Article by Amy-Jane Beer
From Robin Hood to the Faraway Tree, woodlands and storytelling have been intertwined since tales started to be spun. What is it about trees that captivates fiction writers?
“That very night, in Max’s room, a forest grew – and grew – until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.” The American illustrator and author Maurice Sendak worked obsessively on the sparse word count of his classic Where the Wild Things Are, but when he sat back to review that sentence, he must have known it was gold. Reading it aloud to my young son I envisaged walls in his mind crumbling to dust and almost heard the woosh of his imaginary horizons expanding. Sendak knew that there is nowhere you can’t go in your head: perhaps he also suspected that there was no better place to start a journey to everywhere than a forest.

If you opened up a human brain, sliced it very thin, and zoomed in with a high-powered microscope, you would see “trees”. Neurologists call them dendronsor dendrites – the branching structures whose tips meet and touch, transmitting billions of chemical and electrical messages a minute, one nerve cell to another.

A recurring archetype in global mythology and folklore is that of the World Tree – an axis mundi, or pillar of the Earth, rooted in the underworld, its trunk in the realm of men and its branches touching or supporting the heavens. In the Norse version, Yggdrasil is a mighty ash, the Chinese Fusang is a mulberry or hibiscus, the Hindu Ashvattha a fig and its Mayan analogue a ceiba. The idea of trees as connectors is as potent now as ever, and is explored brilliantly in Richard Powers’s 2018 novel The Overstory, which draws heavily on the rapidly advancing science of dendrology (the scientific study of trees), which is revealing the connectivity to be not only metaphorical and metaphysical, but literal. Under the ground and through the air, trees are talking and collaborating. If we are surprised by these ideas, perhaps our ancestors would not have been.

Several of the mythic trees, such as the sacred cedar in the forest home of the Mesopotamian gods and the Chinese Kien-Mu, promise eternal life or youth (as do golden apples or peaches in other mythologies). Others, like the Old Testament tree of knowledge and the Buddhist Bodhi Tree, offer enlightenment of one form or another. It’s not hard to unpick either of these ideas, or see how they came to be so pervasive. Any culture developing among trees might be expected to conclude that in living so tall, so deep and so wide in space and so very long in time, these beings must have secrets worth knowing.

Compared with their constituent trees, the forests of mythology and folklore are more ambiguous. They have long been places of sanctuary and opportunity and life, but also of uncertainty, menace and death. What’s maybe more surprising is that they remain all those things, even now, when most of us live urban lives and never see a true wildwood.

Perhaps this is because our minds are much like forests: places of light and dark, of growth and retrenchment, of replication, creation and deposition, of recycling and resurrection. Through both, there are familiar thoroughfares where we travel so often we don’t stop to notice what is going on any more. There are also the paths we walk less often, leading to places we are afraid to go.
The archetypal deep, dark wood has many names. In Old Norse it was Myrkviðr, which gave us the Old English mirkwood – as in murky – and found its way to Tolkien’s Middle-earth via William Morris’s The House of the Wolfings. In Middle-earth, Mirkwood is one of several forests, including the elven idyll of Lothlórien, Fangorn where the trees are really woody giants or ents, and the Old Forest of the Shire. Another variation appears at the beginning of Inferno, the first part of Dante’s epic Divine Comedy, where the poet finds himself in a selva oscura, a “dark wood”, having lost the diritta via –the “straight path” of salvation. Unfortunately for him, the only way out was onwards, into hell.Call it what you will, the deep dark wood has always been home to the worst of our imaginings – be that a werewolf, a troll, or a Blair Witch.

The darkness isn’t all pervading, though. A gruffalo is easily outwitted by a little brown mouse and the worst you’ll find in the Hundred Acre Wood is a grumpy donkey. In Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Wood, even if you find yourself in a disagreeable land at the top of the Faraway Tree (a sort of axis mundi with cupcakes), there are always friends to help you out. When you’ve had enough of the psychedelic dreamscape of the Night Garden, you only have to wake up. We’ve tailored forest tales for everyone, as if the setting matters more than the genre, character or plot.

The stories grow up as we do, but the themes and archetypes remain, and into the woods we go, again and again. We go to hide, we go to escape, we go to face our fears, or, in the words of Roger Deakin, we go to find ourselves – by first becoming lost. On our way, like the heroes who’ve gone before, we might meet Mr Tumnus the timid fawn, or be swooped on by Baba Yaga, a spectral Slavic matriarch in a flying pestle. We might encounter the Big Bad Wolf, a mischievous Puck, an exiled woodwose or a Green Man.

In older European stories, as elsewhere, it is often impossible to separate ideas about God from concepts of nature, and all wildernesses, be they caves, rivers, mountains or forests, which all had their own God-nature magic. It stood to reason that heroes venturing into these places, or beings that lived there, would be touched by it one way or another. But the allure of forests doesn’t depend on enchantment – there’s nothing ostentatiously supernatural about the nursery of Romulus and Remus, the encampment of Robin Hood, the lairs of Mowgli or Tarzan.
One of the most powerful characteristics of forests is that when you are in one, you can’t see very far. The twists and turns we are forced to make while navigating them are literally bewildering. If you have ever tried to find your way without a map and compass in a trackless forest, or even in one with many good paths, you may well have experienced the strange blend of surprise and anxiety when after travelling in what you thought was a straight line, you arrive back in a place you have already been. This uncertainty gives our imaginations licence to run fabulous riot. Robert Holdstock looped this “mythogenic” quality to spectacular effect in his brutal Mythago Wood fantasies, in which a bigger-on-the-inside English wood has the power to conjure and blend archetypes from the minds of those who visit it – snaring them in a terrifying, time-twisted world of myths incarnate.
Where did our forest fascination start? We know it’s older than recorded history because the archetype is right there in the world’s oldest known written work of literature, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh,inscribed on tablets dating to 2100BC. Gilgamesh was King of Ur in about 2300BC, and the story told by the tablets is of his quest for answers about life, triggered by the death of his friend Enkidu in the sacred cedar forest realm of the gods.

Even the terminology of written stories seems to have forest roots. “Library” derives from the Latin liber, meaning bark, which was used as a writing material in ancient times; “book” is widely asserted to derive from the Old English bōc, meaning beech, a tree whose smooth bark makes it particularly suited to inscription; and “tree” comes from the Old English trēow, which also meant “truth”.

The previously oral tradition of folk stories often carried warnings of mortal or moral peril, the latter especially in European fairy tales, and these were often emphasised when they came to be written down. Some of these tales have roots millennia-old, though the written versions we regard as traditional now have been thoroughly scrubbed and curated. The versions published by the Brothers Grimm were a genuine attempt at capturing the form as it was in the 18th and early 19th century, but they were selective, and markedly more Christian than older versions. More recent iterations are often sanitised to the point of being unrecognisable, but the forests are still there.

Perhaps it was around 10,000 years ago, when humans first developed agriculture, that forests began to develop their deeply storied identity. An ability to raise and store crops and livestock brought security, especially in winter, but at a cost.

Counter-intuitively, farming is much harder work than hunting and gathering. Cultivation, which across Europe necessitated the felling of forests, also tied communities to a place and gave them very much more to lose. The time where our ancestors belonged to the land was ending: they began to acquire the notion that the newly cleared land and the resources on it might, instead, belong to them. Long hours of hard labour must have impacted on the opportunities for storytelling, and on the function of stories. Perhaps it was then, as the trees became fewer, the forest became the “other” place, the dark place, the once-upon-a-time place. The cutting and clearing, the taming of the land didn’t dislodge the forest from our psyche, they reinforced its place there. And as we took the next step, from field to urban jungle, our roots remained firmly where they always were. The forest is in us, we are in the forest, and, dear reader, we can never leave.

Yorkshire Tea and trees
Yorkshire Tea is planting a million trees over five years – with a bit of help from the Woodland Trust, UK schoolchildren and Kenyan tea farmers. Learn more at yorkshiretea.co.uk/yorkshire-tree