-clear burns rushed through. The trees were draped in flowing lichen. Lichen itself is a strange life form – a not fully understood symbiosis of plant and algae, and it comes in innumerable forms – those close-clinging yellow patches on damp rocks are lichens, the rough orange skin that clings to tree trunks are lichens and so are the long grey strands that hang down over the little burns in the ancient woodlands. They look like cobwebs or spiders’ webs but are heavier, denser than either.
Beside a burn, in front of the moss-covered remains of an abandoned stone wall, I saw a weather-beaten notice that said, ‘Tress Cutting is Prohibited’. For a few startled moments I thought this referred to the lichen, though sadly closer examination revealed that it only said ‘Tree Cutting is Prohibited’. I liked the idea of the trees as ensorcelled maidens with lichen hair, now grey with age and stirring gently in the breeze. It was very beautiful and very spooky.
It was very silent, too. I knew, sitting there, that I had been right to be scared. This was primal landscape and full of silent shadows of menace, the menace of being lost, magical-mad like Merlin, swallowed up into something wilder, bigger and infinitely more ancient than myself. In my mind I
could hear the ghost wolves howling in the hungry winter. There is a current debate about the reintroduction of originally indigenous species into these surviving woodlands and the wild area around them; and while almost everyone would desire the windflower, the one-flower wintergreen, to be dancing again here, there is an almost atavistic resistance to reintroducing wolves. Before I went to Glen Affric I had been fairly simply pro-wolf, persuaded by the argument that they would prove the most effective way of managing the excessive red deer population that denudes and destroys the forest itself, and conscious that the prejudice against and consequent destruction of wolves was almost completely unfounded. But sitting there looking slightly edgily at the treacherous moss hags, the strangely distorted trees, the somehow sinister stillness of the loch itself and the lichens, which might at any moment reach out their cold crinkled fingers and touch me damply, aware that immediately around me was dense silence into which I could not see and in which anything might lurk concealed, I had a deep sense of relief that there were no wolves.
The silence of the forests is about secrets, about things that are hidden. Most of the terrains of silence – deserts, mountains, oceans, islands, moorland – have austere but wide views. They are landscapes that can be appalling in their openness, but at least you can see what is coming. The wide sky is bright above you, the clouds give you warnings of approaching weather and the land sweeps away into the distance. But the silence of the forests hides things; it does not open them out but closes them off. Trees hide the sunshine; and life goes on under the trees, in the thickets and tanglewood. Forests are full of surprises. It is not strange that the fairy stories that come out of the forest are stories about hidden identities, both good and bad. The princess looks like a goose girl, but the wicked stepmother looks like a beautiful queen. In the Grimms’ version of Cinderella the infamous ‘Ugly Sisters’ were not ugly – they were, indeed, ‘beautiful and fair of face, but vile and black of heart’. Snow White’s murderous stepmother was ‘the fairest of all’. The wolf could disguise himself as the sweet old granny.
The forests do not generate the huge god of the desert, nor the partisan, passionate, sexually active deities of the Greek mountains and islands. They produce little fragmented stories, of magic and human courage and dark plots, stories of secrets and silences. Over and over again in the old stories there is a silence: mysteries; hidden names; concealed identities; things not told, withheld, cloaked by silence. These tales have oral roots, so each time they are told they are told for a slightly different purpose. Do you want to soothe your baby towards sleep? Warn your child against wandering? Inspire your teenager to enterprise? Amuse your sulking adolescent with a thrilling horror? Console the elderly or even get rid of your unwanted lover? You tell them a story and the story, like the forests it came out of, shifts to your need.
We know now that the Grimm Brothers themselves, despite their linguistic and ‘scientific’ intentions, shifted the stories, made them more Christian, more family-orientated; they emphasised the good but absent father (theirs died and it changed their lives from idyllic to penurious overnight) and the cruel malignant stepmother, who seemed under pressure to have changed from the sweet warm mother of their infancy. Bruno Bettelheim in his immensely influential and suggestive Uses of Enchantment12 sees the stories as offering liberation to boy children.* I see them as offering empowerment to women. You can make of them what you will – they are shape shifters. We do not know where the stories came from, their roots are truly buried in silence. There is not and cannot be a single easily pinned-down meaning to fairy-story silence. It is more honest, perhaps, to recognise that there are a number of different sorts of silence in the forest.
There is the silence of secrets; the things that must not be told. In the stories this ‘secrecy silence’ has a very straightforward narrative function – it keeps the story going, allows things to develop, plots to work themselves through, babies to grow up into princesses. So characters in fairy stories are frequently bound to preposterous oaths not to tell, to keep silent about whatever has happened to them. In ‘The Goose Girl’ the princess has everything taken from her – her magical horse, her royal status and her princely fiancé – by her wicked servant, while she herself is driven out to keep geese. The whole story here depends on the princess keeping the oath that she was forced to swear ‘by the clear sky above her’ not to tell anyone about the maid’s behaviour. Since virtuous characters in these stories keep their promises regardless of the cost, the teller of the tale is now free to devise a complex narrative by which the truth is exposed without the princess breaking her word. In reality she has only to say, ‘I am a princess and this woman is my wicked maid’ and the whole story is resolved.
But I sense there is something more going on in this particular structure than simply a cunning plot device. These sorts of promises are nearly always extracted from younger people by adults who wish to oppress them in socially unacceptable ways. It is hard not to feel here something of the darkness of sexual abuse, in which the child is bound by the complicated mixture of shame and fear not to tell, and indeed can repress those memories so effectively as to be ‘dumb’ about them – the child not only does not speak, but cannot speak, and sometimes may not even remember. Remember in its literal origins means to put something back together again, to make it whole, to rejoin the members or parts into a single unbroken form. Psychotherapy in these cases urges patients to speak, to tell a story not just about events but also about the way the events were silenced.
There is also the silence of renunciation, often of penance. In these stories the young protagonists go or are driven into the forest. There they meet a hermit, or an old wise woman, who very often turns out originally to have been a warrior or princess. Either through choice or as punishment they had exiled themselves in the forest – and in silence learned wisdom. Now they can understand the language of the birds, or have a mastery of herbs and healing, which they use to assist and serve the young. The ancient custom of keeping a night vigil alone in a church before major life events – like setting out on a quest or crusade, or even being made a knight – might derive from these stories. Nor is it only men who retreat into silence to expiate past sins and emerge not merely absolved, but with a new depth of knowledge. Guinevere and Maid Marian both become nuns. Sleeping Beauty is consigned to the absolute silence of sleep as a punishment for her parents’ pride and forgetfulness – first they failed to invite all the magical powers to the child’s christening and then they thought they could circumvent a curse. She sleeps for a hundred years while the thorns grow thick around her and the whole castle is silent with her. But she is awakened to love and joy when she has served her turn. In the face of oppressive power, silence is often a sound strategy, at least in the short term.
There is another related but different sort of silence in these stories. It is always perilous to tell of fairy things. If the hero or heroine comes by fairy knowledge – help or riches or simply good luck – they must never tell where these good things came from or they will vanish. Sometimes the fairy folk coerce silence by terrible vows or threats. Sometimes they even seal characters’ mouths and make them dumb so that they cannot speak. This sort of silence trickled out of the stories and into ‘real life’. In several witch trials in Scotland in the early seventeenth century this silencing comes up in evidence: Elspeth Reoch’s fairy lover made her
be dumb for having teached her to see and know anything she desired. He said that if she spoke gentlemen would trouble her and [make] her give reasons for her doings … and on the morrow she had no power of her tongue nor could not speak … wherethrough her brother [hit] her with a [bridle] until she bled, because she would not speak and put a bow string about her head to [make] her speak. From the which time she still continued dumb.13
Scottish witches had much more exotic and florid experiences of the devil’s works than English witches. This probably has less to do with Celtic versus Anglo-Saxon imaginations and more to do wit
h the fact that Scottish law allowed witches to be tortured in more extreme ways than English law did. Isobel Gowdie told her court a spell for flying and assured them that it was easy; Elspeth Reoch was given Knowledge and bound to silence. We now know that ‘evidence’ given under torture is extremely unreliable and these trials offer older proof of that. In such witch trials I think we see women under intense and painful pressure drawing on stories from their communities in order to have something to say.
A great many fairy stories are about someone’s true identity. You may look like a goose girl; you may be so filthy and ill-kempt, through poverty or neglect, that they call you Cinderella, but truly you are the princess – and the evil servant or stepsister who has usurped your rightful place will be exposed. Related to this there is also a very specific silence about a person’s true name. In the Earthsea Trilogy Ursula le Guin picks up on this particular silence: to know people’s or things’ true names gives you power over them. The art of magic is the art of learning true names and how to use them. Le Guin did not invent this – it is embedded in a great many cultural myths and stories: if you know a person’s real name, you know their true identity, for good or bad, and you have power over him or her. ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ is a very well-known European version of this sort of silence. The imp or minor devil who bails out the heroine by spinning her straw into gold – a task laid on her, incidentally, only because of her own lies – does so in exchange for her first child when she has one. The straw is spun, she marries the prince and she has a baby. The imp returns to extract his wages, but she strikes a bargain with him: if she can discover his real name the pact will be voided. Through an odd mixture of chance and endeavour she does indeed succeed – she tells him his name and he vanishes in a puff of smoke. Identity, these stories suggest, must be guarded and cherished.
A Book of Silence Page 21