INTO THE WOOD

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January 01, 2015

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Chronicles

Written by John Howe

“Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past,

given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.”

– Robert Holdstock

‘How heavily

That old wood sleeps in the sunshine; — not a leaf

Is twinkling, not a wing is seen to move

Within it; — but, below a mountain-stream,

Conflicting with the rocks, is ever heard,

Cheering the drowsy noon.

of this grove,

This pigmy grove, not one has climb’d the air

So emulously that its loftiest branch

May brush the traveller’s brow. The twisted roots

Have clasp’d, in search of nourishment, the rocks,

And straggled wide, and pierced the stony soil: —

In vain, denied maternal succour, here

A dwarfish race has risen. Round the boughs,

Hoary and feeble, and around the trunks,

With grasp destructive, feeding on the life

That lingers yet, the ivy winds, and moss

Of growth enormous. E’en the dull vile weed

Has fixed itself upon the very crown

Of many an antient oak; and thus refused

By Nature kindly aid – dishonoured – old –

Dreary in aspect – silently decays

The lonely Wood of Wistman.’

– Nicholas Toms Carrington (died 1832)

A little over a year ago, I went on a pilgrimage. A pilgrimage of sorts, not a proper pilgrim, with commitments of faith and leagues on foot; it was more of a detour of opportunity, of serendipity seized. Years ago, I read John Fowles’ The Tree. Fowles is a gruff, sophisticated and demanding author, whose fiction borders on the fractious, but this slim non-fiction book reveals the heart under his rough bark, and his intense relationship to nature and trees. He dwells at length on a particular forest in Devon: Wistman’s Wood. Not long after that, I was in Devon, but of course completely forgot the Wood and went for to wander on the moors in the steps of Holmes, forgetting Fowles, then berating myself for my poor memory when I realized how close I’d been. In November 2013, I was back, in Cornwall with a day off during a documentary shoot and only a handful of miles away, determined this time to correct my error.

So, I found myself in the company of a small group of artists from nearby Chagford, heading for Wistman’s Wood. It’s not a long walk – three quarters of an hour from the nearest road, upstream along the shallow valley of the Dart. It is a smudge on the hillside at first, which quickly resolves itself into a small wood, hardly more than a few acres in extent, tucked under the brow of the moors.

The trees are low; the edge of the wood is well defined; you could walk around it in half an hour.

A few steps take you into the wood itself. Everything changes – the sound, the light, the wind and even the temperature. Above all, even in company, you are quite curiously alone, there is something that both unites you to and isolates you from your companions of the hour, something acknowledged in every gesture and word.

That is when you know you have entered something somehow sacred. You have entered the Wildwood.

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The Golden Fleece was nailed to an oak, or hung from one of its low boughs. The Grove of Ares in Colchis was famed the world over, until Jason stole the golden winged fleece from under the nose of the never-sleeping dragon. The oak was sacred in all Greece, until the laurel usurped its place. Oaks stood in Delphi, until Apollo slew Python, but the most sacred grove was Dodona, in Epirus. A temple was built in the grove when the grove could no longer serve as temple (man always has to better nature, usually by inscribing his impermanence in everlasting stone). The temple was dedicated to Zeus, because thunderstorms raged there more than in any other place. The temple was at the foot of an oak, through which Zeus would speak with rustling leaves, despite the still air and absence of breeze. This was not yet the Olympian father of the gods, but one closer to the Pelasgic Zeus. The Arcadian Zeus had only one shrine: the oak-woods of Mount Lykaeos.

Now, the leaves of trees are privy to all secrets, and will offer them to those who know how to ask, thus Merlin is often depicted with a chaplet of oak leaves, symbol of the wisdom of the tree that he shares. When Apollo chose the laurel (after pursuing Daphne, until, in her despair, she changed into a laurel tree) he discarded the oak then and there – centuries of laurel wreaths adorn stern marble brows of Rome’s emperors because of a suit too ardently pressed.

Left: Antonio del Pollaiolo – (1431/32-1498) -Apollo and Daphne (1470-80). Centre: Arthur Rackham: Daphne transforms into a Laurel. Illustration for Comus. Right: John William Waterhouse: Apollo and Daphne, 1908.

Despite Daphne’s renown in Greek and Roman mythology as a determinedly chaste nymph who took refuge in treeform to deter an unwanted suitor, hers was only one of several sylvan transformations related in the Metamorphoses of the Roman poet Ovid. Book I also recounts how the naiad Syrinx was sympathetically transformed into reeds on a river bank to escape the lascivious Pan – the melodious pipes that bear his name were first fashioned from the hollow stems of those same plants. The sun god’s daughters, the Héliades, and their transfiguration into poplar trees as they grieved over their fallen brother Phaethön, is a subject of Book II. In Book VIII, the kindly old couple, Philemon & Baucis, are granted their heart’s desire of meeting death at the same moment, by being transformed together into a pair of trees that provide welcome leafy and whispering shade to weary travelers, in perpetuity. Dryope was the daughter of a Grecian king (Dryops, or “oak-man”, of Oeta, where the legendary Herakles, facing his own demise, later built his own funeral pyre), and her destiny, as another object of Apollo’s unwanted attentions, is described in Book IX. Walking one day with her child by that enforced union; Dryope plucked the blossom from a lotus tree, unaware that it was the transfigured body of Lotis, a nymph who had fled from the foul embrace of the god Priápus. Transfixed, she too began to take root, and turned into a lotus tree herself. The melancholy fate of Myrrha, mother of Adonis, and her punishment for incestuous passion, is a subject of Book X. In her shame she pleaded with the gods to chastise and transform her, and so she metamorphosed into a fragrant myrrh tree. Also in Book X is the pitiful tale of Cyparrisus and the sacred stag. This noble beast was Cyparrissus’ beloved companion, but one day whilst out together in the woods, Cyparissus carelessly cast a spear, which mortally wounded the creature. Overcome with guilt and grief, the young man begged the gods to allow him to mourn his friend forever more, and his request was granted as he henceforth took the form of a cypress tree, eternal symbol of sorrow. Book XIV tells how Appulus, or, the Shepherd of Apúlia, was punished for his unpleasant behavior before a dainty band of wood nymphs, by being turned into a wild olive tree as he mocked their graceful dances, his contemptuous capering cut short by his swift comeuppance.

After Cornelis Floris: Cyparissus 1565

In his Heroïdes (Epistles of the Heroines), Ovid recounted the ill fortune of Phyllis, abandoned by the transient king Demophoön (taking an amorous detour on his way back to Athens from the Trojan War). This was a fable also found in the works of Hyginus, Virgil, and, further on, in the fourteenth century, Boccaccio, followed by Geoffrey Chaucer and his contemporary, the poet John Gower.[1] Phyllis, a young Thracian queen, fell in love with Demophoön when he came ashore whilst on the voyage home to his father. When he set sail again, the despairing damsel, bereft of her beloved and her innocence, at last took her own life by hanging herself from the bough of a tree within the lonely woodland nearby. Some versions of the story say that she was transformed into an almond tree that would only flower when her faithless paramour returned. Others (Hyginus for example) relate that the trees in that sombre forest shed their leaves in mourning for the loss of their tragic queen.

Leaves sing the same notes as the harmony of the spheres. Japhet, one of Noah’s sons, invented the first instrument after hearing the rustling of restless leaves strummed by the breeze. A young nymph in a Swedish ballad played so beauteously the leaves accompanied her with an overhead polyphony. The prow of the Argo, made from oak from the magical grove of Dodona, could speak.

W. Russell Flint: The Argo.

It was from the spilled blood and broken body of the slain Titan Rhoecus that the first oak grew, when Zeus and the victorious gods contemplated the wreckage of the Titanomachy. Oak was called the “Mother Tree”; its first acorns fed mankind.

Mankind’s beginnings are often entwined in trees. The Greeks looked upon the oak as having produced the first humans. For the Romans, according to Juvenal in his Sixth Satire, it was the opening Oak that produced mankind’s first food. Ovid echoes this by affirming that man’s first nourishment was “acorns dropping from the tree of Jove.” According to the Eddas, Odin and his two brothers were wandering the newly created world when they came upon two trees near the seashore, and changed them, one into a woman the other into a man. Odin gave them life and a soul, the second gifted them wit and the will to move, the third speech, sight and hearing. The gods gave the new humans clothing and names: Ask for the man, Embla for the woman. From the Ash: the first man, from the Elm: the first woman.

The tree can symbolize life beyond life. There is a legend in Cornwall that recounts how Tristram and Iseult were buried in the same church, a proximity grudging granted them by King Mark, though their graves were set some distance from each other. Ivy found root in each grave, and joined in the vaulted roof above.

The sky doesn’t stay up on its own. It may be on the shoulders of a god or a mountain, or supported by a pillar. The world-tree holding up the heavens may in time become a garden, perhaps the earliest form of the intertwining of the sacred and the forever lost, because the garden becomes walled and guarded, and mankind, fallen from grace, is thrust out into the wilderness. The sacred grove becomes the place where a hint of that grace may be preserved, and the stern God propitiated. Sacred groves are the first temples and cathedrals. (Vienna arose around a scared grove; all that now remains is the Stock am Eisen, a memory in the middle of the city.)

World-trees have roots on every continent; even the four corners of the sky over Ancient Egypt were supported by forked trees. (They were later replaced by four mountains, joined by chains of lesser peaks.) The Persian world tree, the Homa, the first tree planted by Ahura-Mazda, has its roots in the clear waters of the fountain of life. It resembles Yggdrasil in many aspects, notably the dragon or lizard serving Ahriman who gnaws ceaselessly at its roots. (Happily, according to the Zend-Avesta, the demon is thwarted by ten fish that swim ceaselessly around its roots to protect it.) Two fabulous trees visited by Alexander the Great, the Trees of the Sun and the Moon, grow on the frontiers of India east of Persia. In Siberia, the Samoyed world-tree links the three worlds of the gods, men and the underworld. In Uralic lore it grows out of the back of a reindeer and carries the sun and moon in its branches.

In Saxon myth, Irminsul is the tree-column famously cut down by Charlemagne. There is little agreement over the nature of the wooden sky-pillar, though it is possibly a Saxon version of the Norse Yggdrasil. Sacred trees throughout those regions likely suffered a fate similar to Donar’s Oak in the region of Hesse. According to the 8th century Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi, Saint Bonifacius had it felled and used the wood to build a church on the same spot. Before the era of Christian missionaries, innumerable sacred groves, called nemeton in Gaulish, were likely found throughout northern Europe. The Romans had undoubtedly destroyed many by the 1^st century.

Left: Carl Emil Doepler: Saint Bonifacius. Centre: The Externsteine Descent from the Cross relief, the bent structure in the right centre is popularly identified as Irminsul. Right: Bernard Picart: Thoron, Divinité des Lapons – 1726 (as described by Schefferus in 1674).

Hungarian folk tales mention the shamanistic Égig érő fa (Sky-reaching tree), also called the világfa (World tree). The mythical turul lives in its upper branches. The “táltosok” (shamans) are entitled to climb up the égig érő fa and wander in the seven or nine layers of the sky. (It is tempting to see a connection, even if only onomatopoeic, with Ratatoskr, the squirrel that scampers up and down the trunk of Yggdrasil, carrying messages – and insults – between Nidhoggr and the eagle in the uppermost branches.)

Mesoamerican myth is rich in world-trees, symbolizing the axis mundi, either at the four cardinal points, or a central world-tree of a fourfold nature. Hindu myth also provides a grand number of world-trees, notably the Ashvattha or sacred fig, visited by two birds of heavenly beauty representing the sun and the moon.

(There are underworld-trees as well. Virgil speaks of the Tree of Morpheus in the vestibule of Hell: “In the midst a gloomy Elm displays its boughs and ancient arms, which seat vain dreams are commonly said to haunt, and under every leaf they dwell.” The Hantakadruma, or Tree of Thorns, is the tree of Yama, the Hindu god of death.)

There is a wood at the centre of the world, from which four streams flow. Water flowing from a tree’s roots is also the voice of the tree: Zeus could speak as eloquently from the brook that flowed from the roots of the sacred oak at Dodona as he did through the murmuring leaves. Four rivers flowed from the garden east of Eden, from the roots of the two Trees. The Babylonians placed the world-tree at Eridu, near the mouth of the Euphrates. The roots of the tree went deep into the watery abyss of Ea, the first god. Upon the leafy crown of the Tree, rested the primeval mother goddess Zikum, the mother heaven, from whom all things come. Midway up the trunk: the world of men.

The fabled Yggdrasil, or “Odin’s horse”, the great three-rooted World-Tree rising from the fertile soil of Norse mythology, drew its name from verses in the Elder or Poetic Edda, recounting the story of Odin’s sacrifice in his search for the sacred secrets of the ancient Runes. The tale is narrated by none other than All-father himself in Hávamál, The Words of Odin the High One. He speaks of the self-inflicted suffering he was prepared to endure in his quest after the Runes described by translator Olive Bray (1776-1823) as “the letters of the old Germanic alphabet, but (the) earliest meaning must have been something softly spoken, whispered, or ‘rounded’ in the ear…especially used for those metrical charms which preserved from all danger whosoever whispered or chanted them. As civilisation advanced and the art of writing was learned, these charms were inscribed in characters cut in stone or wood, and thus seemed to lend the characters themselves a magic power. The transmission of thought by writing must have seemed strange and supernatural to the uninitiated, and the name of runes was soon applied to letters of the alphabet.”[2]:

“I trow I hung on that windy Tree

nine whole days and nights,

stabbed with a spear, offered to Odin,

myself to mine own self given,

high on that Tree of which none hath heard

from what roots it rises to heaven.

None refreshed me ever with food or drink,

I peered right down in the deep;

crying aloud I lifted the Runes,

then back I fell from thence.

Nine mighty songs I learned from the great

son of Bale-thorn, Bestla’s sire;

I drank a measure of the wondrous Mead,

with the Soulstirrer’s drops I was showered.

Ere long I bare fruit, and throve full well,

I grew and waxed in wisdom;

word following word, I found me words,

deed following deed, I wrought deeds.

Hidden Runes shalt thou seek and interpreted signs,

many symbols of might and power,

by the great Singer painted, by the high Powers fashioned,

graved by the Utterer of gods.”

In additional notes Bray speaks of the solemn tone of these stanzas, appearing amidst “half-humorous, half-serious words of warning and advice, a recital of love tales and charms… (then) suddenly…this awful and mysterious scene of a god offering himself in sacrifice upon the World Tree in order to attain the maturity of his wisdom and power.” There is further speculation on “whether…in some old and mystic legend we are entering the very sanctuary of heathendom, or whether…it is merely a scene borrowed from the Christian sacrifice, where Tree and spear must be identified with cross and lance.”[3]

Left: Carl Emil Doepler: Odin Hanging on world tree, 1905. Centre: Yggdrasil & the Nine Worlds. Right: W. G. Collingwood: Odin on Yggdrasil. From The Elder or Poetic Edda, translated by Olive Bray.

The gigantic Yggdrasil was an ash. According to Alexander Porteous,[4] a significant grove, sacred to three principal gods, Thor, Odin and Freya, and home to a celebrated temple, had arisen in Upsala (sic), the ancient religious capital of Sweden. Within this grove one specific tree, magnificently proportioned and evergreen, flourished and was regarded as representative of the World Tree. When festivals of nine days duration were held at the Vernal Equinox in honour of these special gods, the bodies of sacrificial victims, including men slain alongside dogs and horses, were hung from the sacred tree.

The oak that grew on the eastern edge of Valhalla yielded the lethal sprig of mistletoe that cunning Loki fashioned into a fatal dart for the blind god Hödur to cast at Baldur the Beautiful.

The Druids regarded the mistletoe plant itself as a potent herbal remedy for a variety of ailments, ranging from infertility in domestic animals to an antidote for all poisons. It had to be plucked only from sacred oaks, losing its potency as a symbol of healing if taken from any other tree. Pliny says “The Druids …held nothing more sacred than the mistletoe and the tree that bears it, supposing always that tree to be the robur [oak]. Of itself the robur is selected by them to form whole groves, and they perform none of their religious rites without employing branches of it.” [5]

The Druids or Derwydd, “the sublime and intellectual philosophers who directed the machineries of the state and the priesthood, and presided over the dark mysteries of the consecrated groves”, apparently derived their name from the Celtic words derw (for “oak”) and ydd, a common termination of nouns in that tongue. (Dryad would have the same origin.) The emblematically named Bardds and Ovydds, musicians and noviciates, from bar (branch) and ov (raw, pure) respectively, formed the other two orders of Druidism. “The Derwydd was the trunk and support of the whole; the Bard the ramification from that trunk arranged in beautiful foliage; and the Ovydd was the young shoot, which, growing up, ensured a prospect of permanency to the sacred grove.” [6]

A nineteenth-century appraisal of Welsh folklore tells us that the fairies “favour the oak-tree, and the female oak especially (for their fairy rings and dances), partly because of its more wide-spreading branches and deeper shade, partly because of the ‘superstitious use made of it beyond other trees’ in the days of the Druids. Formerly, it was dangerous to cut down a female oak in a fair dry place.”[7]

Mistletoe rarely grows on oak, but is thought to have special qualities when it does. In winter, the vital essence of the tree, the true spirit of the oak, takes refuge in the mistletoe during the winter months. Bringing a sprig of mistletoe into the home brings with it the tree-spirit.

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Wistman’s Wood might not be there, might not have survived, were the rocks less jumbled and close. Trunk and boulder, bark and stone – the tree and the substituted column, tree-pillar or standing stone possessed similar functions and strengths, but the sacredness of the tree was a growing part of it, whereas numen had to be conferred on the stone through ritual invocation. The story of Pygmalion, seen in this light, is a different tale indeed. That the rock, inherently soulless, should be the protector of the wood, is a prosaic enough occurrence, but with wider philosophical implications, redefining our notions of usefulness and worth.

Of course others have spoken of it better far than I ever could.

Foremost among them is John Fowles (31 March 1926 – 5 November 2005), author of The Ebony Tower and The French Lieutenant’s Woman, who abandons his habitual ever-so-slightly-sententious stance for a more personal testament in “The Tree”. This extraordinary and quite slim book is a personal ode to the trees in his life, and notably the forest of Wistman’s Wood.

The following excerpt is drawn from the closing pages of the book. On reaching the place long-sought, Fowles writes:

“But then suddenly, like a line of hitherto concealed infantry, huddled under the steepest downward fall of the slope near the bottom, what we have come for emerges from the low grass and ling: a thin, broken streak of tree-tops, a pale arboreal surf. For me this secret wood, perhaps the strangest in all Britain, does not really rise like a line of infantry. It rises like a ghost.

I can’t now remember the exact circumstances of the only other time I saw it, except that it must have been late in 1946, when I was a lieutenant of marines in a camp on the edge of Dartmoor. This was not part of our training area, and I can’t have been on duty. It was winter, there was ice in the air and a clinging mist, and I was alone. I think I had been walking somewhere else, trying to shoot snipe, and had merely made a last-minute detour to see the place, perhaps to orient myself.

At least it lived up to the reputation I had once heard a moorland farmer give it: some tale of an escaped prisoner from Princetown a few miles away, found frozen to death there – or self-hanged, I forget. But it had no need of that kind of black embroidery. It was forlorn, skeletal, almost malevolent – distinctly eerie, even though I am not a superstitious person and solitude in nature has never frightened me one-tenth as much as solitude in cities and houses. It simply felt a bad place, not one to linger in, and I did not go into the trees; and I had never gone back to it, though often enough on Dartmoor, till this day. In truth I had forgotten about it, in all those intervening years, until I began writing this text and was recalling my father’s suspicion of the wild. One day then its memory mysteriously surged, as it surges itself from the moorland slope, out of nowhere. Its name is Wistman’s Wood.

I do not know who Wistman was – whether he was some ancient owner or whether the word derives from the old Devonshire dialect word wisht, which means melancholy and uncanny, wraithlike; and which lies behind one of Conan Doyle’s most famous tales. There would never have been a hound of the Baskervilles, were it not for the much older Wisht Hounds of Dartmoor legend.

Wistman’s Wood may be obscurely sited, but it is no longer, as it was in the 1940s, obscurely known. The rise of ecology has seen to that. In scientific terms it is an infinitely rare fragment of primeval forest, from some warmer phase of world climate, that has managed to cling on – though not without some remarkable adaptations – in this inhospitable place; and even more miraculously managed to survive the many centuries of human depredation of anything burnable on the Moor. Culturally it is comparable with a great Neolithic site: a sort of Avebury of the tree, an Ur-wood. Physically it is a half-mile chain of copses splashed, green drops in a tachist painting, along what on Dartmoor they call a clitter, a broken debris of granite boulders – though not at all on true tachist principle, by chance. These boulders provide the essential protection for seedlings against bitter winds and grazing sheep. But the real ecological miracle of Wistman’s Wood is botanical. Its dominant species, an essentially lowland one, should not really be here at all, and is found at this altitude in only one other, and Irish, site in the British Isles. Here and there in the wood are a scatter of mountain ashes, a few hollies. But the reigning tree is the ancient king of all our trees, Quercus robur, the Common, or English, Oak.

We go down, to the uppermost brink. Names, science, history . . . not even the most adamantly down-to-earth botanist thinks of species and ecologies when he or she first stands at Wistman’s Wood. It is too strange for that. The normal full-grown height of the common oak is thirty to forty metres. Here the very largest, and even though they are centuries old, rarely top five metres. They are just coming into leaf, long after their lowland kin, in every shade from yellow-green to bronze. Their dark branches grow to an extraordinary extent laterally, are endlessly angled, twisted, raked, interlocked, and reach quite as much downward as upwards. These trees are inconceivably different from the normal habit of their species, far more like specimens from a natural bonsai nursery. They seem, even though the day is windless, to be writhing, convulsed, each its own Laocoön, caught and frozen in some fanatically private struggle for existence.

The next thing one notices is even more extraordinary, in this Ice Age environment. It is a paradoxically tropical quality, for every lateral branch, fork, saddle of these aged dwarfs is densely clothed in other plants – not just the tough little polypodies of most deciduous woodlands, but large, elegantly pluming male ferns; whortleberry beds, grasses, huge cushions of moss and festoons of lichen. The clitter of granite boulders, bare on the windswept moors, here provides a tumbling and chaotic floor of moss-covered mounds and humps, which add both to the impression of frozen movement and to that of an astounding internal fertility, since they seem to stain the upward air with their vivid green. This floor like a tilted emerald sea, the contorted trunks, the interlacing branches with their luxuriant secondary aerial gardens . . . there is only one true epithet to convey the sight of Wistman’s Wood, even today. It is fairy-like. It corresponds uncannily with the kind of setting artists like Richard Dadd imagined for that world in Victorian times and have now indelibly given it: teeming, jewel-like, self-involved, rich in secrets just below the threshold of our adult human senses.

We enter. The place has an intense stillness, as if here the plant side of creation rules and even birds are banned; below, through the intricate green gladelets and branch gardens, comes the rush of water in a moorland stream, one day to join the sea far to the south. This water-noise, like the snore of the raven again, the breeding-trill of a distant curlew, seems to come from another world, once one is inside the wood. There are birds, of course . . . an invisible hedgesparrow, its song not lost here, as it usually is, among all the sounds of other common garden birds, nor lost in its own ubiquity in Britain, but piercing and peremptory, individual, irretrievable; even though, a minute later, we hear its prestissimo bulbul shrill burst out again. My wood, my wood, it shall never be yours.

Parts of all the older trees are dead and decayed, crumbling into humus, which is why, together with the high annual humidity, they carry their huge sleeves of ferns and other plants. Some are like loose brassards and can be lifted free and replaced. The only colour not green or bronze or russet, not grey trunk or rich brown of the decaying wood, are tiny rose-pink stem-beads, future apples where some gall-wasp has laid its eggs on a new shoot. But it is the silence, the waitingness of the place, that is so haunting; a quality all woods will have on occasion, but which is overwhelming here – a drama, but of a time-span humanity cannot conceive. A pastness, a presentness, a skill with tenses the writer in me knows he will never know; partly out of his own inadequacies, partly because there are tenses human language has yet to invent.

We drift from copse to copse. One to the south is now fenced off by the Nature Conservancy to see what effect keeping moorland sheep, bullocks and wild ponies from grazing will have. It has a much denser growth of ground level, far more thickety, and is perhaps what the wood would have looked like centuries ago, before stock was widely run on the Moor; and yet now seems artificial – scientifically necessary, aesthetically less pleasing, less surreal, historically less honest beside the still open wood, ‘gardened’ by what man has introduced. There is talk now of wiring off the whole wood like this, reserving it from the public, as at Stonehenge. Returning, we come on two hikers, rucksacks beside them, lying on their backs inside the trees, like two young men in a trance. They do not speak to us, nor we to them. It is the place, wanting it to oneself, and I am prey to their same feeling. I persuade my wife to start the long climb back. I will catch up.

I go alone to the most detached and isolated of the copses, the last and highest, to the north. It grows in a small natural amphitheatre, and proves to be the most luxuriant, intricate and greenly beautiful of the chain. I sit in its silence, beneath one of its most contorted trees, a patriarchal gnome-oak. The botanist in me notices a colony of woodrush, like a dark green wheat among the emerald clitter; then the delicate climbing fumitory Corydalis claviculata, with its maidenhair-fern leaves and greenish-white flowers. A not uncommon plant where I live in Dorset; yet now it seems like the hedgesparrow’s song, hyperdistinct, and also an epitome, a quintessence of all my past findings and knowledge of it; as with the oaks it grows beneath, subsuming all other oaks. I remember another corydalis, bulbosa, that they still grow in the garden at Uppsala in honour of the great man, who named the genus.

From somewhere outside, far above, on top of Longford Tor, I hear human voices. Then silence again. The wood waits, as if its most precious sap were stillness. I ask why I, of a species so incapable of stillness, am here.

I think of a recent afternoon spent in discussion with a famous photographer, and how eminently French and lucid his philosophy of art seemed, compared to mine. I envied him a little, from the maze of my own constantly shifting and confused feelings. I may pretend in public that they are theories, but in reality they are as dense and ravelled as this wood, always beyond my articulation or rational comprehension, perhaps because I know I came to writing through nature, or exile from it, far more than by innate gift. I think of my father and, wryly, of why I should for so many years have carried such a bad, unconsciously repressing mental image of Wistman’s Wood — some part or branch of him I had never managed to prune out. It is incomprehensible now, before such inturned peace, such profound harmlessness, otherness, selflessness, such unusing…all words miss, I know I cannot describe it. A poet once went near, though in another context: the strange phosphorus of life, nameless under an old misappellation.

So I sit in the namelessness, the green phosphorus of the tree, surrounded by impenetrable missappellations. I came here really only to be sure; not to describe it, since I cannot, or only by the misappellations; to be sure that what I have written is not all lucubration, study dream, in vitro, as epiphytic upon reality as the ferns on the branches above my head.

It, this namelessness, is beyond our science and our arts because its secret is being, not saying. Its greatest value to us is that it cannot be reproduced, that this being can be apprehended only by other present being, only by the living senses and consciousness. All experience of it through surrogate and replica, through selected image, gardened word, through other eyes and minds, betrays or banishes its reality. But this is nature’s consolation, its message, and well beyond the Wistman’s Wood of its own strict world. It can be known and entered only by each, and in its now; not by you through me, by any you through any me; only by you through yourself, or me through myself. We still have this to learn: the inalienable otherness of each, human and non-human, which may seem the prison of each, but is at heart, in the deepest of those countless million metaphorical trees for which we cannot see the wood, both the justification and the redemption.

I turned to look back, near the top of the slope. Already Wistman’s Wood was gone, sunk beneath the ground again; already no more than another memory trace, already becoming an artefact, a thing to use. An end to this, dead retting of its living leaves. [8]

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The forest, though, is not passive. While its vastness and latent hostility might awaken the age-old fears of becoming lost, the woods themselves are alive. Liminal sentience and even more frighteningly, as embodied by the slowly rising anger of the Ents and the sudden purposeful advance of the Huorns, pervades the wood; the forest can move.

There is a side-path here, leading to Wild Men, Green Men and Green Knights, woodwoses, daurogs and Entwives, but for once I’m not going to take it. My copy of Alexander Porteous’ Forest in Folklore, Mystery and Romance (I have the 1928 edition from Macmillan) is open to the chapter on Chapter V: Mythical Denizens of the Forests and Woods. Woodwives “frequented the old sacred forests or groves, and apparently it had been they who formed the court or escort of the ancient gods when they sat enthroned on the trees… (they) were the quarry of the Wild Huntsman, but were saved from him if they could reach a tree with a cross on it… Occasionally the Wood-Wife was known as the Wish-Wife, and her clothes were believed to be kept in an Oak tree.” Even Linneaus wandered off the main track, adding the Wild Man, or Homo ferus, to his Systema Naturae in 1735. According to him, the creature was mute, covered in hair, walked on all fours and inhabited the wilder forests and mountainous regions. As for the Green Man, he may have first opened his eyes under the Roman Empire, carved in stone in the Levant, before finding more fertile ground in medieval Europe. There is so much more to explore, but for another time.

Left: Hans Burgkmair the Elder: The Fight in the Forest, early 16th century. Centre: Martin Schongauer: Coat of arms with a Dog, supported by a Wild Man armed with a Club. Right: Green Man in Poitiers Cathedral

The legend of Herne the Hunter is associated with Windsor Forest, recounting the fate of Richard II’s favourite keeper and companion of the chase, a young man skilled in woodcraft who, falling prey to the jealous plotting of his peers, hanged himself from a huge oak tree in the gloomy heart of the great wood. His spirit in the form of a mysterious antlered figure astride a black steed, and followed by a pair of fierce black hounds, has led to comparisons with the Wild Hunt of ancient folklore. There is a curious parallel with Odin or Woden, the traditional leader of the Huntsmen, who, according to Norse mythology hung nine days and nights from the “Windy Tree” or World Tree Yggdrasil, in order to acquire the arcane wisdom of the mystic Runes. In the legend of Herne, his vengeful shade demanded retribution through the hanging of those found guilty of plotting against him. This aspect of the story is another echo of pagan practice, through an ancient ritual of hanging the corpses of victims sacrificed to the Scandinavian gods on the boughs of the great trees within their sacred groves. Comparison has also been made between the distant origins of Herne and those of the Nature god Cernunnos, also depicted as a horned deity. The name may have some connection with the Einherjar, those selected heroes slain in battle and borne to Valhalla by the Valkyries to await the dawning of Ragnarök. Close on their heels come the unearthly Wild Huntsmen who, with their spectral hounds, follow Woden (Odin) or other mythical war-leaders such as English Herla or Welsh Gwynn ap Nudd in their perpetual gallop through the folk tales and superstitions of countless cultures and localities.

Left: Franz von Stuck: Wilde Jagd (Wild Hunt), 1899. Centre: F. W. Heine; The Wild Hunt, 1882. Right: Franz Von Stuck: The Wild Hunt.

The forest’s gods are darker and grimmer than the gods who identify with groves and sacred trees. The Finnish god of the forest (and ruler of the game therein) is named Tapio.[9] Human-like before, from behind he might be mistaken for a gnarled tree. (Tolkien gives us a glimpse of a Middle-Earth Tapio when the Hobbits encounter Treebeard, mistaking him for a twisted tree.) The forest deity might also be female: an especially beautiful one, who would entice travellers and woodcutters out in the woods at night but who was perceived to be a rotted stump at dawn.

Left: Cernunnos, from the Gundestrup Caldron. Center: Cernunnos. Right: Relief of Cernunnos on the column dedicated by the boatmen of Paris to Emperor Tiberius and Jupiter, unearthed beneath the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris. Two torcs hang from his antlers. This is the earliest discovered inscription of the name Cernunnos (the C is missing, but was formerly visible). Musée du Moyen-Âge at Cluny, Paris

The wood is other, the abode of beings foreign and incomprehensible to us. To venture in is to endanger body and soul. One of the most powerful modern descriptions of the arcane power of the primeval wooded landscape is to be found in Arthur Machen’s “The White People”, in the pages of the Green Book, a secret diary kept by a young girl whose nurse has set her on the path to the secret world of ritual magic. Science fiction scholar and biographer E. F. Blieler has called the narrative in the Green Book “probably… finest single supernatural story of the century, perhaps in the literature.” Machen achieves a child’s-eye view of a magnified and potentially malevolent world kept at bay through childish rhyme and ritual; whether the presence of dark faerie is real or imagined is up to the reader.

When young Titus Groan briefly escapes the castle of Gormenghast, he forces his way into a forest through a wall of vegetation so dense his coat is left hanging, “the long thorns of the tree impaling it like the fingernails of a ghoul”. Inside, he is in the muffled world of an ancient wood. He sees ahead of him “spreading into the clear distances, the forest floor like a sea of golden moss. From its heaving expanses arose, as through the chimera of a daydream, a phantasmic gathering of ancient oaks. Like dappled gods they stood, each in his own preserve, the wide glades of moss flowing between them in swathes of gold and green and away into the clear, dwindling distances.” It is here he first encounters the Thing, an abandoned enfant sauvage that comes to symbolize – and galvanize – his desire for independence from the senseless and stultifying ritual of his ancestral home.

“He had been afraid of leaving the dark margin on his right, for it was his only hold upon his location; but now he felt it as part of some devilish plan, and that to cling to its tangled skirt would be to deliver himself to some ambushed horror; and so, he turned suddenly to his left and, although the vistas of the oak-land were now a sickening and phantom land, he bounded into its gold heart with all the speed he could.

Fear grew upon him as he careered. He had become more an antelope than a boy, but for all his speed he must have been a novice in the art of travel – through moss-leaping – for suddenly, while he was in mid-air, his arms held out on either side, for balance, he caught sight, for the merest fraction of an instant, of a living creature.

Like himself, it was in mid-air, but there was no other resemblance. Titus was heavily if sparsely built. This creature was exquisitely slender. It floated through the golden air like a feather, the slender arms along the side of the gracile body, the head turned slightly away and inclined a little as though on a pillow of air.

Titus was by now convinced that he was asleep: that he was running through the deep of a dream: that his fear was nightmare: that what he had just seen was no more than an apparition, and that though it haunted him he knew the hopeless absurdity of following so fleeting a wisp of the night.” [10]

While groves are equated with consecrated ground, and serve as the antechamber to the spirits and gods of nature, a place where human and divine may each approach from one side, ancient forests are the very body of the gods themselves, the sacred ground upon which rules only dimply perceived must, by prudence, be obeyed. Transgression may mean death, or worse, imprisonment.

The misfortunes of Ariel.

Left: Paul Woodroffe: Illustration for The Tempest by William Shakespeare, 1905. Centre: Edmund Dulac: Ariel and Sycorax. Right: Maud Tindal Atkinson: Ariel, 1915.

Ariel, in Shakespeare’s Tempest, is bound to serve the magician Prospero’s service, after being delivered from the tree in which he was imprisoned by the witch Sycorax.

The enchanter Merlin is himself enchanted by the sorceress Vivien, and imprisoned for eternity in the heart of a tree in the forest of Brocéliande. For Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), it is the mystic echo of ancient forest-lore and the seasonal battle between the Holly King and the Oak King of pagan mythology:

“…or ever dreamed on charm-bound Brocéliande? O that journey of the doting wizard and his secret nymph! – it is a continuous spell, and enchains the spirit long before the last utterance of magic completes the dark enchantment. But where was flown the enamoured mystic’s cunning, that the very names in that dim world of trees contained no warnings for him? …And when… he passed forever from men’s sight into the heart of a great holly tree, did he not know it was a restoration of his spirit to its original spring, and bless the guile that re-created him a pulse of nature?”[11]

Merlin in Brocéliande

Lewis Spence, however, in Legends & Romances of Brittany, recounts the tale of Merlin and Vivien as told by the local people. They say that the sage was passing through Brocéliande in the guise of a young student, when he decided to rest beside a fountain in the heart of the forest. Vivien appeared, the beautiful daughter of a lord who lived in a nearby manor. Her mother was a faerie, who had foretold that their child, in womanhood, would be beloved by “the wisest man in the world”. Merlin rather foolishly sought to impress this lovely maiden, by performing the most entrancing magic, which Vivien longed to learn and emulate. The ancient sorcerer arranged to meet with her again in a year hence, and, adopting the same youthful disguise, journeyed once more to the forest and that fatal tryst. There, consumed by his infatuation for the enchanting creature beside him, Merlin was completely beguiled by her irresistible charms. And all the while, as he, enamoured, revealed to her the secrets of most potent spells and other magical arts she sought to steal from him, “Vivien was calm as a lake circled by trees, where no breath of the passion of tempest can come.” But cold, heartless and calculating as she was, the subtle Vivien conceived a certain glimmer of love for the hopelessly besotted sage, and begged him to teach her a spell that would enthral his heart so completely that he could never leave her side. “Evening was shrouding the forest in soft shadows when Merlin sank to rest…” and there, as he slept, the bewitching damsel wove the charms that would hold the mighty wizard captive for eternity.

Gustave Doré: Illustrations for The Idylls of the King, by Sir Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

According to the thirteenth-century French author Huon de Méry, the waters of the magical Fountain of Brecelien, also known as “the Fountain of Baranton”, were said to possess a similar power to that which, much later, J. R. R. Tolkien would give to “The Mirror of Galadriel”, for when taken from “the golden basin that hung from the oak that shaded it”, and sprinkled upon a magical stone which lay behind the fountain, those with the gift of the seeing eye “beheld many marvels”:

“Ah, how remote, forlorn

Sounded the sad, sweet horn

In forest gloom enchanted!

I saw the shadows of kings go riding by,

But cerements mingled and paled with their panoply,

And the moss-ways deadened the steps of steeds that never

panted.”

A curious tale told by the Scottish writer William Sharp (1855-1905), penning works later in life under the pseudonym of Fiona Macleod, “Cathal of the Woods”, subtitled “The Annir Choille” or “Wood-nymph”, recounts the strange story of Cathal mac Art. A comely young man of nineteen years old from Iona, Cathal had been sent by St Colum to live with a holy man residing on the Isle of Á-rinn [sic], in the hopes that he would so avoid the snares of sin. Cathal was discontented in his heart, for he had fairness of mind and body that would have taken him far in the world, but he was instead confined to the ascetic life of a cenobite, and taught above all to fear the evil temptations of women. Unfortunately, Cathal did not think women were evil, and he became deeply enamoured of Ardanna, the seductive daughter of Ecta, a local chieftain. And so Cathal fell willing victim to the wiles of woman that he had been so sombrely warned about and therefore was punished for breaking his vow of chastity, when Ecta and Molios the monk discovered the pair and doomed the young sinner to death. Cathal’s punishment was harsh as any pagan sacrifice (Ardanna escaped it), for he was imprisoned in the hollow heart of a huge oak tree, and left without food and drink, to die slowly. But in Cathal’s death throes he dreamed of the green people who inhabited that grove, and he awoke to behold one of them, Deòin (“Green Breath”), a woman of the woods. “Cathal looked about him. Everywhere he saw tall, fair pale-green lives moving to and fro: some passing out of trees, swift and silent as rain out of a cloud: some passing into trees, silent and swift as shadows. All were fair to look upon: tall, lithe, graceful, moving this way and that in the moonshine, pale green as the leaves of the lime, soft shining, with radiant eyes, and delicate earth-brown hair. And these fair forms were the trees, “the green life” of that forest. Cathal’s inherently untamed spirit, set free by physical death, then mingled with those ghostly green folk, and vanished into their world as “the green fire of life flamed in his veins.”[12]

Eleanor Farjeon mentions this tale in her own writings, then muses on “that green fire”:

You cannot mingle long with trees and not become merged with them; you cannot pass among them without something having passed through you. Walking the woodland ways in a great stillness, you have the sense of being on the edge of some imminent life-form that was in action the instant before your coming, and will be resumed the instant you have departed. The elusive mystery seems to be hidden but by the next tree and the last, yet you can never steal upon it, for this life-form exists in your own bosom, and you carry it as you go; the trees have only awakened a deep slumberer to the pitch of dreaming, and realization still awaits its hour.

She adds:

I believe that trees are interpreters of a secret between man and God; I believe that their branches are hands reached out to you, and the wind in their leaves is speech to you; I believe that beneath their rind the sap makes mysterious response to his blood who leans upon them in his need; I believe that leaves spotted red and yellow, picked up by daylight for their lovely shapes and colours, were fairy treasure under last night’s moon; …I believe that he who holds cones and acorns in his hand, holds in his hand a forest of pine and oak…

Tree-magic is not inevitably for ill. There are jolly ghosts in Sherwood, I am certain, and in many a Forest of Adventure you are as like to meet with the Knight-Errant as with the Questing Beast. Yet who has not also shivered in haunted woodlands that ever drifted wraith-like near Melisande crouching above her pool? or trod the forbidden ways where the Beautiful and Merciless One keeps princes and pale kings in thrall? or stolen in the steps of Leoline’s daughter when, going forth in the midnight wood to pray for her distant lover, she came on evil moaning in the dark? or ever dreamed on charm-bound Broceliande? O that journey of the doting wizard and his secret nymph! – it is a continuous spell, and enchains the spirit long before the last utterance of magic completes the dark enchantment. But where was flown the enamoured mystic’s cunning, that the very names in that dim world of trees contained no warnings for him? … And when …he passed forever from men’s sight into the heart of a great holly tree, did he not know it was a restoration of his spirit to its original spring, and bless the guile that re-created him a pulse of nature?[13]

The lure of the wildwood. Cover illustration for Into the Green, by Charles de Lint.

Tolkien’s lifelong love of trees, so vividly symbolized by the ancient and ponderous Ents in The Lord of the Rings, is reflected in the last photograph ever taken of him, about a month before he died in September 1973, at the age of eighty-one. He is pictured next to “one of his favourite trees” – a towering Black Pine – in Oxford’s Botanic Garden. It is tempting to imagine Tolkien was aware that, according to Alexander Porteous, (Forest Folklore, Mythology & Romance, published by Macmillan Company, New York, 1928) a black Pine tree, regarded as a Tree of Life in Persian lore, grew in the heart of the fabled Grove of Eridhu, within the Sacred Forest of that name.

Tolkien’s fascination with trees is ever-present. Niggle “was the sort of painter who can paint leaves better than trees. He used to spend a long time on a single leaf, trying to catch its shape, and its sheen, and the glistening of dewdrops on its edges. Yet he wanted to paint a whole tree, with all of its leaves in the same style, and all of them different.

There was one picture in particular which bothered him. It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind, and it became a tree; and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots. Strange birds came and settled on the twigs and had to be attended to. Then all round the Tree, and behind it, through the gaps in the leaves and boughs, a country began to open out….”

Alas, poor Niggle must make a long journey, and leave his painting behind, along with his dreams of ever finishing it, but at last, after protracted imprisonment in a “real” world, he is allowed his freedom, and discovers “his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind….”[14]

As an appropriate epitaph, several weeks after his death a memorial service was held by some of his American admirers, where Leaf by Niggle was apparently read aloud to the assembled mourners.[15]

The landscape of Middle Earth unfolded in evocatively-named forest and woodland – Taurfuin, the Forest of Night; Taur-im-Duinath, Forest between the Rivers; Taur-i-Melegyrn, Forest of the Great Trees; Taur-na-Chardhîn, Forest of the Southern Silence, and Taur-na-Danion, Forest of Pines, emerge in the history of that world alongside – for example – the more infamous Mirkwood [Greenwood the Great], which evidently translated as Taur-na-Fuin.[16] Nímismaldar, surrounding the city of Eldalondë on the western coasts of Numenor, meant “Fragrant trees”. Mallorn-trees, brought from Tol Eressëa, were planted there. (Mallorn is from the Sindarin malt “gold” and orn “tree”.) As for Mirkwood, it existed well before the adventures of Bilbo the hobbit: in Norse myth and legend, Myrkviðr (“mirky wood”, or “dark forest”) was dark and dangerous forest that separated various lands; heroes and even gods passed through it reluctantly.[17]

Tolkien remarks: “Mirkwood is not an invention of mine, but a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations. It was probably the Primitive Germanic name for the great mountainous forest regions that anciently formed a barrier to the south of the lands of Germanic expansion. In some traditions it became used especially of the boundary between Goths and Huns. I speak now from memory: its ancientness seems indicated by its appearance in very early German (11th c.?) as mirkiwidu although the *merkw- stem ‘dark’ is not otherwise found in German at all (only in O[ld] E[nglish], O[ld] S[axon], and O[ld] N[orse]), and the stem *widu- > witu was in German (I think) limited to the sense of ‘timber,’ not very common, and did not survive into mod[ern] G[erman]. In O.E. mirce only survives in poetry, and in the sense ‘dark’, or rather ‘gloomy’, only in Beowulf [line] 1405 ofer myrcan mor: elsewhere only with the sense ‘murky’ > wicked, hellish. It was never, I think, a mere ‘colour’ word: ‘black’, and was from the beginning weighted with the sense of ‘gloom’…^”[18]

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Since Wistman’s Wood has been there forever, at least as human life spans go, accounts of the wood are many.

“Guarded by great hills that fold each upon the other and fade into distance; set in granite and briar, brake-fern and the nodding wood-rush, Wistman’s Wood lies basking under September sunshine to the song of Dart. Upon a south-facing slope the hoary dwarfs that go to make this forest grow, and each parent oak of the ancient throng was old before the Conquest. Time and fire have slain, yet the little forest plays its part in the spring splendour of every year, in the leafy and musical hours of high Summer, and in autumnal pageants as the centuries roll. Here, under the Dartmoor hills to-day, sunshine kisses the granite to silver, brightens each withered and distorted trunk, makes the leaf shine, and sets rowan berries glowing through the ambient green. These aged oaks lack not virility, for I see their ancient crowns besprinkled with bright leaflets of the second Spring, with tufts of ruddy foliage, like smiles on the face of frosty age…

Granite and oak are clothed with lichens of a colour exactly similar, and to the imagination, seen thus jagged and grey together, one appears as enduring as the other. The old trees, whose average height is scarcely fifteen feet, are distorted, cramped, twisted, and knotted by time. Their mossy limbs, low spread, make a home for the bilberry, whose purple fruit ripens beside the acorns; for the polypody that fringes each gnarled limb with foliage; for the rabbits, who leap from the stones to the flat boughs spread upon them; and for the red fox, who, sunning himself in some hollow of moss and touchwood, wakes, as a wanderer assails his ear or nose, and vanishes, like a streak of cinnamon light, into the depths of the wood. Here, too, the adder rears her brood; the crow, with intermittent croak, flies heavily; a little hawk, poised in the sky, seeks the lizard below, or the young plover in the marsh upon the hills.

A great hush and peace brood over Wistman’s Wood to-day. As yet, but one pinch of Autumn has transformed the leaf, reddened the briar, or powdered the fern with gold. In the hollows a diamond dew still sparkles though the hour is noon, and the sweet, sharp breath of September whispers along the wood. Still every ancient crown wears the deep green of Summer, and a stray honeysuckle blossoms, though its berries are turning scarlet; but the tender, white corydalis and other flowers of Summer have vanished; the wood-rush has its sharp leaves amber-pointed; the heather fades; and the wrinkled wood-sage likewise wanes away…

The wood of Wistman partakes of these many harmonies—adds its sudden green to the hillside— lies there a home of mystery, a cradle of legend, a thing of old time, unique and unexampled, save in Devon itself, all England over.”[19]

“Arthur Rackham trees” define a category of their own. Illustrations from the Brothers Grimm and Comus

A ‘wonder’ which has been associated with the Druids is the grove of oaks called Wistman’s Wood. It lies close to Two Bridges, on the slope above the West Dart, and at a little distance looks more like a furze-brake than a wood. All the oaks are dwarfs, stunted by the lack of soil and force of the winds. Mr Rowe quotes from a ‘botanical writer,’ who examined some of them: ‘The bole of this tree was about three feet high, and its total height to the topmost branches fifteen feet. The circumference of the trunk was six feet, and its prime must have been about the date of the Norman Conquest.’ Some of the boughs, like the trunks, are immensely thick for the height of the trees, and they are covered with very deep cushions of bright green moss and hangings of polypody, and whortleberries grow upon them. Every step between the trees is perilous, among the uneven crowded masses of rocks and half-concealed clefts. Many of the boulders are moss-covered, a kind of sedge and long, flag-like grass spring among the crevices and add to the pitfalls, and the whole wood really has the air of having been bewitched. Mrs Bray’s impressions of it are interesting. She found the slope ‘strewn’ all over with immense masses of granite…. In the midst of these gigantic blocks, growing among them, or starting, as it were, from their interstices, arises wildly, and here and there widely scattered, a grove of dwarf oak-trees…. They spread far and wide at their tops, and their branches twist and bend in the most tortuous manner; sometimes reminding one of those strange things called mandrakes, of which there is a superstition noticed by Shakespeare—

‘”Like shrieking mandrakes torn from out the earth.”‘[20]

Approaching Wistman’s Wood. Left: Illustration by E W Haslehust – 1910

“Perceived from any distance by the uninformed, this ‘third wonder of the Moor’ might well be passed by with no more than the casual glance bent on a patch of scrub and undergrowth. Actually, it is a place of considerable strangeness – the more so as its charm is far more fickle than that of other Dartmoor spectacles. In a dull hour, you may light upon it when it presents neither character nor quality, and be merely annoyed by the curiosity which brought you out of your way. At a favourable time, the least sensitive cannot but be struck by its fantastic aloofness from things modern and unmysterious. Its exact age is very little to the point; let it be found contemptibly recent – the impression remains the same. Grown oaks little higher than man’s own stature, burdened with lichen to their topmost boles, tremulous with close-set ferns which cling to them, their gaunt arms wave sombrely in the trailing mist, or sun themselves in exhausted rest. There is something about this wood of decay made imperishable; in that which stood for its youth, the seal of old age and dishonour must have been on it, and it passes from century to century with no added increment of growth or of mortality.”[21]

“The ‘lonely Wood of Wistman’ is situated on the left bank of the West Dart, about a mile above Two Bridges. The ancient oak trees grow amid a clatter of rocks, and so stunted in their growth are they that many have their boughs resting on the blocks of granite that encumber the ground, and while this confused clatter has been the cause of the dwarfish growth of the oaks of Wistman, it has at the same time aided in their preservation. Had not the young saplings received the shelter which it has afforded, in all probability Wistman’s Wood long ere this would have disappeared. Today it forms one of the curiosities of Dartmoor, and it is to be hoped that it will long flourish amid the gray rocks of its silent valley.”[22]

Left: Painting by J. Lay Fethybridge – My Devon Year by Eden Phillpotts. Right: From Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts, by Rosalind Northcote, Illustrated by Frederick J. Widgery.

“…that exceedingly curious place… Wistman’s Wood is sometimes incorrectly spoken of as being a remnant of a forest which once covered the whole, or the greatest part of the moor. That Dartmoor was never clothed in such a manner is certain. There may, it is true, have been timber similar to the oaks of Wistman, growing in some of the more sheltered spots, in fact more than one such collection of trees are still to be seen there, and trunks of trees have been found imbedded in the peat, which prove that such was the case… The term ‘forest’… was given to those large tracts of land where the beasts of the chase were hunted, and which were under the forest laws, as formerly the whole of Devonshire was, until the reign of King John…

Wistman’s Wood consists of a number of small oak trees growing in the midst of a clatter of rocks that stretches along the left bank of the West Dart, about a mile above Two Bridges. They are not of great height, averaging about ten or twelve feet, but are of very aged appearance. It is said that a Perambulation of the forest made in the time of the Conqueror, describes the old wood as presenting much the same appearance as it does today. There is no such thing as walking through it, — the passage of the wood must be made entirely by scrambling from rock to rock, and great care is necessary, for these are so overgrown with moss, that a false step would quickly precipitate the explorer into one of those crevices that everywhere abound. From amid those boulders the gnarled trunks of trees protrude, their lower limbs not infrequently resting on the surfaces of them. Trunks and limbs are all covered with a thick coating of moss, which causes them to appear much larger than they really are. The whole is of very interesting character, which is heightened by its wild surroundings.[23]

“… on the south side, we find a spring of the clearest and the purest water, which Hannaford, the farmer, tells us never fails. It bursts from beneath a rock, and, like most of the blessings of Providence (whether we avail ourselves of them or not) it still pours its limpid fountain in fruitful abundance, amidst the wildness and desolation of the spot, and nourishes a thousand beautiful mosses and flowers, that render the Moor, though a desert in one sense of the word, a rich wilderness for Flora, and her train. We now view with surprise the oaks before us: and such is their singular appearance, that, without stopping to reason upon the subject, we are all disposed to think that they are really no other than the last remnant of a Druid grove; or rather the last vestige of its posterity…The ascent to Wistman’s Wood is strewn all over with immense masses of granite, that lie scattered in every direction. The soil about these rocks is very scanty, and appears, the same as in many other parts of the Moor, to be composed of decayed vegetable matter. In the midst of these gigantic blocks, growing among them, or starting, as it were, from their interstices, arises wildly, and here and there widely scattered, a grove of dwarf oak trees. Their situation, exposed to the bleak winds, which rush past the side of the declivity on which they grow, and through the valley of the Dart at their base, (a valley that acts like a tunnel to assist the fury of the gust) the diminutive height of the trees, their singular and antiquated appearance, all combine to raise feelings of mingled curiosity and wonder. The oaks are not above ten or twelve feet high, thus stunted is their growth by the sweeping winds to which they stand exposed; but they spread far and wide at their tops, and their branches twist and wind in the most’ tortuous and fantastic manner… In some places these branches are literally festooned with ivy and creeping plants; and their trunks are so thickly embedded in a covering of fine velvet moss, that at first sight you would imagine them to be of enormous thickness in proportion to their height. But it is only their velvet coats that make them look so bulky; for on examination they are not found to be of any remarkable size. Their whole appearance conveys to you the idea of hoary age in the vegetable world; and on visiting Wistman’s Wood it is impossible to do other than think of those ‘groves in stony places,’ so often mentioned in Scripture as being dedicated to BaaI and Ashtaroth… Many of the immense masses of granite around and under the trees are covered with a cushion of the thickest and the softest moss; but to sit down upon them would be rather too hazardous; since such a seat might chance to disturb from their comfortable bed a nest of adders that are very apt to shelter in such a covert, and few persons, now-a-days, would feel quite so confident as honest Hannaford in the power and efficacy of the ashen wand to render them innocuous. The oaks, though stunted and turning from the west winds, to which they are most exposed, are by ‘no means destitute of foliage; and the good-natured farmer cuts me down a branch to carry home’ in triumph, after having achieved the adventure of a visit to Wistman’s Wood. This branch has upon it several acorns, the smallest I ever saw; but the leaves are of the usual size, and as vigorous as most other trees of the same kind”,[24]

“From whichever side approached, rough boulders and soil more or less soft are almost inevitable. But having once reached it, the explorer will see a spectacle not easily forgotten, especially if the time be evening, or the sullen clouds lowering upon the waste, when the intense silence is only broken by the murmur of water in the valley beneath, where Dart ‘fleeteth through the moor with a long solitaire course’. As he stands there in the gray light, with no trace of life visible, he may be pardoned if a feeling of something very like awe take possession of the soul, for he will almost expect to see the wraith of some Druid priest gliding along the steep hillside“.[25]

Topographer and antiquarian Samuel Rowe (1793 – 1853) describes the wood at length:

“Wistman’s, or Whistman’s, Wood is the third of Risdon’s ‘three remarkable things’ in the Forest of Dartmoor. By him it is described as consisting of ‘some acres of wood and trees that are a fathom about, and yet no taller than a man may touch the top with his hands.’ The general description of this third wonder of Dartmoor is in sufficient accordance with its present condition to warrant the conclusion that the lapse of more than two centuries and a half has not materially changed its aspect, and that probably for a much longer period it has presented the same singular appearance as now. The traditionary account that the wood was planted by Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon and Albemarle, in the thirteenth century, has been related by some authors; but there is no reason for supposing that this is a planted wood. Nor can there be any reasonable doubt that here we behold the poor relics of those sylvan honours, which we may reasonably conclude once graced many of the moorland vales and acclivities, without contending that the entire district – the granite soil of which is unfavourable to the growth of trees — was at any period one continuous forest in the ordinary acceptation of the term. Risdon, Bray, and other writers, report a Perambulation made immediately after the Conquest, to prove that Wistman’s Wood was even at that remote period much the same as it now appears…” (The author here states that this is apparently unsubstantiated.)

“The whole world cannot boast, probably, a greater curiosity, in sylvan archæology, than this solitary grove in the Devonshire wilderness… the antient storm-stricken oaks of Wistman are without recorded parallel. Viewed from the opposite steep, when sullen clouds have lowered down on Longaford Tor, and shut out all surrounding objects – when mist-wreaths half shroud and half reveal their hoary branches and moss-covered trunks – there is something almost unearthly in their aspect.”[26]

He adds: “— surely this antient oaken grove, whose age outdates tradition and history …might have itself been a favourite resort of the hierophants of Druidism, and might have sheltered the last of the Danmonian priesthood, who, in these secluded wilds of the west might have found an asylum from the vengeance of the exasperated Romans. But it is not a little curious that among the aboriginal relics in the immediate neighbourhood, no sacred circle, no avenue, no logan, is to be observed. Nor among all the parasitical plants which crowd the branches of these venerable oaks – the most sacred tree of Druidism – has the far-famed mistletoe yet been discovered.”

Rowe also quotes from the Pharsalia [Book iii] of the Roman poet Lucan (39-65AD), suggesting Wistman’s Wood as the perfect “original of the grove, which he depicts as consecrated to the mystic ceremonies of Druidism”:

‘Not far away for ages past had stood

An old unviolated sacred wood;

Whose gloomy boughs, thick interwoven, made

A chilly, cheerless, everlasting shade;

There, not the rustick gods nor satyrs sport,

Nor Fauns and Sylvans with the Nymphs resort;

But barbarous priests some dreadful Power adore,

And lustrate every tree with human gore.’ —

Apparently Lucan also spoke of dracones that lurked amongst the oak trees, drawing further comment on this aspect from the author: “(The rocky labyrinth of) Wistman’s Wood has an evil reputation among the country people, as abounding in noxious reptiles.”

The “reptiles” remarked on appear to have been adders, which in a footnote the author refers to as ‘dragons’, as described above by the prudent poet. (As for the adders, they may well have had other preoccupations. Twelfth century Honorius d’Autun, writing in the 12^th century, explains that … the lion …is antichrist, the dragon the devil, the adder is sin, the basilisk death. He has a good deal to say about the adder, “…a kind of dragon which may be charmed by songs, so to protect itself against the voice of the charmer it lays one ear against the ground and stops the other ear with its tail.”)[27]

Rowe also regarded the local standing stones of Dartmoor as Druidic monuments, in accordance with the fashion of the time. Dartmoor chronicler William Crossing (1847–1928) adds: “When the belief was held that the Druids once turned Dartmoor into one wide temple, Wistman’s Wood was regarded as being a spot they particularly patronised: indeed, it was said to have obtained its name from them, this meaning neither more nor less than the wood of the wise men. The valley, with its ruined hut dwellings, its oak groves, and the Dart perhaps as its oracle, it was probably regarded as another Dodona.” Dodona in Devon; a far more romantic and enticing origin than trees randomly spared by tin miners.

Not all authors find the wood appealing. A description by Reverend J. Swete penned in 1797 perhaps tells us more about the writer than the wood itself:

“It is hardly possible to conceive any thing of the sort so grotesque as this Wood appears, with their branches just spreading themselves over the enormous blocks of granite among which they are intermingled; and their upper lateral roots twisted around their bases, and in the most fantastic wreathings insinuated, whereon a recess, or interstice offered themselves – from the visible decay of their branches, their having long ceased to produce acorns, and the encroachments of the Moss, their destiny seems to be near, and in the 4th part of a Century, they may be conceived to say “Actum est Nobis” – indeed this Moss, (in the common way so injurious to trees) must in the voluminous mass in which it is here found, have hastened on the ruin of the trees… Silence seemed to have taken up her abode in this sequestered wood – and to a superstitious mind some impression would have occurred approaching to dread, or sacred horror..”

˜ ˜ ˜

In the realms of fairy tale, forests are traditionally dark and forbidding places, full of shadowy pathways, frequently blocked by gnarled boles and branches, where lonely travellers find themselves in a twilight world, a gloomy, inhospitable region with the prospect of who knows what lurking behind each tree and every tangled thicket. In the most perilous journeys of folklore and legend, the hero or heroine must pass undaunted through such a domain in search of their heart’s desire, which often lies, tantalisingly, on the farthest edge of an enchanted forest. Alternatively, they may have become lost in the dusky and mysterious depths of a woodland wilderness.

The perilous forest. Left: Gustave Doré: illustration for Hop o’ my Thumb. Centre: Artur Grottger: The Great Forest 1864. Right: Arthur Rackham: illustration for Undine, 1909.

The stories collected by the Brothers Grimm feature numerous symbolic obstacles, normally disguised – beyond the sombre environment itself – as malign spirits, evil hags or mischievous goblins. Sometimes, however, the most malevolent creatures wear kindly faces – for a while. The benign old woman dwelling in her delicious-looking gingerbread house (built in the very heart of a dense forest), far from feeling true compassion for the starving and abandoned Hansel and Gretel, seeks to ensnare them through the guiles of witchcraft.[28] Little Brother and Little Sister, hoping to escape their wicked stepmother, enter a large forest, only to find that all the streams are polluted by evil enchantments, to drink from which would transform them into wild animals. Thickets of thorns and the most entangled of tree roots enclose the castle where the beautiful princess Rosebud lies in spellbound sleep. The Water of Life finds a handsome young prince wrongfully sent to certain death whilst hunting in a forest, a favourite spot for the doing of foul deeds. (He survives to wed a fair princess, so all is happy ever after, eventually!)[29]

The tragic tale of the water nixie, Undine, takes the reader beyond the friendly fisherman’s cottage to “…a fearsome forest right perilous to traverse. It was dark, solitary and pathless, and many a marvellous strange creature and many a wraith and spectral illusion haunted its glades, so that none might dare adventure unless a sheer necessity drave them.” The fisherman, however, had found a way of dealing with this, for “He was a man full of holy thoughts, and as he took his way through the gloomy shades peopled with forms of dread, he was wont to sing a pious chaunt with a clear voice, and an honest heart, and a conscience void of guile.” Clearly weapons as sound as a stout stick and a streak of knightly valour. It was in this very forest, at the height of a wild storm, that the ultimately faithless Huldbrand was to find the winsome and wayward water sprite. Once wedded, Undine travels back with her new husband through that same secret forest, to Huldbrand’s distant home. Further on, Undine’s love rival, Bertalda, steals away to the Black Valley, a place of great foreboding, overshadowed by tall and gloomy pines.[30]

Boisterous elemental beings, bringers of storm, flood and avalanche, live deep in the forest. John Bauer: Among Gnomes & Trolls, 1915

Hop O’ My Thumb, like Hansel before him, tries to find his way out of the dreary forest where he and his siblings have been left by their poverty-stricken parents, through the ploy of casting pebbles along the path by which they had come. Lost again, the little group stumbles upon an ogre’s stronghold rearing up amidst the ancient oaks and elms.[31]

In search of the castle that lies “east of the sun and west of the moon”, the young lass of that story sets out alone from the depths of a thick forest where she has lain after the beguiled prince, in the guise of a white bear who magically bore her there, vanishes when she accidentally looks upon him in defiance of his wishes. From those same old folk tales from the far north comes the account of another fair “lassie” (as they are called) cast adrift by her godmother for releasing the sun, moon and stars from their captivity. On her travels she wanders through “a great, great wood…but the farther she went, the farther off the end seemed to be.” She takes refuge in the very top of a large tree, and there, peering down into the waters of a forest pool, her reflection entrances a passing prince, who carries her home to be his bride.[32]

The perilous forest, but Scandinavian, where the twisted trunks of more southerly woods are replaced by the vertical boles of pine and fir. Left: Kay Nielsen – Illustration for East of the Sun and West of the Moon. Centre & right: Two illustrations by Swedish artist John Bauer.

In southern climes, fairy tales continue to be told of further fantastical forests. The Italian story of The Talking Tree tells of a princess under enchantment, having bathed in a fountain whose bewitched waters transformed her into the eponymous tree. Sadly she awaits the man whose love will break the spells that enthral her. The king entrusted with this task travels in search of those spells, and makes the obligatory journey through an impenetrable forest, the province of a terrifying ogre, whom he has to outwit in order to escape (aided by the ogre’s daughter, who would have liked to marry the king too). Eventually he is able to return to his tree-bride, and by striking her in exactly the right place with a magical axe, he releases her from the enchantment. Alas, when he proudly carries her home, his courtiers point out that she is made of wood, a trick played by the owner of the axe, the ogre’s jealous daughter. A magic salve, stolen from that envious maiden, restored the princess to her mortal form, setting her free to marry the faithful king.

In the tale of The Cobbler’s Luck, the unlikely hero of the title must traverse “the hundred thousand mile forest” to gain the kingdom of The Three Golden Mountains, and his lost true love. [33]

Phantastes, A Faerie Romance, by the Scottish fantasy writer George MacDonald (1824-1905), in which the bewitched hero Anodos discovers the fabled road to Fairy Land, reveals en route a mystical forest, wherein the beautiful spirit of a beech-tree emerges to rescue him from the clutches of a cruel and pursuing goblin, the ghostly embodiment of an aged ash.[34]

The Box of Delights, written for children by John Masefield (1878-1967), relates the adventures of a young boy, Kay Harker, who encounters a kindlier incarnation of Herne the Hunter, here portrayed as a benevolent forest being, and the dream-like Oak-Tree-Lady, who inhabits the hollowed trunk of a huge and ancient oak, filled with magical birds and beasts that materialise from the surrounding tapestries of leaves which hang on the living oakwood walls.[35]

In John Milton’s 17^th-century metaphorical masque, Comus, a virtuous damsel is lost in a dark forest, where, separated from her brothers and captured by the debauched creature of the title, her noble nature is put to the test whilst chained to an enchanted chair.

Even more dismal is the wood of the self-murderers, or suicides, into which Virgil leads Dante in the seventh circle of Purgatory.

ERE Nessus yet had reach’d the other bank,

We enter’d on a forest, where no track

Of steps had worn a way. Not verdant there

The foliage, but of dusky hue; not light

The boughs and tapering, but with knares deform’d

And matted thick: fruits there were none, but thorns

Instead, with venom fill’d. Less sharp than these,

Less intricate the brakes, wherein abide

Those animals, that hate the cultured fields,

Betwixt Corneto and Cecina’s stream.

Here the brute harpies make their nest…

One of the unfortunates explains that upon death “…When departs

The fierce soul from the body, by itself

Thence torn asunder, to the seventh gulf

By Minos doom’d, into the wood it falls,

No place assign’d, but wheresoever chance

Hurls it; there sprouting, as a grain of spelt,

It rises to a sapling, growing thence

A savage plant.” [36]

GUSTAVE DORE - Harpies in the Forest of Suicides, an 1861

GUSTAVE DORE They wear no longer the shape of trees, and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope, nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish shoots.

Left & centre: Two illustrations by Gustave Doré for Dante’s Inferno, Canto XIII, the Suicide’s Wood.

Right: Another fantastical wood by the same artist: “They wear no longer the shape of trees, and yet they live, and cannot be conquered by winter, by their slope, nor by time, but boldly put forth into their native air their whitish shoots.”

By contrast, the woodland setting of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a fairy forest, Oberon and Titania’s realm, in which several convoluted plots unfold.

Left: Arthur Rackham: Illustration for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Centre: Noel Patton: The Fairy Raid. Right: John Gilbert: The Enchanted Forest, 1886.

˜ ˜ ˜

But, back to the wood at hand. There is little consensus about the actual age of the wood, though the twisted trees are estimated to be several centuries old for the most ancient. If the botanical origins of Wistman’s Wood are far beyond our grasp, the toponymy may be within our reach. The name may find its origins with the “Wish Hounds” of Dartmoor.

Variously known as Yell Hounds, Gabriel Hounds, Gabriel Ratchets or Gobble-ratches, this spectral pack of hunting dogs may have been the source of Conan Doyle’s eerie moorland mystery, The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which the intrepid Sherlock Holmes encounters an enormous and deadly black dog, uncannily similar to that of local folklore. These dogs are comparable, amongst others, to the Cwn Annwn, or “Dogs of the Abyss”, of Cymric legend.

In Tales of the Cymry (by James Motley, published in London by Longmans, 1848), the Cwn Annwn are compared to the ancient stories prevalent in the wilder parts of Dartmoor in Devonshire. ‘The wish, or wisked hounds, as they are called, a name probably connected with the Anglo-Saxon wicca, or witch, are under the immediate guidance of that mysterious being, whose nature ‘well may I guess, but dare not tell.’ In the pauses of the storm, and mingling with the hoarse voices of the rapidly-swelling mountain waters, the broken cry of dogs, the shouting of the hunters, the loud blast of their horns, and the sounds of ‘hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill,’ are borne onward upon the winds of the forest, and when the dark curtain of mist rolls slowly up over the hill side, they may sometimes be seen to sweep across the moors, rough, swarthy, and of huge size, with fiery sparks shooting from their eyes and nostrils …certain spots on Dartmoor are more commonly haunted by the wish hounds than others …and on certain nights …they are supposed to go in procession through the long deep shady lanes which abound in this district.”

Small wonder then that Sherlock Holmes should find himself facing such a spine-chillingly formidable foe when he set foot on the moors himself. The term wish is apparently connected with the West Country word whist, which signifies a deep and mysterious melancholy. There is even the possibility that the word may connect with Woden’s appellation, wyse, and inevitably links these creatures with the legendary Wild Hunt. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Wistman’s Wood has been regarded as “the very home of the Wish hounds, which hunt so fiercely over the Moor; and this Wistman appears to have been some demon creature, whose name alone remains.” The same author states: “Wusc, or Wisc [is given as] one of the names of Odin. Here we have a similar name given to a strange wood in Devonshire, associated with wild superstitions; and whish, or whisht, is a common term for that weird sorrow which is associated with mysterious causes.”[37]

Eliza Bray favoured an etymology of Druidic origin: “Wist is the preterit and participle of wis, from pissan, Saxon, wissen, German, to know; and is not at present altogether obsolete, as it is still used in Scripture in this sense. From the same etymon comes also wise: ‘sapient; judging rightly; having much knowledge ‘ — (Johnson’s Dict.) Thus Wissman’s or Wistman’s Wood signifies Silva Sapientium, ‘the wood of wisemen.’ The Druids and bards were unquestionably the philosophers or wise men of the Britons. We may naturally conjecture, therefore, that this was their principal or their last place of assembly; and the many stone circles on Bair-down immediately opposite the wood confirm the opinion”

According to Frederick John Snell (b. 1862), “Wistman’s Wood comes, not from wissen, but is more probably uisg-maen-coed or “stony wood by the water” disguised in modern garb.”[38] The sentiment is echoed by Eden Phillpott in The River (1902): “Here, at least, these two immortals ” the stream and the forest ” continue to survey each other through the centuries, and, still flourishing in the proper polity of green wood and living water, preserve a melodious and eternal tryst with time.”

Wist is possibly a corruption of Welsh – according to historian E. Hemery, an early Duchy document dating to 1621 states: “One place called Welshman Wood where the Tallest Tree is not above the Height of a Man”. William Crossing adds: “In the will of King Alfred, the people of the Westcountry are called Weal-cynne, that is Welsh kind. It is significant that the older among the Moor people called the Ancient grove Welshman’s Wood, and that this name was in use a hundred years ago is on record… The idea that the name is derived from the Druids, or wise men, is merely a fancilful one…”[39]

˜ ˜ ˜

We’re not out of the woods quite yet. (I seem to have wandered unwittingly off on all manner of paths and detours.) If there is one author who evokes the essence of Wistman’s Wood, it is Robert Holdstock.

Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984) and the tales he wrote after – some about Ryhope Wood, others faring farther afield, though all comprising events from the same mythos – define a genre of their own: the sentient landscape, born of thought as much as earth, shaped by fear and desire as much as the sun and snow, a world of the limitless dimensions of the mind and the imagination. The essence of Mythago Wood is the glimpse from the corner of the eye, the true Landscape of Myth, where elements of legend and story are seen when the glimmering shapes of rock and tree and stone are slightly skewed in passing. The unbridled thought made bole, root and branch. Or, in the words of W. B. Yeats: “I have read in a fabulous book that Adam had but to imagine a bird, and it was born into life, and that he created all things out of himself by nothing more important than an unflagging fancy….”[40]

The Perilous Wood

While Mythago Wood preceded the first of Robert’s handful of trips to Wistman’s Wood, and while he wrote nothing specifically about the place, it might well have sprung, like a mythago, from his mind.

“Out of our deepest memories come the forgotten forms of the past, given new life by the living sentience of an ancient and eternal forest.”[41]

“All of legend is in Ryhope Wood, though often as fragments, briefly glimpsed in a glade, by a river, across a valley; most often from the corner of the eye, something half seen, which vanishes when it is gazed upon fully. All of legend: that which we remember, and most importantly: the vast amount that has been forgotten during time, because the tales faded from the oral tradition, the events, which had once burned in the story-tellers memory, have crumbled to ash.

But they are not forgotten. The wood itself remembers, and these ancient images of myth, these ‘myth-imagoes’, rise whenever a human mind becomes engaged with this oldest of woodlands.”

“I get the shadow of the time, and make my own tale from it.”[42]

Holdstock evokes the folding of the landscape, the compression and juxtaposition of myth on the land. He describes the wilderland, or land of bewilderment, where geography is a translation of myth and personal faiths and fears, with the stretching of time inherent in the realm of faerie.

Cover illustration for Mythago Wood

On a personal note, and if you’ll pardon me for wandering back into a tale as discursive and meandering as being lost in a wood, I had the pleasure of meeting Robert only once, when my agent said, one November evening in London around 10 p.m. “Would you like to meet Robert?” I hardly dared reply yes, but did, and we spent a truly magical evening in company of Robert and his wife Sarah, finally tearing ourselves away around 1 a.m.[43]

Robert died unexpectedly five years ago, in late November 2009. In late November 2013, I found myself in a forest he could well have imagined, so strong was the feeling of ur-wood there.

As I said, it was a short pilgrimage in pleasant company, and now two walks in the woods will forever be in the November of my mind. So thank you Robert, for showing me the way into the wood.

A small gallery from Wistman’s Wood.

˜ ˜ ˜

A very very special thanks to Ann Carling, as always, for her precious help, without which this newsletter would never have taken shape. Thanks as well to Nicolas Mezzalira and William Todd-Jones and family, for the pilgrimage.

Footnotes

[1] John Gower (1330-1408). Confessio Amantis. Book IV.

[2] The Elder or Poetic Edda, commonly known as Sæmund’s Edda, edited and translated with introduction and notes by Olive Bray (1776-1823). Illustrated by W. G. Collingwood (1854-1932). Part I. The Mythological Poems. Printed in London for The Viking Club, 1908.

[3] Ibid

[4] The Forest in Folklore & Mythology, Chapter IV, Groves

[5] The Natural History, Volume III, Book XVI, The Natural History of Forest Trees, chapter 95

[6] The Veil of Isis; or, Mysteries of the Druids, by W. Winwood Reade (1838-1875). Published in New York by Peter Eckler, date unknown.

[7] British goblins: Welsh folk-lore, fairy mythology, legends and traditions, by Wirt Sikes (1836-1883). Published in London by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880.

[8] From The Tree, by John Fowles, first published in Great Britain by Aurum Press Limited, 1979. This long excerpt is reproduced here without the publisher’s permission; they have not replied to my permission requests. I will happily remove most of it if necessary, but for the time being have not resisted the temptation to quote the passage in full.

[9] His other names are Metsähine or Hiisi

[10] From Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake. Published by Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1950

[11] Trees, by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965). Published in London by Batsford Books Ltd., 1914

[12] From the Writings of “Fiona Macleod” [William Sharp], Volume 2, published in New York by Duffield & Company, 1911

[13] Trees, by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965). Published in London by B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1914.

[14] Leaf by Niggle, first published in Tree and Leaf (1964).

[15] J. R. R. Tolkien, A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter. First published in Great Britain by George Allen & Unwin, 1977.

[16] The History of Middle-Earth, Index (Volume XIII).

[17] Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy by L. Sprague de Camp, Arkham House, 1976

[18] From The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, Edited by Humphrey Carpenter, Letter 289 to Michael George Tolkien [his grandson], 29 July 1966

[19] From My Devon Year, by Eden Philpots, with thirty-eight illustrations by J. Ley Fethybridge. Published by Methuen & Co., London, 1904

[20] Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts, by Rosalind Northcote, Illustrated by Frederick J. Widgery. Published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1908

[21] Dartmoor Illustrated; a series of one hundred full page plates of its scenery and antiquities with some short topographical notes. By T. A. Falcon. Published in Exeter by J. G. Commin, 1900.

[22] The Land of Stream and Tor, by William Crossing (1847-1928). Published in Plymouth by Doidge & Co., 1891.

[23] Amid Devonia’s Alps; Wanderings & Adventures on Dartmoor, by William Crossing (1847-1928). Published by Simpkin, Marshall & Co., London, in 1888.

[24] A Description of the Part of Devonshire Bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy, by Eliza Bray. John Murray, London, 1836. Anna Eliza Bray (25 December 1790 – 21 January 1883) was a British novelist who wrote extensively about Cornwall and Devon.

[25] An Exploration of Dartmoor and Its Antiquities: With Some Account of Its Borders, by John Lloyd Warden Page. Seeley & Co., London, 1892

[26] A Perambulation of the Antient and Royal Forest of Dartmoor and the Venville Precincts, by Samuel Rowe (1793-1853). This edition published in Exeter by J. G. Commin, 1896.

[27] Ibid.

[28] Hansel & Gretel and Other Stories by the Brothers Grimm. Illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957). Published in New York by Doran & Company, c. 1921.

[29] Snowdrop and Other Tales by the Brothers Grimm. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939). Published in New York by E. P. Dutton, 1920.

[30] Undine, by Freiherr De La Motte-Fouqué (1777-1843). Adapted from the German by W. L. Courtney and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Published by William Heinemann, London. 1909.

[31] Fairy Realm. A Collection of the Favourite Old Tales. Illustrated by the pencil of Gustave Doré. By Tom Hood (1835-1874). Published in London by Ward, Lock and Tyler. 1866.

[32] East of the Sun & West of the Moon; Old Tales from the North, by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812-1885). Illustrated by Kay Nielsen (1886-1957). Published by Doran & Company, New York, 19–.

[33] The Italian Fairy Book, by Anne MacDonell. With illustrations by Morris Meredith Williams. Published by T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., London. 1911.

[34] Phantastes, A Faerie Romance, by George MacDonald (1824-1905). Published in London by Chatto & Windus. 1894.

[35] The Box of Delights, by John Masefield (1878-1967). First published by William Heinemann, London, in 1935.

[36] From The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). Canto XIII

[37] Popular Romances of the West of England, or, The Drolls, Traditions, and Superstitions of Old Cornwall, collected and edited by Robert Hunt (1807-1887). With illustrations by George Cruikshank. Published in London by Chatto & Windus, 1881.)

[38] Memorials of Old Devonshire, Frederick John Snell (b. 1862). Published in London by Bemrose & Sons Ltd., 1904.

[39] From Gems in a Granite Setting: Beauties of the Lone Lands of Dartmoor, by William Crossing. Published by the Plymouth Western Morning New Company, 1905

[40] From Part V of his Preface to Lady Augusta Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men: the story of the Tuatha de Danaan and of the Fianna of Ireland, published in 1904 by J. Murray, London.

[41] AFTERWORD: WAKING TO THE DREAM, from an omnibus edition of Mythago Wood & Lavondyss.

[42] AFTERWORD: IMAGING THE WORLD OF MYTH, from the second volume of The Mythago Cycle: The Hollowing, & Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn.

[43] I had idly picked Mythago Wood off a paperback rack in a shop in Zermatt, in November 1985, and immediately became lost in the story. I illustrated the cover of the novel in 1996.

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INTO THE WOOD

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Written by John Howe

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INTO THE WOOD

January 01, 2015

Chronicles

Written by John Howe

You may also read…

ON RAVEN WINGS: THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE MARVELOUS

WANDERING BUT NOT LOST

EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT US

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