From the Forest (22 page)

You yearn for a baby and you finally get one, but it is a thumbling, a tiny creature, which nonetheless has no magical powers of its own and has to use its size to advantage to make its way in the world.

You are a child who has an alarming encounter with a rapacious wolf. The only magic here is that the wolf can speak and disguise itself as an old woman.

You are a small girl whose parents have sold you (for a very low price) to a known witch, who imprisons you in a tower. Is it magic or just good luck that your hair grows so long and thick that your lover can climb up to your secret cell? The witch, despite her reputation, does no magic; the prince works no spell; you have no supernatural powers except that your tears cure his blindness.

You are a girl with seven brothers, a deranged stepmother and a possibly abusive father.
¹²
Here there is deep magic, for the brothers are enchanted into swans. However, their restoration does not depend on magic at all, but on a long and painful effort by you. You have to keep silent for seven years and sew each of them a shirt out of starwort.
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There is nothing magical about your task; it calls only for a stoic endurance and loyalty. Later, while you are still labouring at your brothers’ redemption, you are
falsely
accused of being a magical witch who has eaten her own babies and you are condemned to death by fire, but you do not swerve. At the last possible moment you are rescued because you have completed your voluntary reparation, and everything ends up happily.

Magical things just happen; they are everywhere, but unreliable, knotted seamlessly into the mundane world of poverty, work and the mysterious goings-on of the forest. In some stories it is hard to tell what is magic and what is not. There is luck, there is love, there is virtue, there is magic. There is the forest.

Magic is never a thing that you do – the protagonists of these stories are not themselves magical; they don’t ‘make magic’, although they use the magical tools and chances they are offered. Although there are many stories in which there is no magic at all, there are none in which a magic worker is the principal character. Magic is something you are given, something that is done to you or around you. You do not have power in the way that the characters of higher, more noble traditions do. You may have to work very hard, and endure great pain or sorrow or hardship, but you do not do this to learn, acquire or achieve the magic that will save you. That comes from outside in a fairly arbitrary way – it is all pure gift. No one studies magic; of all the young adults who leave home to seek their fortune, of their own volition or because they have been driven out, not a single one goes off to learn magic. They go travelling like modern gap-year students, to learn about life, to escape poverty or cruelty at home, to undertake apprenticeships in useful trades, to ‘learn what fear is’, to make their fortunes, or for no particular reason that we learn of. The magic comes to them, without solicitation or endeavour. It is usually in the form of assistance, not solution: they have to use the magical gifts they are given, and they have to continue to work or suffer or both. There is a lesser-known light-hearted story called ‘The Magic Table, the Golden Donkey and the Club in the Sack’ which illustrates this point rather well. Three brothers are driven out of their home by the machinations of the household goat; they take up apprenticeships in three respectable trades – as a joiner, a miller and a turner. When they have served their time their masters give them each a reward: a table that covered itself with food, a donkey that spat
¹⁴
out golden coins, and a club that would beat people up for its owner. But the first two brothers foolishly let their magic gifts be stolen from them by a greedy innkeeper. The third brother uses his gift sensibly: he reclaims theirs, punishes the thief and makes his fortune. He was no luckier and no more deserving than his brothers, but he used his gift wisely.

A possible exception to this appears to be the ‘good sister/ bad sister’ stories: the good, sweet, polite, helpful sister is kind and obedient to an old lady and earns her magical reward; gold coins pour out of her mouth whenever she speaks. The bad, rude, lazy sister gets the same opportunity, but through her arrogance, idleness and unkindness she loses her chance and is punished; whenever she speaks a toad hops out of her throat. But even in these stories the magic is chancy; the ‘good’ sister may get given something magical, but even in that there is a high element of luck – she did not serve the old woman in some Faustian contract, she just served the old woman who happened by chance to be magical. Neither girl is given the power of magic. The old woman does not teach the good sister how to make gold flow out of her own mouth or anyone else’s. No one is apprenticed to a witch, no one gains higher powers – most often they gain loads of money and usually true love as well, although that is frequently secondary.
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I know of no other cultural tradition that treats magic in this odd casual way. I believe it is a distinct forest magic that grew out of the experience of living in woods, where you cannot see far ahead and where things change abruptly. The desert (where the magi come from) and the seashore (where the Celtic wizards come from) are vast and dangerous. The views are long and the weather is extreme and frequently changes suddenly and dramatically. The stars revolve slowly overhead, slow enough for their progress to be pondered upon. The changes in these environments are less seasonal than they are in woods and fields. They do not carry with them the extraordinary fibrillation between same-old and shocking-new that the woods present: the rhythmic regularity of the seasons contrasting with the vibrant surprise of
this
season, of today. There are always butterflies in the bracken in August – the speckled wood butterfly is not rare, is not specific to Suffolk and is not particularly exotic (it is more neat and smart); but
this
speckled wood butterfly, today, now, preening in the dappled sunshine below a weirdly contorted ancient oak, is entirely unexpected and might not have been there. Every summer the pied flycatchers make the long journey from Africa, but
this
quick flash of black and white,
this
sudden ‘pik, pik, pik’ alarm call or pleasing melodious song with its repetitions and changes, this almost-certainly-a-pied-flycatcher on
this
warm August afternoon is a completely unlooked-for and magical moment which we can do nothing to create or summon or control and which comes unearned, as pure gift.

A great deal of scholarly and creative energy has been expended on fairy stories and on their improbably off-hand magic. They are wells of psychoanalytical wisdom, think Bettelheim (a Freudian) and Marie Louise von Franz (a Jungian). They are moral fables to inspire the young to be decent to the old, argues Marina Warner. They are the left-over traces of a more chthonic social mode in which animism ruled and the spirits of place were powerful and almost divine.
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They are the political upwelling of desire and aspiration, the containers of dissent and potential rebellion for the oppressed poor. They are the invented semi-fascistic expression of an arrogant nationalism by two bourgeois linguistic scholars. They are a coded cultural tool for sexism. They are pre-modern, pre-rational, pre-scientific, pre-Enlightenment delusions suitable for the simple minded and superstitious, and therefore for children.

The fairy stories may indeed represent all these things, but in Staverton I realised something else – something very simple and primal: their magic is the magic of the forest. Staverton itself is always there, a mediocre example of ‘W10:
Quercus robur-Pteridium aquilinum-Rubus fructiosus
woodland’. Today, now, we are walking in Staverton where none of us have ever been before and there are oaks of vast bulk and surrealist shape, giant hollies, giant birches, trees that are part oak, part holly and part birch, and a thousand years’ accumulation of dead wood. It is ‘a place of mystery and wonder; it has a peculiar effect on first-time visitors who have no foreknowledge that the world contains such places’.
¹⁷
It is the magic.

In the fairy stories, the usual providers of magical assistance are not in fact human at all – they are the natural inhabitants of the forest: most often birds and trees, but also flowers and other plants, fish, frogs and toads, animals, both wild and domesticated, and also the sun and the moon, streams and ponds. I began to feel that the fairy stories are like pollard oaks: they grow from natural seeds in the woodland; then they are attended to, both tended and managed, and used for all sorts of useful and lovely things, and they live for a very long time. They go back, bits die back, new bits branch off in crazy directions; they get mixed up, confused with other trees (‘part oak, part holly, and part birch’); they provide a rich habitat for all sorts of life forms with a wide diversity of purpose and plan.

While we were in Staverton Thicks, along with all the other magical things that happened, we had an encounter with a witch. A nasty witch, not a little old wise woman. She emerged from a building on the other side of a river – it did not look quite like a house, more like a pavilion or stable or even possibly a gingerbread cottage. I have no idea what it was. She started to screech at us. We were to go away, at once. We had no business to be there. We were off the path. Seen through the trees, contorted with anger, gesticulating, wild, a real witch. And suddenly I could not remember the access codes and laws for England. In Scotland, of course, since this was not ‘domain land’ (someone’s house and garden) and there had been no posted signs telling us why we could not be there, we would have had clear rights. (Except we had the dogs off their leads, which the access law does not really allow.) The English law is more confused and confusing. Then she shouted a stupid thing: we weren’t allowed to be there because it was an SSSI – a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Of course it was; it should be – but SSSI status has nothing whatsoever to do with access law. More often people are confused in the other direction: they think that because a place has a public designation like this it must instantly be accessible (in the legal sense.) It is not.

I do not know if this was aggressive landlordism and she simply did not want us in her private wood, even though we were clearly neither poaching nor stealing firewood. It was August – there were no ground-nesting birds to worry about. She may have been the local madwoman. She may have been right. It did not matter, in Staverton, in the thick bracken, with the ancient pollard oaks laughing at us, and the sun playing games with the green leaves and dark branches – she was a witch and added somehow to our gleeful mood. Like children we skipped away, pretending to go back to the path, but not really.

Then we had a picnic, sitting on a huge fallen trunk under a huge ancient oak.

In 1528, the Chronicler of Butley Abbey recorded that the monks had taken the Queen of France to the ‘Park of Staverton’ and there they had eaten a meal
sub quercubus
(‘under the oak trees’)
cum Joco et Ludo
(quite literally, ‘with fun and games’). The chronicler added that it was
satis jucundis
– ‘great fun’.

Fairy stories grow out of woods like this, ancient, weird, unexpected, surviving against the odds, but also luxuriant, tricky, lovely – fun and games, great fun. Deeply, innocently magic.

The Seven Swans’ Sister

Once upon a time there was a young woman with a fierce integrity.

She sat all day on the wide branch of an ancient oak tree. She had worn away the thick moss where she sat, making a rough bark saddle, but to either side of this bare patch it was green and soft, and the epiphyte polypodies sprang crisp and strong around her. She wore a linen slip and her bare feet dangled down, her slender ankles crossed and her toes relaxed but pointed, her head bent over her work and her long hair loose and stirring in the breeze. From below, looking upwards, a passing traveller could have seen that the soles of her feet were leathery, stained and cut from going barefoot through the forest. When evening came or her fingers were too chilled for sewing, she clambered down and slept in the soft dry cave that was the hollowed oak trunk, on a bed of soft leaf mould.

She never spoke or laughed or sang. She never cried or shouted or swore. Sometimes in the cold of winter she sniffed or coughed or sneezed, but that was involuntary and did not count. She had aligned herself to the silence of the forest, the deep energetic silence of growing things, of seasons turning and of the soundless music of the stars. In spring it was lovely; in summer it was happy; in autumn it was fruitful; and in winter it was grim. Some would have called it clinical depression or ‘survivor’s guilt’ or even autism. She called it love.

In the late spring months, from April through to June, she did not have much time for sleep: at night she would go out into the broken moonlight, which cut weakly through the thickening leaf canopy, and wander down the forest tracks gathering starwort.