I started writing this a pine forest near the small village on Ouhans in the Comté region of France. There was a storm in the afternoon with hail that burst into raindrops the second they hit you. Not for the first time, I had sought shelter in trees.
There is something about the forest that has always captured the imagination. It is both habitable and in-habitable. It is where the earliest humans, the hunter-gatherers, dwelt but ever since our turn towards cultivation we have felled the trees and required a different landscape.
Something about the forest, then, seems to reach into us and tap this primal instinct but simultaneously it is the location of the things which are frightening. Civilization is the opposite of the forest but art finds so much of its source in its density. The forest is wild.
Frost’s ‘Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is a well-known poem that has rattled round my head ever since I started regularly walking through woodland. This is the poem’s final stanza that you have probably heard:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
It is a mournful poem. In the first stanza we are told it is snowing; it is strange that Frost should seek comfort in woodland. Although I have recently gained more sympathy with him, there is undoubtedly something of the death-drive to Frost’s urge. The forest is a siren: it lures Frost to its chilly and dangerous interior. He dwells on this desire in large part because it is dangerous.
Thinking about well-known and often-taught poems allows us to grapple with a sense of collective imaginative understanding. It is a cliché that the woods are lovely, dark and deep; a frequently travelled path into understanding them. And yet, I cannot see the wood for the trees.
Truly, it is difficult to perceive the forest. When you are inside it your visibility is drastically reduced. You can perhaps see for two hundred metres, much less if the foliage is thick. The question of visibility is essential to nature of the nature of the forest. It obscures itself. It obscures its inhabitants. We are safe in the forest because we cannot be seen but we are in danger because we cannot see.
A forest is the easiest place to be lost in for this reason. We can’t see where we are going because we are always going the same way: into trees. The forest is a kind of infinity because of this. Right up until the moment you see the end of the trees, the forest is unlimited.
Alice Oswald in the fantastically titled poem, ‘Wood Not Yet Out’ writes:
once in, you hardly notice as you move,
the wood keeps lifting up its hope, I love
to stand among the last trees listening down
to the releasing branches where I’ve been –
the rain, thinking I’ve gone, crackles the air
and calls by name the leaves that aren’t yet there
Oswald documents a covert infiltration into the universe of the forest. She becomes acquainted to its slow rhythm: the growth that is inevitable but so slow that it is impossible to perceive even if you were to stare for an hour. There is no doubt thought that Oswlad describes an organism. When there is a gentle breeze through the forest you can hear the slow exhale of its gift of oxygen.
The result is that this organism, this sense of universe means that every forest is also every other forest. In any forest you are in The Forest. The roots of each single tree mingle and form the vast web of the Forest. Redwood, Oak, Fir, Ceiba, Baobab, Birch, Meranti, or Hawthorn: all might give a different experience of forest but all are regions of the same country.
This country stands in opposition to the state. It quietly declares the end of borders and the gentle profusion of trees. The forest is the opposite of civilization. As an old tutor, Charles Moseley, explained to me, etymologically the word has its roots in foris which means outside of the law and custom. It is the epitome of triumphant nature.
Shakespeare’s comedies draw on this often. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the best example. We see the double-court: the court of Theseus and Hippolyta is mirrored in Oberon and Titania. Indeed, it is almost obligatory for the actors to double these parts.
The initial narrative device of the play is for Hermia and Lysander to escape from the boundary of Athens’ law so that they can be married. Lysander says:
If thou lovest me then,
Steal forth thy father’s house to-morrow night;
And in the wood, a league without the town,
Where I did meet thee once with Helena,
To do observance to a morn of May,
There will I stay for thee.
Of course, they escape more than just the laws of Athens: the very foundation of human interaction is warped. In the woods they enter Fairy Land where apparent play-full-ness governs. At the end of the play, however, the humans must return to the city. They require the place of habitation.
Humans very rarely live in the forest. Robin Hood lived in Sherwood Forest with his Merry Men. He was an outlaw and the forest was his place of hiding. Thoreau famously lived at Walden for two years, two months and two days. Timothy Treadwell, the central figure of Werner Herzog’s ‘Grizzly Man’, lived in Alaskan forests intermittently with bears. Treadwell was a sort of environmentalist who styled himself (and was styled by Herzog) very much in the American (cf. Thoreau) tradition of frontierism. Treadwell was killed by the bears.
The very final scene of Midsummer Night’s Dream is Oberon and Titania’s blessing of the couples. They promise fertility. Oberon instructs the fairies to bestow this gift and then ends his speech:
Trip away; make no stay;
Meet me all by break of day.
So, too, must the fairies depart from the human world and return to the forest.
Who are these fairies who make the forest their home? Are you picturing tinkerbell? Before the Victorian era, fairies were very rarely considered harmless and associated with sugarplums. Rather, they were spirits imbued with extraordinary power and strength.
In the medieval romance Sir Laufnal, the eponymous knight disapproves of King Arthur’s wedding to Guinevere due to her promiscuity. He is estranged from the court and falls into debt and poverty. He rides into the forest and rests under a tree. There, he finds two beautiful women who take him to their mistress, Triamour, who is the daughter of the Fairy King. They marry and Laufnal is given riches, fine clothes, and physical power on the condition that their love is kept a secret.
Laufnal consequently regains favour and returns to the court where he is propositioned by Guinevere. When he rejects her advances she claims that he has never loved a woman and a woman has never loved him. He replies that he has a lover more beautiful than any woman she has ever seen and that even her lover’s lowliest maid would be more beautiful than her. In so doing, Laufnal breaks him promise to Triamour. Enraged, Guinevere turns Arthur against Laufnal and he is sentenced to death for lying.
He is given a year and two weeks to show his lover to the court but cannot find Triamour. Just as he is about to be executed twenty beautiful women ride into the court. They are all thought to be more beautiful than Guinevere but Laufnal is forced to admit that none of are his lover. Guinevere proclaims the execution and at the moment Triamour appears. Then,
Kyng Artour seyde wythouten othe,
“Ech man may ysé that ys sothe,
Bryghtere that ye be.”
Wyth that Dame Tryamour to the quene geth,
And blew on her swych a breth
That never eft myght sche se.
[King Arthur said, without swearing, “Every man can see that it is true: she is more beautiful than you [Guinevere]. With that Dame Triamour went to the Queen and blew on her such a breath than she might never be able to see again.]
Triamour has the power to grant human riches and to blind with a breath. She is stunningly and incomparably beautiful but also has terrible power.
I give this fierce condensation of Sir Laufnal because I want to show how weird medieval fairies are. The fairies have a sort of amoral system of personal governance that is largely behoven to the plot mechanics of these medieval romances. That is to say, what governs them is the imagination.
It is important that Laufnal makes union with the fairies in a forest. Indeed, resting under a tree as he does is a very common trope that precedes the meeting of fairies. In Gawain and the Green Knight, after setting out on his quest we are told that Gawain fights with wolves and dragons but it not until he enters into a ‘forest ful dep’ that he finds Bertilak’s castle and the plot progresses.
Gawain is another example of the awe-full power of fairies. If you do not know the story: a Green Knight enters Arthur’s court and offers that any knight can deal him a blow if the Green Knight can offer one in return in a year’s time. All of the court know that there is something suspicious about this enormous green man but Gawain, keen to prove himself, takes up the challenge. He uses the Green Knight’s huge battle axe to decapitate him at which point the Green Knight picks up his head and ride off. Gawain must go and seek the Green Knight to meet him almost certain death. I shan’t spoil the end.
Fairies are the embodiment of the forest. Paul, a pilgrim I continue to encounter on the road told me he spent a night in woodland but slept very badly because he was afraid. When I told some Italian pilgrim’s I was going to sleep that night in a forest they left me with the words, “beware of the wolves.”
And yet, despite a sense of imagined, imaginative danger, the forest draws us to itself. There is an endless sense of possibility behind the trees. The fairies can grant blessings as easily as they can curses.
Waking in the forest with the trees as your only cover is as close to reaching synchronicity with nature I have come. The birds and the sun insist on your rising and the dawn reveals the world to you incrementally. I have yet to meet a fairy but I might have seen their shadows.
It is the sense of the magical, at its root, that is so alluring. Caroline Kirkland, a nineteenth-century author who wrote a book called Forest Life which is a document of her travels through the woodland of the Western States wrote a poem in her preface. Here is part of it:
Not ours the wand, – not ours the Wizard’s lore, –
Not ours the touch that made the heart-strings thrill,
That woke the smile where smile ne’er played before,
And called from stony eyes sweet tears at will!
The Forest can never belong to us. We may never truly inhabit it and we shall not marry fairies. It is, though, a place in which we can discover the possibility of imaginative magic.
I’ve
Short Bibliography
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
For more on medieval Fairies (often spelt ‘Faeries’) I would recommend C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image. He has a chapter on them where he refers to them as ‘The Longaevi’. For something more recent and more than just an introduction, James Wade has published an excellent book called Fairies in Medieval Romance.