Hooking up forest walks to a retelling of Grimm’s fairy tales makes for a journey of enchantment
Gossip From The Forest By Sara Maitland
Granta Books, 354pp, £20
Stephen Sondheim has slightly pre-empted Sara Maitland. His 1986 musical which featured several stories from the works of the Brothers Grimm was called Into The Woods: likewise, Sara Maitland’s double-study links together the Grimms and the forests (its subtitle is “the tangled roots of our forests and fairytales”). This is the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or “Child and House Stories”, the collection of traditional Germanic folktales which the Grimms assembled, and which they expanded on continually. The 1812 collection features 82 stories; by the seventh edition in 1857 it had swollen to 211 tales. Although we think we know the stories it contains – Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Rumplestiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel – one of the key strengths of Maitland’s book is in showing how little we really do.
And in that respect, the stories are in a similar position to our misunderstood forests, copses and woods. To take just one example from the world of fairytales, the Grimms do not write about Cinderella. They write about Aschenputtel (literally, ash-fool), who does not have a fairy godmother (she has a white bird in a hazel tree planted on her mother’s grave) or glass slippers (they’re golden, and it seems the glass slipper is a mistranslation of the French vair – fur – in Perrault’s more courtly version) and her sisters aren’t ugly (they’re beautiful, and chop their toes and heels to cram their feet into the prince-acquiring shoe).
Structured as 12 walks in 12 woods over 12 months with 12 re-tellings of Grimm tales, Maitland justifies the yoking of the two topics ingeniously. One school of critical thought seeks to find the common elements in all traditional stories; while others are more interested in the points of divergence. Marina Warner, for example, has written brilliantly about the Arabian Nights, and their cultural specific images (such as flying, something that rarely happens in the Grimms). What we do have idiosyncratically in their work is an obsession with forests. The forest is both sanctuary and danger, the place of escape and the site of trauma, a liberation and a looming, mazy constriction. Jacques in As You Like It says “there’s no clock in the forest”, and in one way, the forest is a timeless, archetypal place. On the other, the forest is the clock, measuring seasons by its own internal differences and changes, and the book reflects that very well indeed.
The walks allow Maitland to meander on the meaning of forests. A forest nowadays is a place of nature, and yet most of the wooded areas we have are for industrial logging, and in the past, the same ambivalence prevails. There is an excellent chapter on the miners of the Forest of Dean. Yes, miners. Compacted and decayed forests, in the form of coal, exist beneath the Forest of Dean and there is a body, The Free Miners of the Forest of Dean, with their own pedigree, history and rules, albeit ones faced with new challenges in the present day. Maitland links this to “Snow White” and the workaday employment of those seven dwarves: who knew that “Hi Ho, Hi Ho” was still happening? It rather made me wonder why the other writer obsessed with the Forest of Dean, Dennis Potter, did so little with woods and so much with blue-remembered hills (famously invisible in forests) and ominous scarecrows.
Forests, as much as stories, are peculiarly pliant in this book. They are “reserves” in both meanings of that word; a constriction and a resource. They are also both debatable territories, and the best writing here thrives on that. Maitland is an uncompromising noticer, and there is a kind of shamanic re-enchantment at work in her refusal to use generic terms. It’s never a bird that crosses her path, it’s a nuthatch or a firecrest. It is never a tree, but a larch or an oak. Maitland credits Robert Macfarlane, the Samuel Johnson prize shortlisted author of The Old Ways, with this sensitivity to the naming of things, but it has been a constant feature in her work as well. There is a bravura example in her version of “Rumpelstiltskin”: “You sit at the spinning wheel and you think of all the golden things in the forest: of lichens in flat, round disks on granite; of wile narcissus under the first fresh leaves in springtime; of the patterns on the back of Carterocephalus palaemon, the Chequered Skipper butterfly; of globe flowers seen through hazel branches, bright as sunshine; of the stripes of a bumblebee sipping on clover; of the iridescence on the undersides of dung beetles; of the flash of a goldfinch in a hawthorn hedge; of chanterelles on shaded moss; of owl eyes blinking in the deep wood; of tormentil and asphodel and agrimony and broom; of horse chestnut leaves in autumn and of ripening crab apples; of grass seed heads catching the low sun in winter. If memory fails, even buttercups and dandelions will do, though the work is slower with such common joys”.
Rewriting Grimm is a noble tradition, stretching from Andrew Lang to Angela Carter and, most recently, Philip Pullman. I was slightly disappointed there was less in the book about how the stories metamorphose, particularly through pantomime and Disney, into more conventional narratives; but this is compensated for by Maitland’s keen attention to the stories themselves. They are a most peculiar body of work, far removed from our stereotype of the fairytale (indeed, fairies are particularly uncommon in them). They are more likely to feature an unemployed tailor than a princess; they are less morally didactic than one might expect – guile often beats endeavour – and the magic is singularly magical: unearned, random, wilful. There is also an awful lot of cruelty to horses. Maitland’s versions are often oblique and wrench our expectations in a manner similar to the originals: Rumpelstiltskin is the hero, not the villain; both Hansel and Gretel find themselves in the wood, and learn unlikely and salutary lessons from the “witch”.
Maitland’s endnote point out that the Citizenship Test (an odd euphemism, since we are subjects, not citizens) has no questions about ecology or geography and no cultural questions except about Christianity. She suggests that Grimm – and this is an idea first found in WH Auden – is a powerful shared mythology.
Her book takes vast steps through a knotty undergrowth of interwoven environmental and cultural concerns towards realising that vision.