In the East, there is a sense of the wilderness as a place of peace and refuge. From those ancient days of the hermit-prophets who descended their mountains to condemn the wayward people of Israel and the pagan merchants of Mecca to the Sufi mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who sought God in the desert, the spirit of the Wilderness was ever one of foggy mysticism we have long come to associate with the Asiatic as a type. One calls to mind that famous quatrain from Fitzgerald’s 1889 rendering of the Rubáyyát:
Fitzgerald, of course, took some liberties with the Bodleian manuscript he was translating when he published that text—as he himself admitted freely. He was also fond of the Germanic practice of capitalizing his nouns (this was not poetic—he did it in private letters, as well), deliberately obscuring the mystical and theological significance of the verses. His Anglophone audience established a long tradition of popular interpretation seeing the quatrain about a meeting of lovers; unsurprising, given the influence of earlier Romantics that had made the wilderness into that “fine and private place” where a man might embrace his coy mistress. The sensual eroticism of the fin-de-siècle European mind was ignorant of the spirit of pseudo-Khayyam, whose original quatrain more completely captures the spiritual awareness of the wilderness that they themselves had only recently abandoned:
It was these same who made the Rubáyyát as famous as it was. For pseudo-Khayyam, however, the Wilderness was not a private place at all, and certainly not one for sensual pleasures. A crust of bread and a single glass of wine is hardly the epicurean delight of Victorian eroticism—and surely no one imagines that the narrator has wandered off into the desert carrying a copy of Leaves of Grass when he mentions his “book of verses”. For what reason might a man go into the wild with bread, wine, and scripture? Like Moses, Elijah, John-Baptist, and Muhammed before him, this pseudo-Khayyam finds and converses with God in the Wilderness.
For millennia, people have found in the Wilderness not just God, but demons, demigods, monsters, spirits both benign and malicious, and the human acolytes, hunters, and tamers of these various beings and creatures. Europe in particular is full of country defined by its old-growth forests. These woods and copses were refuge for bandits and heretics, the homes of great monstrous creatures and the ancient cults of murdered gods—places that inspired tremendous fear and trepidation among the people for both the physical and spiritual threats they posed to communities. With fear, however, was also a sense of trust if a certain balance was maintained between the forest and the people living near it.
Gifford Pinchot remarked when he was governor of Pennsylvania that the old-growth forest of that state was once a great obstacle for the settlers to overcome transformed into a precious resource for the state to guard. How far removed was this great conservationist from the medieval townsfolk who protected and conserved their forests not because of what the forest had to give to them, but because of what the forest was itself: the cradle of the great motley of creation, home to great monsters and great heroes (both Merlin and Robin Hood, after all, dwelt in forests, as did the Green Knight beheaded by Sir Gawain). No one owned the woods except those who dwelt in the woods. The king had formal authority over hunting grounds, but most wilderness was in actuality no-man’s-land in the literal sense: no man dwelt there, no man possessed it, and no man ventured out without a drive for great deeds or some desperate great need that temporarily choked out his fear of God.
It has all gone by the way now; we live in the age of Gifford Pinchot and Walden Pond—the neutered, grey wilderness that is either a weekend retreat or a plunderable resource. The nymphs and dryads have all been desiccated of their power and meaning, the dragons have all been slain or starved, the basilisk and cockatrice live on only in stone relief. Indeed, the one legendary creature of the European wilderness that our scientists have admitted—the mighty aurochs—has been driven to extinction. The world in which these existed is just as inaccessible to us as the anxieties and anticipations of our ancestors who inhabited it. We cannot even speak in their language anymore.
Just as Chesterton recast Tradition as a sort of “democracy of the dead” to make it palatable to his post-revolutionary audience, so too the best we are able to embrace in this mental framework is a conservationism of the fantastical—that species of antiquarian Romanticism that has left us content to look into the past and sigh. We are, after all, living in that grey and frozen winter of Western civilization; our spirit is in hibernation, and our race is dormant. This cannot continue forever. A new paradigm is necessary; for our children will be fellaheen, and raise fellaheen children themselves, with numberless generations of such until we remember why we once approached the wilderness with reverence and unease.
Primeval Forests and Medieval Men
The West was born of the blood of the aged and crippled classical civilization, murdered and dismembered, as it were, like Ymir by the Germanic tribes sweeping across the Rhine and Danube. In the roles of Odin, Vili, and Ve, Alaric of the Visigoths, the eldest, Theoderic of the Ostrogoths, and Clovis of the Franks—dividing up the spoils of the Roman world and using them to give form to the West. Other Germanic kings set up petty kingdoms and principalities throughout Europe, borrowing what was intelligible to them and developing a new civilized world. The fears and faith of the old civilization, though, lingered—and among them was the great fear of the forested wilds of the Northlands, whence Germanic armies first emerged to crush Varus at Teutoburg some three centuries before Alaric oversaw the Sack of Rome. The limes was in most cases bordered by or even cut through the thick Hercynian Forest, a massive old growth forest stretching from Teutoburg itself south past Augusta Trevorum to Carnuntum and beyond. As the border towns were abandoned or overrun, the castells and forts left to ruin, the forest itself seemed to follow the barbarian hordes, swallowing former Roman cities and settlements. The mythical quality of a living forest survived even to the time of Shakespeare, as proud MacBeth proclaims, as no doubt the Romans had:
Then, two scenes later, his diabolical wife dead, isolated in Dunsinane, the armies of MacDuff closing in, and a messenger reports:
Macbeth, gripped with unholy terror, believes the wood has picked up and moved itself towards his citadel, and he then begins to doubt his position, which he thought guaranteed by the witches whose strange greeting propelled him on the course to Cawdor, Glamis, and king thereafter.
As the Germanic peoples moved into the towns and cities, and Christian priests drove the recalcitrant Celtic Druids and Germanic Goðar into the woods, the Romanized people who had heretofore feared the darkness of the forests began to put names to the things they feared, having known them in the days when they wandered as people of those woods. They related to the woods differently than the Romanized Celts before them, however. They were, after all, formerly people of the woods—who carried their past into battle with them in the form of ornate and deadly effective battle-axes, the ubiquity of which is evidenced on the Bayeux Tapestry, which portrays both sides wielding them. People of the woods relate differently to the forest than people of the plains.
Travelling northeast, past the frozen Baltic and the land the Teutonic Knights would name in honour of the Mother of God, in the ancient wilderness where the Urals begin their creeping ascent towards the realm of Perum and Tengri, another, younger people lived among the spirits of the woods so comfortably that they were regarded by the Russians of the 19th century as part of the forest. They are called Ко́ми войтыр, “the forest people” – a race of Wordsworth’s “vagrant dwellers of the houseless woods”. Russian ethnographer Klavdi Popov wrote of them that “If it was… possible to record the history of the Komi people, it would also be necessary to write a history of their hunting”, which the long-settled Russians regarded as the Komi’s most identifiable human trait. Twentieth century folklorist Pavel Limerov uses them to open his piece on forest mythology, observing how their chthonic religion different from cults of an Earth Goddess in agrarian societies. Limerov observes:
[The Agrarian] fertility cult was… associated to the myth of the cosmic marriage between Heavenly Father and the Earth Mother: this motif was entirely unknown in the hunting society, which honoured not the Earth itself, but its “skin”, its “hairy” surface, the woods that grew on the Earth… Those who worshipped forest believed in the cosmic relationship of heavenly beings and earthly woodlanders, including deities, people, and animals, i.e. they conceptualised the wood as the only natural living environment and sphere of economy, whereas the Earth Mother necessitate the reclamation and cosmologisation of large wild forests, and their cutting down for the cultivation of arable lands.
This is not unique to the Komi people of the Urals; the place of sacred trees and holy groves among the Anglo-Saxons and their continental counterparts likewise reveals an inherent sacredness of the woods in particular. Donar’s Oak is merely the most famous example of this worship of gods who, in addition to all their primary traits, are also guardians of the woods—as, no doubt, the ancient Germanic peoples who worshipped them were. Thor, of course, was chiefly an agricultural deity—yet even here, the “sky father” motif fails to account for the thunder-god’s attachment to the woods, which, as Limerov asserts, are obstacles to agriculture, not complements. If the wood around Donar’s Oak was not cleared; the Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi describes it as being “of tremendous size” relative to the other trees in Gaesmere, the forest where the tree grew. The same is not true of the Sacred Tree of Uppsala, where the only temple of the Germanic peoples is attested—here, a single tree (a yew, like Yggdrasil) remained dedicated to Odin after the temple was built. Like his saintly predecessor among the Saxons, Adam of Bremen had the tree removed when the temple was burned in the 11th century, so highly did the local pagans revere it.
People of the forest converted to agriculture are different than those to whom agriculture is native: medieval man had a barbarian heritage that shaped his attitude towards forests, and it was the outgrowing and willful abandoning this heritage that marked the shift in attitudes towards the forests. Likewise, people of the forest converted to agriculture will always exist in balance with the woods, and the spirits who inhabit them—in a medieval Christian cosmology, a wood may be sacred or diabolic, and in either case was to be left alone. Riparian forests, for example, marked for the Will O’ Wisps of the swamps that were dispersed throughout them, were left untouched—and this cannot be because land drainage technology was lacking: the land around several European cities, including Paris (and long before that, Rome) had been drained swampland. Massive tracts of woodland were brought under the protection of the kings, many of whom entered “agreements” with the fey of those realms—indeed, this is the origin of the word “forest”, which were foris (“outside”) the king’s law.
Upon the Norman conquest of England, which had been heavily deforested by the Anglo-Saxon kings, the Angevins and their successor Plantagenets had huge tracts of the country afforested and even decreed new woodlands to be cultivated, such as the New Forest in Sussex. These laws worked in conjunction with the common laws of the Britons in Wales, whose Hywel Dda guaranteed the inviolability of wilderness and forest land in themselves, rather than according to the property rights of the crown, as under the Norman Kings. True, the Welsh princes meted out land to their favorites at court, but the remainder of unowned land (which was always the majority of land prior to enclosure laws of the 17th century) was not claimed as the Princes’ right, as it was in Norman territories. In either case, however, there was a common understanding that forests were not for plunder—reverence were due to them, not out of responsibility for resources, but out of healthy respect for the powers native to them.
These “alliances” with the woodland folk after years of intense warfare had more to do with changing times than cultures—the greatest deforestation that began the process whereby the Hercynian Forest, once stretching from Noviomaus in Germania Inferior all the way to the very northern extremes of Pannonia, and eastward deep into the Urheimat of the Vandals along the Oder river was reduced to the modern Ardennes in France, Schwarzwald and Thüringerwald in Germany, and Šumava in Czechia. These relict tracts of the ancient wood would be completely isolated from one another in the second wave of deforestation following the so-called 12th century Renaissance, as cities began slowly to replace the rural manors as the centres of social interaction and cultural growth. However, during both of these waves, recent studies have revealed that woodcutting was never wanton—or, as the authors of the studies have it, “unmanaged”. The practice of “coppicing”, or deliberately leaving tracts to guarantee secondary growth—on the assumption that deforestation was always temporary—distinguishes medieval lumbering from Roman practices. The result of coppicing around new villages meant that when the Black Death swept through Europe and these villages disappeared, the forests quickly regained much of their lost territory. The next major wave of deforestation, though, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, would be far more ruthless and leave far less for the woods to reclaim.
Throughout their long history, therefore—from the early centuries of overzealous convert kings (and emperors) eager to smash secret pagan cults in the woods through the periods of regrowth and deliberate cultivation to the later centuries of closely monitored coppicing, the forests of Europe flourished in both the land and the Western mind. Arthurian Romances, the Grail stories, the tales of Chrétien de Troyes, these are all rife with forest imagery—indeed, some of the most powerful prior to the soulless worship of the woods during the Romantic period (more on that later). Prior to these tales being recorded by story-tellers like Chrétien de Troyes, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Guillaume de Lorris, Jean de Meune, Wolfram von Eschenbach, and the countless anonymous monks and lay scribes who have given us multitudes of enchanted woods. There are woods of a single tale like the waste-forest of Tristan and Iseult and the woods of the Green Knight beheaded by Sir Gawain, or there are those woods that crop up repeatedly, like the famous Brocéliande of Brittany, supposedly the home of Merlin, guarded by Esclados le Ros.
This latter wood offers an example of the aforementioned agreements—the wood is mentioned as the home of a colony of faeries, where one could make it rain by wetting a stone, in the same text as it mentions the owners of the forest—the very Dukes of Normandy whose scions would introduce forestry law to England. Later, in the late 1170s, Chrétien de Troyes wrote of the wood in her Le Chevalier au lion at the same time as Bertran de Born (a favourite of Pound) was singing about Brocéliande to Geoffrey II of Brittany, by then the owner of the wood. Dante, who later put the same Bertran in the eighth circle of Hell, finds Virgil and the entry to hell in a dark wood. Perhaps most telling about medieval attitudes towards the woods, though, is the case of Lancelot on quest for the Holy Grail; encouraged after the Grail by a maiden, he hears the Grail described as a relic which quickens “with life and greenness like the forest.”
It has been the decided task of literary scholars to obfuscate and deform the relationship of elites with the folk traditions of the commoners in medieval Europe. As with most problems in modern scholarship, this can be traced to Hegel (or at least that’s who Peter Brown blames, and your author is inclined to agree), and has introduced a non-existent class conflict and division into academic treatments of these subjects. Recently, scholars like Brown and Eamon Duffy have made an effort to dispel the fiction that the upper class lived in a different, wiser, more serious and less superstitious reality than that of the ignorant peasant-farmer who would see strange lights in the swamps and shuttered his cottage against the howl of banshees on windy nights. This is sheer pretension; the reality is and must be that no person could conceive of a world in which the hobgoblins and dragons of the deep woods did not exist, because such things had not yet been forced out of existence by the grey and soulless empiricism that has come to dominate the West in the last four centuries. It is perhaps unfair to lay the blame at the feet of Copernicus, for it was not he but the generation after him who became obsessed with the “scientific laws” of the natural world who played the part of Mithras, plunging their pointed quills like daggers into the neck of the last Auroch and baptizing all the Occident in its blood.
Romantics: The Guilty Mourners
The Romantics liked to imagine that they were reacting with disgust to the ideological storming of the Tullieres that took place when the medieval was usurped with the rational and humanistic world as the peasants began their long denigration into Frenchmen and Germans. They could not, however, capture the spirit of quotidian acceptance of the other-worldly that existed when the tales of Arthur and Parzival were in their youth. No matter how beautifully Yeats wrote or how fluent Pearse became in Gaelic, neither man had the eye attuned to see a banshee. To carve a Jack’o’Lantern with meaning, a man’s heart must truly believe in the demons he is mocking, and the Romantics could only regret that they lacked this deep and blood-borne condition. Consider, for example, the deeply purple but utterly soulless prose of Chateaubriand in his Génie du christianisme:
The forests of Gaul were, in their turn, introduced into the temples of our ancestors, and those celebrated woods of oaks thus maintained their sacred character. Those ceilings sculptured into foliage of different kinds, those buttresses which prop the walls and terminate abruptly like the broken trunks of trees, the coolness of the vaults, the darkness of the sanctuary, the dim twilight of the aisles, the secret passages, the low doorways, in a word, every thing in a Gothic church reminds you of the labyrinths of a wood; everything excites a feeling of religious awe, of mystery, and of the Divinity.
None of the men who built or first worshiped in those great Faustian towers of Babel would compare them to the woods—the forest for them was not sacred and had never been sacred to their ancestors in the way Chateaubriand regarded the Eucharist to be sacred. Only the Romantic who never truly knew the medieval man could speak of the medieval woods as “the first temples of the Divinity” from which “man first learned the principles of architecture”. A servant of Nature and of Nature’s God, but not of the same Jesus Christ whose death was so lamented by his cross in The Dream of the Rood. This was a man who rejected the Republic and regarded Voltaire as a vulgar scribbler, who withdrew his support from the restored Louis XVIII for being too progressive and supported the draconian Anti-Sacrilege Act—yet became known as the Father of Romanticism in France. He has not created anything here, though—he merely gives voice to beliefs that were clearly assumed: the idea that the woods contain a sort of religious awe and mystery is not a Romantic invention, but the celebration of the woods certainly is.
As with most things it celebrates, Romanticism draws the mystical quality of the wilderness out of the unconscious religious mind and makes it a literary trope. Romanticism disinters but cannot resurrect, and so while Chateaubriand, Wordsworth, Goethe, and the rest might play-act at calling forth Lazarus from his tomb, the best they could do was dig him out and prop his corpse up in a chair they paraded about proclaiming the resurrection. Thus the fey-folk are placed, like all savage creatures Western man has lacked the heart to put out of their misery, in state-protected reservations—called National Forests and Endowments for the Arts (until recently, at least).
The image that your author calls to mind is the famous painting of Caspar David Friedrich Abtei im Eichenwald, focusing the ruins of Eldena Abbey in Pomerania. For Friedrich, the beauty of the site was to be found in its ruination; dissolved three centuries prior, ransacked by the Swedes, it was a melancholic sort of sentimentality that defines that painting as much as it defines Wordsworth’s “Tinturn Abbey”. Friedrich and Wordsworth might be able to recognize the power and beauty of these sites, but the source of that power was lost on them—in the case of Eldena Abbey, the foundation legend had it that the Abbey was built on a site indicated by a Griffin that had taken up residence in an oak tree on the site. By the time Friedrich wept his paint upon the canvas, though, he lived in a world in which Griffins no longer had a place: even as the Romantics grasped at and fetishized the mystical of their medieval past, they fossilized the past and liberated it of mysticism, choking off the senses that perceived the goblins and witches and dragons of the deep woods, until the spiritual organs capable of producing fear before the entrance of the wilderness became vestigial.
The result was that followers of the Romantics, instead of maintaining their healthy distance from the woods, as befits true reverence, instead went rushing into the woods (some pulling their clothes off as they went). So much for Chateaubriand’s “feeling of religious awe”—for with awe is also a sense of fear. No medieval Christian approached the throne of Christ directly—it would take the Reformation to teach Europeans such wanton audacity. Instead, it was the saints, in tangible form before them—with blessed bones that still held the soul and would arise in divine perfection at the general resurrection—to whom they turned. So, too, would no man venture into a mystical wood, but instead knew to respect the space that was not theirs—the king and his appointed nobles, whose fathers had stood against the pagans who came out of those woods, these alone stood equals with the faeries, elves, and monsters who held dominion there.
Twentieth century parents were fond of groaning that their children do not appreciate the beauty of the woods, and so they raised their children on the neutered forest magic of A.A. Milne (the only variety of magic that would suit a literary gelding like Milne). In Fangorn alone does the healthy medieval fear of the woods lurk to be discovered only later, after the child has outgrown the capacity to learn such a fear. This fear is not like the instinctual fear of the dark, but a learned fear, and a fear that is good for our children to learn, for it is fear out of reverence for that which, to quote the Bard, is not dreamt of in our philosophy.