Fairy Trees and Forests

Fairy Tree Argyll

From a distance this looked like a fairy tree with a door at the base. As I walked closer, the grassy forelock and stout legs became a creature. Another visitor must have felt the same, because I discovered a bright sapphire blue piece of glass someone had placed as an eye. Or did they?

Many of these lush, magical forests in Argyll had carpets of bluebells with standing stones and circles embellishing them.

Further north in Sutherland and the Highlands I expected to find even grander wildwood settings. I was troubled to find many large clear cuts along the side of the road and sheep pastures dominating the hills with nothing growing except thistle.

I read a review of a book that intrigues me. Gossip From the Forest, the Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales by Sara Maitland.

I look forward to reading this book that explores the northern European collective psyche relationship with forests as soon as I can obtain a copy. These excerpts by Kappa Kassabova in the Scottish Review of Books tell why.

“Once upon a time, it was all forest and we were all forest people. Hard to picture it if you are surrounded by concrete and traffic, but not so hard to feel it.”

“Even if we are no longer physically dwelling in the forest, our myth-making imagination is still rooted there. In fact the forest and the European fairytale grow from the same turf, and we have nurtured each other symbiotically through the ages, transcending time, fashions, and the Brothers Grimms’ pious 19th century adjustments.”

“If the forests have given us our fairytales, Maitland argues, the fairytales give us the forest back, both the vanished forest and the still-standing forest which we have forgotten how to enter and enjoy.”

“Many fairy tales are about the separation of true identity (often found in the forest) from a false identity (often found in a castle). The forest therefore is the home of your secret true self, perhaps because it is such an ancient self.”

“Forests, like the spirit of fairytales, are endangered, because our sense of freedom, adventure, and time for contemplation has been cut down by artificial living and a sanitised culture, both physically and imaginatively. It is time to reclaim all of the above and to rediscover the magic of forests by experiencing them, knowing them and imagining them for what they really are: beautiful and savage, useful and wasteful, dangerous and free.”