From the Forest (3 page)

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.
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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 edition
⁷
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 suggested
⁸
that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people 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.)
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The deep connection between the forests and the core stories has been lost; fairy stories and forests have been moved into different categories and, isolated, both are at risk of disappearing, misunderstood and culturally undervalued, ‘useless’ in the sense of ‘financially unprofitable’.

So that is what this book is about: it is an attempt to bring them back together, so that they can illuminate and draw renewed strength from each other.

‘Hang on,’ said Adam, after hearing an edited version of all this. ‘You talk about British woods, British history and being specific and all that. But the Grimms were German, not British, and these are all German stories. How are you going to plonk them down in British woods?’

This was pretty smart of him and I was not unimpressed, but I argued stoutly, ‘No, they are not German stories; they are Germanic stories. The British are Germanic people from the northern European forests, and I believe we had the same stories. Well, not just the same stories, because we also have Celtic fairy stories and some Viking fairy stories, but they are really different.’

‘You’re just guessing.’

I admitted that I was a bit. And I told him that it will always be hard to tell with oral stories, because they are always changing and shifting and we just cannot know. But there is some evidence. The oldest printed fairytale we have in English is ‘Tom Thumb’, from 1621. It is nearly identical to the Grimms’ version – not simply the same type of story (there are midget hero stories in all sorts of cultures), many of the episodes and details are the same too. It must have been widely known because Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810 – 1891), the American circus impresario, gave Charles Stratton, his famous performing dwarf, the stage name of ‘General Tom Thumb’ in the early 1840s – only twenty years after the Grimms’ stories were first translated. There are lots of little clues like that. And the Grimms’ stories became popular in English very quickly. Even during the Second World War, W. H. Auden praised the collection as ‘as one of the founding works of
Western
culture’. But I told Adam he was right in a way – I
am
guessing. It is a deep guess though, from how the stories fit into our forests and how our forests fit into the stories. It is a guess that works.

By this point in our conversation, Adam and I had long finished with the baked beans and had crawled into our sleeping bags in the tent. I last slept in a tent forty years ago, and Adam slept in this one a few months ago high up above the snow line of the southern Andes. It was cosy but a little strange to be snuggled up so close together, although the dog thought it was heaven and wriggled around our feet ecstatically. Occasionally she jumped up, rigid, attentive, aware of something outside in the wood even though we could not hear it, and then turned round and round, stirring herself into the sleeping bags as her ancestors must have stirred themselves into grassy nests in long-vanished forests.