Mysteries of the Forest by Yvonne Aburrow
- essay written as an introduction to the Forest exhibition which was shown at Wolverhampton Art Gallery from February to April 2004 and will then tour the country until the summer of 2005The forest is the scene of some of our deepest fears and wildest fantasies. It is the realm of dreams, the subconscious, and the imagination. Heroes and hermits, wild men and witches live in the forest, along with boars, wolves, and bears. It is a place of primordial innocence and primal urges.
Around 11,000 BCE, as the ice retreated northwards after the last Ice Age, Britain was colonised by trees – first birch, aspen, and sallow, then pine and hazel, then alder and oak, then lime and elm, then holly, ash, beech, hornbeam and maple (Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside). The destruction of the wildwood began around 4,000 BCE. The first farmers cleared the land and formed a new relationship with it, one based on ownership and control. They struggled against the elements to wrest food from the land, cutting down the trees to build houses and trackways. Rackham estimates that by 500 BCE, around half of England was no longer wildwood (completely natural woodland unaffected by Neolithic or later civilisation). This new relationship with the land must have changed people's view of the wildwood. To the hunter-gatherer, the woods were a source of food; to farmers, they represented untamed nature, something to be feared and subjugated.
The word forest derives from sylva forestis, land belonging to the king, where he kept deer for hunting. It could apply to heath as well as woodland, and in areas designated as such, the harsh forest laws applied throughout the Middle Ages. We tend to think of forest as uncultivated land, but in the medieval period, people were coppicing it, pollarding it, letting pigs graze in it, and even mining there. By the late medieval period there was concern that there might not be enough trees left for shipbuilding if they continued to be felled without replacements being planted. More recently, woodland has been threatened by roadbuilding, but organisations like the Woodland Trust are planting more woodland, and more and more people are concerned to save ancient woodlands.
We have a very ambivalent relationship with wilderness; we like to know that it is there, but we wouldn't necessarily want to go there after dark. We regard the forest as the realm of the uncanny, but also fill it with sylvan idylls. It has always been regarded as a refuge for outlaws and hermits, madmen and exiled heroes. The greenwood was a region beyond the reach of the law: Tristan and Isolde, fleeing from the wrath of King Mark, take refuge in the forest near the dwelling of a hermit. Lancelot runs wild in the forest after he runs away from the situation with Guinevere; he loses his memory and his wits and becomes a wild man of the woods. Robin Hood takes to the greenwood after falling out with the ruling Norman elite. At the end of Maurice by E M Forster, Maurice and his lover Alec take refuge in the greenwood; according to Forster's afterword, it is the last moment in history when they could have done so (the book was written in 1913). So for 'respectable folk' the forest is a place of lawlessness and fear; for those who have stepped beyond the bounds of respectability, it is a refuge and a shelter.
Since ancient times, the forest has been regarded as a place outside the norm, where monsters live. In the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, the monster Khumbaba lives in the cedar forest; and in many later legends we find the Lord of the Animals living in the forest. He is a being of peculiar appearance, huge and rather ugly, but has a special rapport with the animals. The feminine aspect of the forest is represented by the Lady of the Flowers; in the twelfth-century tale Vita Merlini (The Life of Merlin), she is represented by Guendolena, and Merlin himself becomes the Lord of the Animals, summoning an enormous herd of stags and she-goats for Guendolena as a wedding-gift. Another version of the Lady of Flowers is Blodeuwedd in the Mabinogion – a rather more ruthless character, who wheedles from Llew Llaw Gyffes the secret of how he can be killed, and then arranges for her lover Gronw to do the deed. For this, she is turned into an owl, a creature of the night and a symbol of the wild aspect of female sexuality which is rejected by the patriarchal status quo.
In many legends, the forest is equated with the underworld and possibly the subconscious. In Norse mythology, one region of the underworld is known as Ydalir, valley of the yews. The Wild Hunt ride through the trackless woodland; they are the restless souls of the dead who travel the spirit paths in winter. They are derived from many sources, and occur in stories all over Europe and in India. In the Welsh Marches they are led by Wild Edric, a Saxon lord who gave up resisting the Normans too soon; in other parts of Britain they are led by Herne the Hunter; in Greece they are led by Hecate, goddess of witchcraft; in Scandinavia by Odin, lord of the dead; in India the Maruts are led by Rudra, god of the storm. The Wild Hunt may be related to the legend of Pwyll, Lord of Annwn (the Welsh underworld) who is accompanied by white faery hounds with one red ear.
In folktales, the forest is a place of initiation, where children go to confront their fears. Little Red Riding Hood has an encounter with the big bad wolf; Hansel and Gretel are abandoned in the forest and encounter the witch. All these characters learn caution and adult cunning from their experiences; the unfortunate Babes in the Wood (first heard of in a ballad attributed to Thomas Millington, 1595) die in each others' arms. Hence this is not a classic folktale (where the protagonist always survives, at least in the form of the youngest sibling), but is probably a legend with some basis in fact.
Forest spirits are mischievous and tricksy; they lead the unwary traveller astray among the trees. In Poland, the Leshy (a faery being) was particularly dangerous in spring, when he had awoken from his winter sleep. The word panic derives from the experience of being confused and led astray by Pan, god of the wood. Faeries are not the innocuous little winged beings of Victorian imagination, but something far wilder and more primordial.
Another embodiment of the forest is the Green Man, an ambivalent figure, both savage and innocent. In his earliest form he appears in Roman architecture, and surfaces again in the Decorative Gothic architecture of the fourteenth century. He is enjoying a contemporary revival as the symbol of the greenwood, of all that is wild and free; he embodies our sense that we have lost something essential in our reliance on technology and the comforts of civilisation. As an archetype, he relates to Green George (the Eastern European form of Saint George) and possibly the Sufi hero-saint Khidr, the Green One who dwells within the heart.
Now that we have cut down so much of the forest, we are belatedly realising its importance as the last wilderness. Because so many of the wild beasts that lived there have been hunted to extinction, we have lost our fear of the forest by day. But by night, the old legends resurface from the depths.
Robin Hood continues to be popular in one form or another; he is a symbol of popular resistance of oppression, and as such has massive contemporary relevance. Current storytelling still retains the multiplicity of meanings conveyed by the word forest: the scary atmosphere of the Blair Witch Project reflects the themes of abandonment in Grimm's fairy tales; in Emerald Forest, the story of a Western boy who is brought up by a tribe in the Amazonian rainforest, themes of otherness and wildness are explored. The screenplay for this film was written by Rob Holdstock, author of Mythago Wood, a story of the last vestige of wildwood in Britain, where myths and legends spring to life out of the land.
The forest is the realm of the subconscious; we project our fears and desires into its dark depths. Light and shade dance among the leaves; outlaws, witches, shamans, wild beasts, madmen and hermits hide in the secret places. Meanwhile the complex life of the forest, with all its creatures, trees and fungi mutually enfolded in the dance of the elements, goes on. The myriad forms of life in the forest absorb our carbon dioxide and give us oxygen; they feed on decay to create an abundance of life and beauty. The changing seasons are reflected in the life-cycles of the woodland. The trees, whispering among themselves, seem to know something we have forgotten. Each tree has its own special character: the bunchy purple alders, the slender silver birch, the flickering poplars, the holly in the depths of winter. It is the beauty of the forest which gives rise to the sylvan idyll, the return to Nature so ardently desired by the Romantics. The wild spaces of the forest remind us of anarchic innocence and freedom, and call to the depths of the spirit, where darkness and silence are experienced as part of the natural cycle, and the wildwood is the original sacred space, beautiful and mysterious.
Yvonne Aburrow
17 November 2003