From the Forest (40 page)

And third and finally, such woods are works of the creative imagination, and so they do to genuine ancient woods and forests what the fairy stories do. They take the actual real forests with all their perils and pains and convert them into places for leisure and delight. These artificially ornamented woods were designed solely as places to play, in which to enjoy oneself – not just for children, but for adults too. This, as we have seen, was not true for real forests until very recently. Originally forests were not for ‘amenity use’, they were places of hard work, bitter poverty and contested rights. They were places of exile or flight; they were places where trees and animals and plants had to be managed, worked on or with and used; they were work places rather than playgrounds.

But the stories that came out of such forests were for amusement; telling them and hearing them was an activity of leisure moments. The real features and events and interactions of the forests were remade creatively into something far more relaxed and playful. Indeed, with the early fall of the dark in midwinter it is particularly easy to imagine that this was the season when the stories were told, to the rhythmic sounds of spindles or knitting needles. They would more readily be told than read. In old highland blackhouses,
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each child had its own ‘firestool’ – simple wooden stools which were designed to be stacked and put aside during the day to make space and brought out at night to circle the fire; such an arrangement, in an ill-lit and smoky room, would encourage story telling through the winter months.
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Of course I also know that this is a romantic fantasy – life in the blackhouses through the long highland winters must have been ‘poor, nasty and brutish’,
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even if not solitary or short, but that is all the more reason to suggest that the stories were meant to delight and entertain rather than edify their hearers.

I always find it slightly depressing to see how solemnly too many people can take both forests and fairy stories. Here, for example, is a fairly typical passage from a contemporary writer:

The fairytale journey may look like an outward trek across plains and mountains, through castles and forests, but the actual movement is inward, into the lands of the soul. The dark path of the fairytale forest lies in the shadows of our imagination, the depths of our unconscious. To travel to the wood, to face its dangers, is to emerge transformed by this experience.

Particularly for children whose world does not resemble the simplified world of television sit-coms . . . this ability to travel inward, to face fear and transform it, is a skill they will use all their lives. We do children – and ourselves—a grave disservice by censoring the old tales, glossing over the darker passages and ambiguities.
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It is not that this is untrue. I have made these points myself. I agree entirely that this is
one
of the things that
some
of the stories are about – cruelty and malevolence and serious danger. But in reality most fairy stories are not about ‘finding yourself through terror’ or working out the more problematic questions of identity. They do not all offer a negotiation through the latency period into mature sexuality, or the rewards of a well-developed sense of self-esteem. They are not even about magic in any serious sense of the word. A surprising number of them are very silly indeed – they are jokes, elaborate teases, for fun.

In Chapter 8 I discussed ‘The Boy Who Went Forth To Learn What Fear Was’ – the story of a young man so stupid that he cannot imagine what fear feels like. Nothing frightens him. Because of his courage, or foolishness, he wins a fortune and a princess. What I did not tell in that chapter was the end of his story. Although she loves him, his princess-bride becomes somewhat bored by his continuous plaintive desire to learn what ‘the creeps’ would feel like, so she finally solves his problem:

She went out to a brook that ran through the garden and fetched a bucket full of minnows . . . That night when the young King was sleeping, his wife pulled the covers off him and poured the bucket of cold water and minnows on him. Then the little fish began flapping all over him, causing him to wake up and exclaim, ‘Oh, I’ve got the creeps! I’ve got the creeps! Now I know, dear wife, just what the creeps are.’

No one, surely, is supposed to take this seriously. The ‘path’ of this fairy story could not be more different from the solemn pontifications of too many commentators. It is important to remember that this is as much part of the fairy-tale canon as ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Snow White’ or even ‘Sleeping Beauty’, which can be read, though they do not need to be, as dark allegories of the psyche. A substantial group of the stories – for example, ‘The Musicians of Bremen Town’, ‘Riffraff’, ‘Clever Gretel’, ‘The Death of the Hen’, and ‘The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage’ (which I mentioned in the opening chapter) – are purely humorous. They are games – sometimes quite elaborate and well-worked-out games – like shaggy-dog stories. It would be would be hard to draw any serious moral, let alone a profound symbolic meaning, from them. The one clear intention of such tales is to amuse.

It is worth remembering that all fairy stories end happily – and very often with some sort of party, at which there is lots to eat and drink.

The ultimate objective of both heroes and heroines throughout the Grimms’ collection is to find a ‘cushy billet’, to enjoy themselves. As I have already shown,
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Bettelheim notices, as any attentive reader can hardly fail to, how very little ‘ruling’ or work of any kind any of the kings actually have to do (they never go to war, they seldom have to make serious judgments in the legal sense, and they are certainly not weighed down by paperwork), and suggests that kingship simply represented being a grown-up from a child’s perspective. But if you see the stories as I do – as entertainment for grown-ups as well as children – then you can see kingship in a slightly different way: it represents being rich from a poor person’s perspective. In addition to the task of monitoring their children, usually unsuccessfully, kings in fairy stories eat a lot, fall in love a lot and go hunting a lot. (They also do a curious amount of getting dressed up in posh clothes and admiring their own gardens.)

The hunting is not surprising of course; hunting was probably the activity during which rural people were most likely actually to see their monarch.
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The woods and forests from which they laboriously drew their livelihood in effect belonged to the King in order for him to hunt in them. Royal hunting was not the trapping and netting and snaring that ordinary people practised (both legally and illegally) in the forests – it was a colourful ritual performance, often accompanied by lavish picnics.

In England particularly, throughout the historical era, the royal household developed the custom of paying visits around the country – these, frequently nearly bankrupting the local aristocracy, must have looked entirely leisured to the local poor. Great feats, pageantry, masques and concerts and hunting for the pleasure of it (somewhat inefficiently, from the point of view of supper) were the standard entertainment on offer. To be a king, in the view of the rural labouring classes – probably right up to the nineteenth century, when Queen Victoria (partly in response to the perceived ‘decadence’ of her immediate predecessors) invented a new vocabulary of ‘service’ and emblematic domesticity – was to be on permanent holiday. Even administration and diplomacy must look fairly easy to a sub-literate population whose principal work is manual and physically exhausting. As we become more and more an urbanised society we are losing touch with the continuous grinding work of agricultural life. Now we tend to have office hours; we go to work and come home to play. We have organised holidays, during which we do not expect to work. On a farm, even now, there are no days when the cows do not need to be milked or the chickens fed. The distinction between leisure and work is much more blurred and both happen in the same place. You find your amusements as and when you can – the more of them the better.

More leisure time is the clear aspiration of many of the characters in the classic fairytales. Not only are the stories themselves frequently witty or even foolish, the lifestyle they present also gives some justification to the nineteenth-century bourgeois claim that unenclosed forest and common were indeed ‘a nursery and resort of the most idle and profligate of men’.
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No one who can find an alternative wants to work: they want to become queens or kings, or at the very least to get rich, by cunning trickery, by courage, by the assistance of magic (Why spin yourself when a little manikin will turn up and spin gold for you? Why work in the fields when you can trick the Devil himself into doing your ploughing?), or by pure chutzpah. Punishment never follows from this – on the contrary, prosperity, happiness, a lover beyond the expectations of your status, and usually children are the direct reward. It is so much more important to be kind, generous with what you have and merry hearted than to do an honest day’s work.

Although in many of the stories hard work is honoured and respected, it does tend to be presented as a means to an end – and the end is not having to do it any more. And in just as many stories, eating, drinking and making merry set the scene and form the content. It was not until the twentieth century that Cinderella’s ball became an evening event: in the Grimms’ version it was a ‘festival’ that ran all day for three days. Rapunzel’s prince is just loafing about the countryside when he comes across her tower – and thereafter he is free to visit her daily apparently; the Little Tailor does nothing to earn his rich reward – a whole kingdom as well as a princess – except boast, somewhat falsely, of his courage and then con kings and giants and a fierce wild boar. The old soldiers sit around in pubs grumbling until they can hear something to their advantage.

Similarly, the distinction between ‘child’ and ‘adult’, like the distinction between work and play, was less rigid. The ‘invention’ of childhood – and its prolongation with increasing education – is a modern development, although it sometimes appears that apprentices were given many of the privileges of contemporary students. (In Tudor London the Mayday rioting – after the flowering trees were brought in from outside the city – seems to have been treated extremely casually, given the great severity with which other disturbances were handled.) On the whole children started to work much younger and were expected to behave as ‘small-sized’ adults, with proper responsibilities and duties, as soon as they passed infancy. When this model was replicated under industrial, rather than rural, conditions it proved immensely damaging to the young – hence the heroic moves to protect children by controlling their work hours and conditions in the second half of the nineteenth century. But within an agricultural framework, the blurred edges of work and play did not give anyone much concern: it was not children’s work that worried the charitable, but their poverty in the most direct sense.

Now, just as we have divided work from play, we have also drawn a clear line between childhood and adult status, and have further separated the latter very clearly from puberty as well. In the fairy stories – and this seems to me to reflect an older community’s social reality – ‘play’ is not confined to children: children work and adults play, and the distinction is not at all clear.

The nineteenth-century ornamental or artificial forest, planted with exotic and strange trees and flowers from distant lands, was designed only for leisure. This sense of freedom was enhanced of course by the large number of domestic servants that the owners of these sorts of woods had available to maintain them, to keep the paths clear and the litter removed. They were forests of ‘conspicuous consumption’ demonstrating that you could afford to have a plot of land of your own which was put to no economic use. These woods were not even hunted; they did not provide fuel for the fire or food for the table – you could just wander in them romantically. Like the fairy stories, they provided ‘time out’. They were there for fun. Not surprisingly, there is only one ‘artificial’ forest in the Grimms’ stories. It has trees of silver and gold and jewels – and it is where the twelve princesses go to dance and play all night.

I love the Glenlee woods. The trees are magnificent and slightly strange and the waterfalls an extraordinary hidden delight, and the whole ravine creates a fairy-story setting. I am not at all surprised that its owner was able to persuade a small child that the fairies still lived and played there; as a grown-up, I have had a happy, leisured afternoon walk there, despite the early dark of the northern winter. And as we come down from the little wood and back towards the house I have another ‘fairy-tale moment’. I have come along a narrow path down through a dark wood and then, suddenly, I am out of the trees and in front of me is the house, its windows lit up in the dusk – big enough from that angle in that light to pretend to be a palace or castle. I am welcomed in, as travellers from the forest should be. We sit in the kitchen and drink tea and eat cake, as any traveller in a fairy story would.