The Song of the Winter King

 

The Song of the Winter King

                       1

Hair of crystal and hands of ice –

The snow sieves down above him,

He shakes in his palm two silver dice,

And whoever sees him loves him.

Now one of the dice is marked with a cross,

The other is marked with a ring –

And the cross is the seal of paradise

Where the holy angels sing,

But the ring is the seal of the fairy queen,

Queen Morgan is her name,

Who dresses in red and elfin green

 And rules all fair Elfhame.

She and her train come riding by

In cloaks as red as blood:

She lashes her seamed and grunting sow

With a switch of elder wood:

‘O young snow king, shake down your dice,

Find what the chance shall be!’

He shakes them once, he shakes them twice,

He shakes them three times three –

O silver, silver fall the moon

And golden fall the sun –

The nine bright planets in the sky

Leaped as Queen Morgan won.

Hair of crystal, hands of ice,

The white snow falls about him.

He drops from his palm the silver dice:

Queen Morgan cannot doubt him.

She leads him up, she leads him down,

Over the Seven Days,

Where toothed heads grin from every pool

And quickfire beacons blaze,

Under the hill, the hollow hill,

The peaty darkness waits:

She leads him down the fairy road

Behind the narrow gates,

She seats him by a dropping pool

Where ghostly fishes glide:

‘And here you’ll stay for evermore

By the dark fountain side.’

Hair of crystal and hands of ice,

He counts the fishes’ scales,

He strokes their armoured, slimy sides,

Tickles their filmy tails.

                     2

Now Mary Queen of Paradise

One day came riding by

Her robe was made of fine new wool

Bright as a summer sky.

Light as a loaf she sat upon

A milky-mouthed young lamb

As big as any dappled horse

That pulls the plough for man.

She saw the double land lie warm

Under the standing sun –

All the white spires of Castle Cloud

In the blue distance shone.

Long, long the heath before her stretched,

The clear miles shook with heat,

Anemones like drops of blood

Sprang up beneath her feet,

And where she passed, the grinning heads

Plopped back into the water.

Said she, ‘I would the Queen of Fays

Were one of Heaven’s daughters!’

And all the harebells rang for her.

She left the lamb to graze,

Went strolling on the hollow hills

Behind the Seven Days

And spied the dice like burning ice,

Smoking where they lay.

Swift through the golden grate she steps

And down the golden stair:

All the white daisies craned their necks

To see her enter there;

Under the hollow hills she passed

And called the young king’s name.

Before the echoes copied her,

The fairy challenge came:

Queen Morgan as a cloud of bees –

Then a red bitch, but lame –

Last as a lady tall and proud

To rival Mary’s fame.

‘Why have you come, you Queen of Heaven

Within this land of mine?

You may not steal the silver king,

For he is none of thine.

‘He shook the dice and fell to me:

Body and life and soul,

And here he’ll sit for evermore

By the dark fountain’s bowl.

‘He shook the dice and fell to me:

I won the winter king.

He shall be mine for evermore,

Till these dumb fishes sing.’

‘You won his life but not his soul,’

Tall Mary answered free,

‘For that was bought with iron cold

Upon a hawthorn tree.

‘Keep what you can, but for my part,

What I can do, I will’ –

Shakes in her hand the crossways dice

Thrice, thrice beneath the hill –

And shadows fly, and blazing light

Leaps for the young king’s sake:

‘Until the fishes sing, you sleep –

But then you shall awake.’

Hair of crystal, hands of ice

The snow sieves down above him.

Stone in the crystal cave he lies,

And nobody sees or loves him,

And he dreams no dream, but the fishes dream

Of the day they will wake the king –

When they poke their red snouts out of the pool

And open their mouths and sing.

© Katherine Langrish

 


Illustrations

Knight in pen and ink by Aubrey Beardsley, illustration from the Morte d'Arthur, 1909, V&A
Other illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley: facsimile edition of his Morte d'Arthur, Dent 1990.

Falling Trees and Invisible Foresters

 

In his book of travels, ‘In The South Seas’ – subtitled ‘an account of experiences and observations in the Marquesas, Paumotus and Gilbert Islands in the course of two cruises on the yacht Casco (1888) and the schooner Equator (1889)’ – Robert Louis Stevenson relates a number of supernatural stories told to him by the islanders, according to whom the forest-clad slopes were full of  ‘souls of the unburied dead, haunting where they fell, and wearing woodland shapes of pig, or bird, or insect; the bush is full of them; they seem to eat nothing; slay solitary wanderers apparently in spite; go down to villages and consort with the inhabitants undetected...’

So much I learned ... walking in the bush with a very intelligent youth, a native. It was a little before noon; a grey day and squally; and perhaps I had spoken lightly. A dark squall burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies; and my companion came suddenly to a full stop. He was afraid, he said, of trees falling; but as soon as I had changed the subject of our talk he proceeded with alacrity.

We’re not told what Stevenson said, that disturbed his companion just before the sudden alarming squall, but I like the fact that he mentions it – and leaves the question of cause and effect open. This is merely the beginning though, as Stevenson goes on to relate more instances in which the sound of falling trees was attributed to some supernatural cause.

Take ... the experience of Rua-a-mariterangi on the isle of Katui. He had a need for some pandanus, and crossed the isle to the sea-beach, where it chiefly flourishes. The day was still, and Rua was surprised to hear a crashing sound among the thickets, and then the fall of a considerable tree. Here must be someone building a canoe; and he entered the margin of the wood to find and pass the time of day with this chance neighbour. The crashing sounded more at hand; and then he was aware of something drawing swiftly near among the tree-tops. It swung by its heels downward, like an ape, so that its hands were free for murder; the speed of its coming was incredible; and soon Rua recognised it for a corpse, horrible with age, its bowels hanging as it came. Prayer was the weapon of Christian in the Valley of the Shadow, and it is to prayer that Rua-a-mariterangi attributes his escape. No merely human expedition [expedient] had sufficed.

When I read this for the first time I was about thirteen; my family and I were then living in a lovely but lonely cottage on a Herefordshire hillside. The nearest village was a mile away down a rough track, the countryside was beautiful, the nights pitch-dark. At the bottom of the field, the track wound between two immensely tall elm trees, through which the wind made a mighty rushing. This story would return to me whenever I had to walk under them alone at night, and shiveringly I would imagine the upside-down corpse swinging towards me out of the branches... but I should have paid more attention. As Stevenson points out, the apparition was a daytime one.

This demon was plainly from the grave; yet you will observe he was abroad by day. And [...] it is no singular exception. I could never find a case of another who had seen this ghost, diurnal and arboreal in its habits; but others have heard the fall of the tree, which seems to be the signal of its coming. Mr Donat was once pearling on the uninhabited isle of Haraiki. It was a day without a breath of wind, such as alternate in the archipelago with days of contumelious breezes. The divers were in the midst of the lagoon upon their employment; the cook, a boy of ten, was over his pots in the camp. Thus were all souls accounted for except a single native who accompanied Donat into the wood in quest of sea-fowls’ eggs. In a moment, out of the stillness came the sound of the fall of a great tree. Donat would have passed on to find the cause. ‘No,’ cried his companion, ‘that was no tree. It was something not right. Let us go back to camp.’ Next Sunday [...] all that part of the island was thoroughly examined, and sure enough, no tree had fallen. A little later Mr Donat saw one of his divers flee from a similar sound, in similar unaffected panic, on the same isle. But neither would explain, and it was not till afterwards, when he met with Rua, that he learned the occasion of their terrors.

            In the South Seas: Ch V1

 

Now of course trees fall in old forests for other reasons than woodcutters or strong winds. They may be rotten; insects may burrow into them and weaken them, but the sound, on a still night or day, must always be impressive. This common experience may explain why a similar folklore of falling trees is found in other wooded parts of the world. 

When I was writing ‘Troll Blood’, the third book in my ‘Troll’ trilogy, I spent some time researching the folklore of the First Nations peoples who inhabit the still-extensive North-East Woods of North America. Elizabeth Frame, in ‘A List of Micmac Names’ (1892) name-checks an unseen – yet heard – woodsman known to the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick:

Ke’askunoo’gwejit: A mighty chopper, a fabulous being who cuts down trees; you hear the chopping, the workman is invisible, but the tree falls.

‘A fabulous being’ Frame calls it, and possibly she is trying to convey that this entity would not have been thought of as a spirit: the European soul/body dichotomy was literally foreign to the Mi’kmaq and their neighbours, as was our European sense of being somehow separate from, or above, nature. For the Mi’kmaq, humans, animals, stars, even trees and some rocks were – and I daresay still are – ‘people’ or ‘persons’.

 

Baptist missionary, ethnologist and linguist Silas Rand (1810-1889) spent 40 years as a pastor with the Mi’kmaq. He spoke Mi’kmaq, Mohawk and Maliseet, along with a shedload of modern and ancient European languages; he compiled a Mi’kmaq/English dictionary, and on his death left over 900 pages of personally recorded tales to be posthumously published as ‘Legends of the Micmac’ (Longmans, Green, 1894). He gives ‘We’gooaskunoogwejit’ as a variant of the woodcutter’s name (the words were all written down long before any standardised spelling of the Mi’kmaq language), and describes him as:

An imaginary being who was supposed to cut down trees with one or two blows. The Indians say they sometimes hear in the woods, as it were, the sound of an axe upon a tree, and then see the tree fall, even on a calm day, though no one is visible.

 

‘An imaginary being’: his description echoes Frame’s construction and may predate it. Both Europeans carefully emphasise their personal disbelief in the phenomenon. But for whatever reason, both take equal care not to call it a spirit.

A third account occurs in ‘In Indian Tents: Stories told by Penobscot, Passamaquoddy and Micmac Indians’ (Roberts Brothers, Boston 1897) compiled by Abby Langdon Alger (1850-1915), a Canadian ethnologist and translator. She collected the tales personally, but unfortunately was not very good at naming the storytellers or specifying the group to which they belonged. This account could be either Penobscot or Passamaquoddy:

Seeing a smoke come from the top of a mountain, the children asked the elders what it was, or who could live there, and the fathers told them, ‘That is Al-wus-ki-ni-gess, a tree-cutter, whose hatchet is made of stone. He throws it from him; it cuts the tree and returns to its master’s hand at each blow. One stroke of his hatchet will fell the largest tree. No one ever saw him save Glūs-kabé*, who often goes to the cave to visit him.

            In Indian Tents, 51

Unlike the corpse-like spirits of the Paumotu Islands whose arrival is heralded by the sound of a tree falling (but who don’t seem involved in chopping them), none of these three brief North-East Woods stories suggest that the invisible treecutter is dangerous or even frightening – but a feeling of awe, mystery and power is attached to the phenomenon.

Japan is the home of my third example. According to ‘The Book of Yokai’ by Michael Dylan Foster (University of California Press, 2015), the sound of a tree crashing down in a forest may be attributed to a tengu-daoshi. A tengu (which literally means ‘celestial dog’ or ‘heavenly dog’) is, he says, one of the best known of all yōkai (a ‘weird or mysterious creature, a monster or fantastic being, spirit or sprite’) and is thought of as a kind of ‘mountain goblin’ which has morphed over the centuries from an invisible, malevolent spirit, to a winged human/bird-like creature, to a winged monk with a long red nose. Tengu range in their habits from helpful to mischievous to harmful. During the Edo period (c. 1600-1868):

... tengu became increasingly associated with mountain worship and deeply embedded in all manner of local folk belief. They were often invoked as an explanation for mysterious happenings. The sound of a tree falling in the forest, for example, might be attributed to the machinations of a tengu and called tengu-daoshi (tengu knocking-down). A loud guffaw echoing through the forest was called tengu-warai (tengu laugh).

            The Book of Yōkai, 135

 

This illustration of a rather kindly, Gandalf-ish tengu is by writer and artist Matthew Meyer – who blogs about all kinds of yōkai at https://yokai.com. (Well worth a visit.) He provides a more detailed description of the tengu-daoshi, characterising it as ‘an audio phenomenon which occurs deep in the woods [...] the sound of a large tree falling down and the crashing vibrations of it hitting the forest floor. Often it is accompanied by a powerful gust of wind.’ This chimes with Stevenson’s account in which ‘a dark squall burst on the side of the mountain; the woods shook and cried; the dead leaves rose from the ground in clouds, like butterflies’, and his companion declared a sudden fear of ‘falling trees’. Meyer goes on to explain that tengu-daoshi, the phenomenon of trees knocked down by tengu –

is usually encountered only by people who spend much of their time in the mountains, such as woodcutters ... The sound of trees being chopped and crashing to the ground late at night comes from deep within the mountains. It can continue for some time. Occasionally voices can even be heard shouting, ‘Izuko!’ (the equivalent of shouting ‘Timber!’ as the tree falls). Woodcutters sometimes feel creatures shaking their sleeping huts during the night. However in the morning, there is no sign of fallen trees or any evidence whatsoever of what could have made the noise.

This absence of evidence echoes the Paumotu experience of ‘Mr Donat’ and the pearl-divers, when they searched the atoll without success for signs of the tree they had heard fall.

Such striking similarities in narratives so distant from one another – from the north-eastern woods of North America to the Paumotu Islands (known as the Tuamoto today) in the South Pacific – to Japan – begs the question, ‘Can there have been any continuity of tradition, or is this a case of convergence, in which the same conditions produce similar explanations?’ Myself, though without any real evidence – I lean to the first. But who knows? If anyone reading this knows any similar tales of supernatural foresters, I’d love to hear them.  

 

Picture credits:

The Tikehau Islands, part of the Tuamotu group, Polynesia - Louis Choris, c1812

The Fairy Forest at Sunset - Ivan Bilibin (1876-1942)

Old Trees at Dusk (NW Coast) - Emily Carr (1871-1945)

Pine Tree - Ivan Bilibin

Forest - Theodore Kittelsen

The Dead in Fairy Tales

 

The dead are often very present in fairy tales: they have agency from beyond the grave. Some return in bodily form, in gratitude for favours done, or out of concern for the child they have left behind, or more simply to bid farewell to those who loved them. Some come in dreams. And sometimes their presence is more subtly expressed through the trees or flowers which spring from their graves.   

The tales in which the hero pays for a dead man’s burial [The Grateful Dead Man: AT E341.1] are at least as old as the apocryphal Book of Tobit, dated 3^rd or 2^nd century BCE. Tobit, living in Ninevah, piously buries the murdered body of a fellow Jew, but that night he is blinded by sparrow droppings which fall into his eyes as he sleeps in the courtyard. Tobit prays God to release him from misery or else give him merciful death, while in distant Ecbatana, a young Jewish woman called Sarah is in even worse trouble. She’s been married seven times to seven husbands, for on each wedding night the demon Asmodeus arrives and kills the man before the union can be consummated. Accused of their murders, Sarah too prays for either assistance or death. Spotting an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, God sends the angel Raphael to help both her and Tobit.

Ignorant of this, Tobit sends his son Tobias to fetch some money he deposited years previously with a colleague in a far-off town, Rages (near present-day Tehran). Tobias has never travelled, so Raphael disguises himself as a distant kinsman and offers to guide him. I love the next bit: ‘The boy and the angel left the house together, and the dog came out with him and accompanied them.’ (Please note the little dog in the bottom left-hand corner of this painting!)

 

We are now well into fairy tale territory: a huge fish jumps from the river to bite Tobias’s foot. The angel tells the boy to split the fish open and take its gall, heart and liver: the heart and liver can be used to fumigate anyone attacked by a demon, while the gall will cure blindness. Raphael guides Tobias to Sarah’s house in Ecbatana and advises the boy to marry her. Having heard the rumours Tobias hesitates, but the angel tells him to place the fishy heart and liver on the incense burner in the bridal chamber: ‘When the demon smells it he will make off and never be seen here any more.’ Success! Asmodeus flees to Upper Egypt where Raphael overtakes and binds him, while the young couple pray and sleep together in peace. Next, Tobias and Raphael go on to Rages, collect Tobit’s silver and return to Ninevah, where you’ll be pleased to know, ‘The dog went in with the angel and Tobias, following at their heels.’ (Faithful little dog!) Using the fish gall, Tobias restores Tobit’s sight and tells his rejoicing parents that their new daughter-in-law is on her way. Finally he offers to reward his faithful companion with half of all that he has won, but Raphael reveals himself: ‘I am Raphael, one of the seven angels who stand in attendance on the Lord and enter his glorious presence.’ 

Aspects of this story differ from later fairy tales: it names real places (albeit with a shaky grasp of the map), the person who buries the dead man is not the same person who goes on the journey, and an angel accompanies Tobias, not the dead man’s ghost. But the similarities are obvious, and most variants also include the rich young woman whose previous suitors have all been killed, the supernatural agent whose malignity brings about their deaths [The Monster in the Bridal Chamber, AT 507B] – along with the boy’s marriage and offer to split his wealth with his benefactor. 

The best known fairy tale version is Hans Christian Andersen's The Travelling Companion. After paying the debts of a dead man, young Johannes is joined on the road by the travelling companion of the title, who helps him marry a princess whose suitors must answer three riddles, or die.

 

I was entranced as a child by Andersen’s description of the wicked princess who flies out of the castle on black wings to visit her lover – a troll king whose throne is supported on four skeleton horses with harnesses made of glittering red spiders. The travelling companion flies invisibly after her on white swan-wings, slashing her with a birch switch, the stinging blows of which she assumes to be hailstones. He learns the answers to the three riddles, kills the troll and disenchants the princess – who ‘was still a witch and didn’t love Johannes at all.’ Giving Johannes a bottle of liquid and three white swan feathers, the travelling companion tells him to pour the liquid into a tub of water by the marriage bed, cast the feathers on the water and duck the princess three times. She first turns into a black swan with fiery eyes, then into a white swan with a black ring around its neck, and last into a lovely princess who thanks him for breaking the spell. Johannes begs his companion to stay with them for ever, but he replies: 

‘No, I must go. I have but paid my debt. Do you remember the dead man whom you protected from wicked men in the church? You gave all you had so he might rest in his grave. I am that dead man.’ And with that he vanished.

A more laconic version is Beauty of the World, told to William Larminie by Patrick Minahan of Mainmore, County Donegal and reproduced in ‘West Irish Folktales’ (1893). 

There was a king then, and he had but one son. He was out hunting. He was going past the churchyard. There were four men in the churchyard and a corpse. There was debt on the corpse. The king’s son went in. He asked what was the matter.

The king’s son pays all the money in his purse (five pounds!) for the body to be buried, and shortly after is joined by a red-haired man who, on condition that his wages will be ‘half of all we gain, to the end of a year and a day’, sets out with him to find the beautiful woman ‘with a head as black as a raven’s wing and her skin as white as snow and her cheeks as red as the blood on the snow’ on whom the king’s son has set his heart. Along the way, the red man wins three magical objects from three giants: the ‘dark cloak’ of invisibility, ‘the slippery shoes’, and ‘the sword of light’. And he warns the king’s son that his wished-for bride is ferocious: ‘the woman you are approaching – there is not a tree in the wood on which a man’s head is not hung, except one tree which is waiting for your head.’ 

Each night this woman, the eponymous Beauty of the World, presents the king’s son with an object – a comb, a pair of scissors – and tells him that if he cannot show it to her next morning, she will have his head. Each night, the young man loses it.

He took hold of the comb. He put it down in his pocket. When they were going to bed, the red man said, ‘See if you have the comb.’ He put his fingers in his pocket. He had not the comb. His tears fell.

But clad in the dark cloak and slippery shoes, and seizing the sword of light, the red man follows the princess as she rows a cockleshell boat out to an island in the sea where a giant lives. She gives the giant the comb, shares a drink of milk and blood, and lies down to sleep with him. The red man steals the comb, so next day the king’s son is able to show it to the woman, who in fury breaks half the dishes on the table. He does the same for the scissors, and ‘there was not a bit of delf on the table she did not break in her rage’. For the final test the princess demands that the king’s son show her the last pair of lips she kissed. The red man ‘whisks off’ the giant’s head with the sword of light, and the king’s son produces it next day: 

When she saw the giant was dead she gave one sweep, and she left not a chair or a table, nor anything on the table she did not make a smash of, so great was her anger.

I like her energy, but the convention in these tales is that the spell or evil spirit which causes the princess’s wickedness can only be driven out by thrashing her. Even Hans Andersen retains a version of this; his travelling companion thrashes the princess as they fly through the air, but he softens the ending when the princess is plunged into water as a kind of baptism. In Beauty of the World the king’s son and her father beat the princess until ‘a blaze of fire came out of her mouth’. They strike again till ‘another lump of fire came out’, and then a third.

‘Now,’ said the red man, ‘strike her no more. Those were the three devils that came out of her. Loose her now; she is as quiet as any woman in the world.’ They loosed her and put her to bed. She was tired after the beating.

No matter how wicked the princess may have been, this does not make comfortable reading today, nor the moment a year after the wedding when the red man claims half of the couple’s little son. It’s a test of the hero’s faithfulness to his word, for as, like Abraham with Isaac, he draws his knife to cut the child in two, the red man stops him. 

‘Do you remember the day you were going past the churchyard? … You had five pounds. You gave them to bury the corpse. It was I in the coffin that day. […] Health be with you and blessing. You will set eyes upon me no more.’

Even bare bones may have agency in fairy tales. In The Singing Bone (KHM 28) a king promises his daughter’s hand in marriage to whoever can slay a dangerous wild boar. Two brothers set out to attempt it, and the ‘pure and good’ younger brother is given a black spear by a little man he meets in the wood. He kills the boar, but his jealous brother murders him, buries him under a bridge, claims the victory and marries the princess. Years later (!) a shepherd finds a snow-white bone lying under the bridge and fashions it into a mouthpiece for his horn. Then when he blows through it, the horn sings, 

Ah friend, thou blowest upon my bone!

Long have I lain beside the water;

My brother slew me for the boar,

And took for his wife the king’s young daughter.

The shepherd takes the horn to the king, who orders the ground below the bridge to be dug up, revealing the skeleton of the murdered boy. The wicked brother is sewn into a sack and drowned, while the bones are laid to rest in a beautiful tomb. 

Bones speak even more directly in Rashin Coatie, a Scots version of Cinderella. A queen dies, leaving her daughter nothing but 'a little red calfy', which however will give her anything she needs. Then the girl's father marries a new wife, an ill-natured woman with 'three ugly dochters':

They took awa’ her a’ her brae claes [all her fine clothes] that her mother had gi’en her, and put a rashen coatie [coat of rushes] on her and gart [made] her sit in the kitchen neuk [nook], and a’body ca’d [everyone called] her Rashin Coatie.

The girl is is treated as a servant and given left-overs to eat, but the little red calf provides ‘good meat’ for her – until the stepmother finds out and has it killed. Rashin Coatie sits down and cries, but then:

The dead calfy said to her:                 [The dead calf said to her:

‘Tak me up, bane by bane,                  Take me up, bone by bone,

And pit me aneth yon grey stane,       And put me underneath yon grey stone,’]

– and whatever you want, come and seek it frae me, and I will give it you.

The dead mother’s love extends beyond the death of her gift, the red calf – for even  as buried bones it still provides advice and the fine clothes necessary for Rashin Coatie to visit the kirk over Yuletide and marry a visiting prince. 

 

 

Most of the Cinderella versions for children are based on Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon, where the fairy godmother is the heroine’s magical mother-surrogate. Godparents were an insurance policy: they could be expected to help an orphaned godchild. But there is no godmother in the Grimms’ version, Aschenputtel (KHM21). Instead, the heroine plants a hazel tree on her mother’s grave:

It grew, and became a handsome tree. Three times a day Cinderella went and sat beneath it and wept, and prayed, and a little white bird always came to the tree, and if Cinderella wished for anything, the bird threw down to her what she had wished for.

The white bird is surely her mother’s spirit, or messenger, protecting and nourishing the young woman just as the red calf does for Rashin Coatie. With this supernatural protection, Cinderella is able to call all the birds of the air to help her perform the tasks her stepmother has set (such as picking out lentils from the ashes) and when she needs beautiful dresses for the ball –

She went to her mother’s grave beneath the hazel tree and cried:

‘Shiver and quiver, little tree,

 Silver and gold throw down over me.’

Then the bird threw a gold and silver dress down to her, and slippers embroidered with silk and silver.

The tree itself moves, shakes and shivers as the dead mother responds to her child’s need. This is paralleled in The Juniper Tree (KHM 47) in which a childless woman stands one winter day under a juniper tree in her yard, peeling an apple. She cuts her finger, blood falls on the snow, and she wishes for a child ‘as red as blood and as white as snow’. At once she knows it will happen: the months of her pregnancy blend with the blossoming of the year and the flourishing of the juniper, the berries of which she ‘greedily’ eats; in the eighth month she tells her husband to bury her under the juniper if she dies in childbirth. Her son is born white as snow and red as blood. She dies of joy, is buried under the juniper, and the father marries a new wife, by whom he has a daughter, Marlinchen. The stepmother is jealous of her stepson. She murders him, tricks Marlinchen into believing she is responsible, cuts up the child, stews him and gives the meat to her husband to eat. Little Marlinchen sits under the table weeping, and when the meal is done she gathers her brother’s bones (more bones!) in a napkin and lays them under the juniper tree.

Then the juniper tree began to stir itself, and the branches parted asunder, and moved together again, just as if someone were rejoicing and clapping their hands. At the same time, a mist seemed to arise from the tree, and in the centre of the mist it burned like a fire, and a beautiful bird flew out of the fire singing magnificently, and he flew high into the air, and when he was gone, the juniper tree was just as it had been before, and the napkin with the bones was no longer there.

 

As in the Grimms’ Cinderella, here is a dead mother buried beneath a tree that moves and stirs, with a spirit bird, the child’s soul, flying up from its branches. Via the tree, the mother gives her son second birth and new life, resurrects him in fact, for at the end the once-dead child changes from bird-form to human shape and ‘he took his father and Marlinchen by the hand, and all three were right glad, and they went into the house to dinner, and ate.’ (So we know he’s truly alive: the dead don’t eat.)

We still plant trees as memorials, for they are living beings. And the notion of trees or other green, growing things offering a kind of continued life for those who lie beneath is also found in ballads. Having repented too late of her cruelty to the boy who died of love for her, the eponymous Barbara Allen also dies.

            Oh she was buried in the old churchyard,

            Sweet William was buried nigh her,

            And out of his grave sprung a red, red rose

            Out of Barbara’s grew a green briar.

 

            They grew and they grew up the old church tower

            Till they couldn’t grow any higher,

            And there they tied a true lover’s knot,

            Red rose around green briar.

Whether symbolically or in a more real sense, these lovers are united after death. Other dead lovers sometimes return to their living sweethearts, to bid them farewell. The folk song The Grey Cock or The Lover’s Ghost begins with the extraordinary verse:

I must be going, no longer staying,

The burning Thames I have to cross.

Oh I must be guided without a stumble

Into the arms of my dear lass.

Perhaps the ‘burning Thames’ is the supernatural barrier between death and life? Having crossed it, the lover arrives soaking wet at his true love’s window and begs for admittance; she lets him in and they kiss and embrace ‘till that long night was at an end’ when she sees how deadly pale he is. And he admits, ‘Oh Mary dear, the clay has changed me’: he must flee at cock-crow, and they will never meet again until ‘the fish they fly, and the sea runs dry,/And the rocks they melt in the heat of the sun.’

Not all the returning dead are benevolent. The Deacon of Myrká, an Icelandic tale collected by Jón Árnason (1819-1888), tells how a deacon of the church of Myrká in Eyjafjördur had a sweetheart named Gudrún, who lived the other side of the river Hörgá. The deacon always rode a grey-maned horse called Faxi, and one year a few weeks before Christmas he crossed the frozen river to invite Gudrún to a Christmas Eve dance at Myrká, promising to call for her at a particular time to take her there. On the way back to Myrká however, a sudden thaw caused the ice to break beneath him. He fell into the river and though his horse struggled out, he was found drowned with a deep gash at the back of his head made by the ice. Because of the swollen river, no news of his death came to Gudrún. On the day of the dance she was ready and waiting, and hearing a knock at the door went out into the night, where the moon slipped between clouds. Faxi was standing by the door, and a man at his side who without a word lifted her on to the horse and sprang up in front of her. Off they rode, but –  

When they reached the Hörgá, the ice-banks were quite high, and as the horse went over the edge, the deacon’s hat was lifted at the back, and Gudrún looked at his bare skull. At that very moment the clouds cleared from the moon, and the deacon said,

‘The moon is gliding.

Death is riding.

Don’t you see a white spot

at the nape of my neck,

Garún, Garún?’

It was a characteristic of Icelandic ghosts to repeat the last word of a clause, and no ghost could pronounce the name of God – which formed the first part of Gudrún’s name. Though alarmed, Gudrún kept silent, and when they came to the church at Myrká they dismounted in front of the lychgate. The deacon said to Gudrún,

‘Wait here for me, Garún, Garún,

While I take my Faxi, Faxi,

Over to the pasture, pasture.’

Off he went. Then Gudrún saw an open grave in the churchyard and became very frightened. She ran to ring the lychgate bell; just as she clutched the rope the deacon grabbed her from behind, tearing the coat from her shoulders, but as the bell began sounding he hurled himself into the grave ‘and the earth rushed in over him as if swept from both sides.’ It was a narrow escape, and Gudrún was never the same afterwards.

Nevertheless, many of the dead are motivated by love. Mothers often return from death in person, if their children need them. The Danish ballad Svend Dyring tells how a mother lying in her grave hears her children crying. With God’s permission, she bursts from her tomb to comfort them – and to threaten the father and stepmother who have neglected them. (You can read the tale here.) There are also many tales of dead children who beg their parents to cease grieving, as in the Grimms’ tale The Little Shroud (KHM 109) in which a child of seven returns.

As the mother would not stop crying, it came one night in the little white shroud in which it had been laid in its coffin, and with its wreath of flowers around its head, and stood on the bed at her feet and said, ‘Oh mother, do stop crying, or I shall never fall asleep in my coffin, for my shroud will not dry, because of all your tears which fall upon it.’

Hearing this, the mother controls her tears and next night the child reappears to tell her that its shroud is almost dry, and it can sleep in peace. 

 

 

Dead sweethearts, too, complain of the tears shed over them. In the ballad Sweet William’s Ghost a young man killed in the wars appears to his lover Lady Margaret, and asks for the gift he gave her when they plighted their troth. She refuses unless he will first marry her ‘with a ring’. He does, and she gives back the cross she’s worn, but he cannot stay:

‘The wind may blow and the cocks they may crow,

And it’s nearly breaking day,

And it’s time that the living would depart from the dead,

My love, I must away, away,

My love, I must away.’

In the ballad of The Unquiet Grave, the living partner mourns for ‘twelvemonth and a day’, after which her dead lover requests her to cease; he cannot sleep for her weeping, and ‘Your salty tears they trickle down/And wet my winding sheet.’

It seems to me that these particular tales and ballads offer to the bereaved not only an understanding of the depths of grief, but the possibility of closure and the permisson not to mourn forever. As even The Wife of Usher’s Well found, you have to let them go. She cast a spell to bring back her three sons drowned at sea, and though they return from the gates of Paradise to visit her, they cannot stay beyond daybreak and the crowing of the cocks, when the youngest bids a sorrowful but final farewell to life and all its chances.

‘Fare ye weel, my mother dear,

Farewell to barn and byre;

And fare ye weel, the bonny lass

That kindles my mother’s fire.’

 

 

 

Picture credits:

The Wife of Usher's Well - HM Brock: ill., The Book of Old Ballads, ed. Beverley Nichols

Tobias and the Angel - Filippo Tarchiani

The Travelling Companion - Anne Anderson

Rashin Coatie - John D Batten

Cinderella and the Hazel Tree - Elenore Abbott

The Juniper Tree - Kay Nielsen

Sweet William's Ghost - Gwen Raverat

Love - Millais

The Wife of Usher's Well -  HM Brock, as above.