From the Forest (28 page)

Caledonian forest is also woodland at its most frightening and forbidding. The terror of the wild feels closer here. The glens that hold these woods tend to be exceptionally lovely in a romantic style, with green fields or lochs, smooth at the bottom, and wild open moor and hill above; but the woods themselves can feel grim by contrast, separating the two spaces sternly. In such woods it is never properly silent; old pine trees creak and moan even in quite gentle winds, and there are always rushing streams just out of sight, and a sense of chill in the air. With half an ear I catch myself listening for the wolf pack; for the brigands and the desperate clans cleared from their homes two hundred years ago; and for malevolent wood spirits who may punish the unwary visitor savagely. Indeed, as it is October, I do hear as evening falls the strange hoarse bellowing of the red deer rut – a sound as weird and unlikely as any imaginary ghost howling its grief.
⁷

For me, these forests expose a deep unease, a chthonic fear; Caledonian 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. It was, as I described in Chapter 1, in a different piece of Caledonian forest, Glen Affric, that I first recognised that forests gave me the same sets of feelings and emotions that I get from fairy stories. One reason I wanted to come to Braemar was to try and understand this strange connection better.

The English language has a large number of words for ‘fear’ – a quick skim through Roget’s online thesaurus offers me this list of fifty nouns (I am not persuaded it is complete; it certainly omits dialect and many slang terms):

Fear: alarm, apprehension, abhorrence, agitation, angst, anxiety, aversion, awe, chickenheartedness, concern, consternation, cowardice, creeps, despair, discomposure, diffidence, dismay, disquietude, distress, doubt, dread, faintheartedness, foreboding, fright, funk, horror, jitters, misgiving, nightmare, panic, peril, perturbation, phobia, presentiment, qualm, quivering, reverence, revulsion, scare, suspicion, terror, timidity, trembling, tremor, trepidation, unease, uneasiness, worry.

There is also a further selection of adjectives, of which I am only including those without an obvious direct connection to one of these nouns:

aghast, diffident, dire, eerie, fey, fell, ghastly, haunted, nervous, spooky, shaky, uncanny, weird.

None of these words mean precisely the same thing as any of the others. I wanted to explore for myself more precisely which sort of fear it is that I experience in the forests and in the stories.

There is the straightforward physical fear of hurt or harm – the fear you feel if the tide is coming in and you cannot find the path up the cliff; if you are walking on a narrow path at the top of a cliff; if a man with a gun or dog with bared teeth is rushing at you; or if you are in a car with an alarmingly bad driver who wants to go too fast: the basic instinctual fear of actual danger that brings on the flight-or-fight surge of adrenalin and to which courage is the natural antidote, the most useful response. This is fear, or peril, or, in its milder form, alarm. Quite closely related to this is the anxiety, anticipation, or trepidation – a sort preview of the gut fear that I can experience in advance of a potentially dangerous and frightening event. These are not what I experience in forests and certainly not what I experience curled up by the fire reading fairy stories.

A more promising contender for forest fear is ‘panic’, because the name itself originates in the woods. Classical Greek mythology defined panic as a specific kind of terror induced by Pan, the God of wild places and especially of woods and forests. His cries could make the strongest nerves crack and drive people to madness. Panic is somewhat different from other fears – it induces extreme irrationality, rather than triggering the more normal, well-adapted fight-or-flight reaction; it is ‘infectious’ and spreads quickly and very dangerously through groups of people. It seldom has a clear cause – it is not fear of something alarming or threatening, it is primal terror. I have once experienced panic as an adult, although not in a wood, and it is a distressing and disagreeable sensation, partly because of the complete collapse of rationality and the intensity of its physical force, but again there is little panic of a recognisable kind in the fairy stories. The characters are seldom attacked by this sort of fear. Perhaps the nearest there is to a description of such a possessing, physical terror is of Snow White’s flight through the forest after the huntsman agrees not to kill her as he has been instructed to do by her stepmother:

The poor child was all alone in the huge forest. When she looked at all the leaves on the trees, she was petrified and did not know what to do. The she began to run, and she ran over sharp stones and through thorn bushes. Wild beasts darted by her at times, but they did not harm her. She ran as long as her legs would carry her.

She has just escaped from a hideously frightening circumstance – caused not by the wild, but by her own family, and she is very young – but it is helpful to notice that this is unusual. By way of contrast and much more typically, there is no indication at all of panic when Hansel and Gretel become lost, although they are frightened:

They walked the entire night and all the next day, from morning till night, but they did not get out of the forest.

They are lost and scared, but there is no panic.

Characters constantly run into grave danger in the forests – they are lost, homeless, hungry, and above all threatened by dangerous human beings – robbers, witches and, most often, the evil machinations of their own families. But they do not tend to respond with this panic fear, leading to senseless flight. In fact, in the classic fairytales, the forests themselves are not presented as particularly scary.

In the delightful story ‘The Boy Who Went Forth To Learn What Fear Was’, there is a stupid son who is unable to understand what people who are frightened are talking about. He thinks to himself, ‘They’re always saying “It gives me the creeps!” But it doesn’t give
me
the creeps. It’s probably some kind of trick that I don’t understand.’ He is sent out into the world, and tells everyone he meets that he wants to learn to be frightened and will pay anyone who can teach him. Various people therefore send him off to very scary places – he spends a night at the foot of a gibbet with seven dead criminals hanging on it, and eventually visits a haunted castle full of demons and ghosts of various truly horrible kinds. His literal interpretation of events – which leads him to outwit gruesome ghost cats and dogs, have wrestling matches with dead men and play bowls against the Devil using skulls – means that he never runs away, and always defeats these opponents who all fail to scare him in the least: he deals with them with a cheerful insouciance and punishes them in a forthright manner. This behaviour finally wins him both a fortune and a princess. The point here is that even though on several occasions he is walking through a forest, no one ever suggests that a sojourn in the forest will itself teach him what fear is. It is human beings, and particularly dead ones, that are frightening.

Although the issue is explicit in this case, it seems to be the usual narrative approach; it is not, in these stories, the forest itself that is frightening, but what other people may do to you in the forest. I think there are two possible reasons for the absence of fear associated with forests. First, and simply, these stories were told by forest people to whom the woods, although dangerous, were not unknown or alien places. There were concrete and actual dangers in the deep forest, but these were problems to be dealt with, rather than terrors emerging ferociously from the subconscious. There is a real difference between the quality of fear induced by dangers one can readily identify and that caused by events that are primarily mysterious. I have cried out aloud in terror at the flit of a white ghost in a night wood, but the moment I have identified it as an owl, it has become beautiful, welcome and even exciting. The absence of panic fear in the fairy stories seems to me one of the strongest indications of their forest origin – because, let’s face it, even in the daytime, even within a mile or so of a road and with an Ordnance Survey map in hand, forests can be fearsome.

The second reason feels more complicated. The stories are certainly full of horrors, although always horrors to be overcome either by courage or by humour. But consistently the dark side of the forest emerges from human malevolence. In these stories it is human beings who are cruel, savage, greedy and violent. It is usually robbers, fathers, witches, stepmothers, and more generally thoughtless or mean-minded people who constitute the danger and threaten the well-being of the protagonists. In a remarkable number of stories, the forest is the place where you escape
from
potential harm. It is ‘at home’, in your house – or in someone else’s – that you are most at risk in a fairy story. This is simple realism, and just as true for children today, as we should remember.

Yet, nonetheless, quite separately, there is a darkness, something fearful, about both the stories and the forests.

In
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame gives a convincing account of forest fear:

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.
⁸

I think, as Grahame clearly does too, that the fear is of a quite different kind from the simple physical reaction to danger – or the anticipation of it – and of a different kind to the violent irrational response that panic represents. It is a fear that, curiously, is better expressed in the adjectives from my list than in the nouns (I wonder if this is because this sort of fear is so nebulous, so hard to pin down and define, that it has never taken on the concrete solidity of a noun):

aghast, diffident, dire, eerie, fey, fell, ghastly, haunted, nervous, spooky, uncanny, weird

This is the fear of things that are associated with magic – the simple, age-old fear of the supernatural, whether it is good or bad, threatening or promising, positive or negative.

The word ‘weird’ does not simply mean ‘strange’, it means the power of or agency of fate, of predestination. The Weirds are the old women who not only know what will happen in the future but can control it, can make magic. Uncanny is defined as:

not quite safe to trust, or have dealings with, as being associated with supernatural arts or powers. Partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar.
⁹

In Chapter 6, I spoke about the ordinary, almost mundane magic of the woods and how that infiltrated the stories. But even the most benign magic is not safe, cannot be safe, because it is unfamiliar, spooky, weird and eerie. The woods are chaotic and wild; life goes on unseen within them, and for every lovely globe flower, springing golden in a small patch of sunshine, there is a death cap –
Aminita phalloides –
shiny, olive and yellow, just as pretty, but deadly poisonous, lurking under the oak trees. And in the stories, for every kindly old woman who gives you a useful gift, there is a very similar one who may gobble you up, put you under an enchantment or imprison you in a tower. All magic, even good magic, all spells, even kindly benign ones, carry the fear of the uncanny with them. Such magic is complex, twisted, strange, and should be feared.

And perhaps we are more vulnerable to this fear than earlier audiences for these stories were. They knew the forests better than we do; they knew the stories better too – and as the stories show, there is a strong antidote to the sinister effects of the supernatural – ferocious retributive justice. One element of fairy-story morality which we have entirely edited out of contemporary versions is that Justice itself is a harsh, even savage, power. The stories are full of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’.
¹⁰
G. K. Chesterton comments that from fairy stories he learned ‘the chivalrous lesson that giants should be killed because they are gigantic’.
¹¹
Wicked characters do not simply lose out, with toads leaping from their mouths instead of jewels, or the despised younger son gaining the wealth or the princess the wicked brothers had unsuccessfully schemed for; they are, in addition, punished for their pride or greed or unkindness with extreme savagery. They are forced to dance themselves to death in red-hot iron shoes; they have their eyes pecked out by birds; they are put in spiked barrels and thrown down mill races; they are cooked to death in their own ovens.
¹²
There is less mercy in human justice than there is in the forest itself. Surprisingly few characters are hurt at all, let alone eaten, by wild animals compared with the number who are punished terminally by their communities. This might be a sensible attempt to create a distinction between punishment and bad luck: it might be foolish, but it is not wicked, to get lost in the forest, to get drowned in the river, to get eaten by a wolf or to fall down a cliff or pothole. Only the evil get punished. I think this is in part a response to the eerie, perilous nature of the forest – bad people, those who use the fey atmosphere of the forests to their own wicked ends, must be stamped out; they are not ordinarily dangerous but uncanny, weird, unnatural.