Dancing with Trees E-Book

Allison Galbraith

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 258

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The oral storytelling traditions of the British Isles have connected people to the land and to their plant and animal neighbours for centuries. This collection brings together story wisdom from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that speaks to the heart of humanity's relationship with nature. Whether it's traditional stories about native birds and animals or tales of living in harmony with the landscapes we call home, there's something here for everyone who believes that a more beautiful world is within our reach. Richly illustrated with thirty original drawings, these enchanting tales will appeal to everyone interested in nature and in environmental conservation and will be enjoyed by readers, storytellers and listeners time and again.

Leseprobe

For Andy Hunter (1954–2015), our friend and a great storyteller who brought his love for cycling and stories together with his commitment to the environment. He was an inspiration to all who had the good fortune to know him.

First published in 2017

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2017

All rights reserved

Text © Allison Galbraith & Alette J. Willis, 2017

Illustrations © Tessa Wyatt, 2017

The right of Allison Galbraith & Alette J. Willis to be identified as the Authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 8284 9

Original typesetting by The History Press

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Foreword by Donald Smith

Acknowledgements

Re-Enchanting the World: A Creation Story for our Times

Folk Tradition and Nature

Bringing Stories Together

About the Authors

Air

1. Magpie’s Nest

2. Archie’s Besom

3. The Laddie who Herded Hares

4. King and Queen of the Birds

Fire

5. Ceridwen’s Cauldron

6. The Alder Sprite

7. Saving the Forest

8. St Mungo and the Robin

Water

9. The Selkie Bride

10. The Tiddy Mun

11. The Sunken Palace

12. Seal Island

Earth

13. The Blaeberry Girl

14. Stolen by Fairies

15. Jack and the Beanstalk

16. Margaret McPherson’s Garden

17. The Sleeping King

The Web of Life

18. The Tree with Three Fruits

19. The Hedgehog and the Fox

20. The Beekeeper and the Hare

21. Mouse’s Tail

22. The Elf and the Slop Bucket

Living in Harmony

23. The Goat and the Strawberries

24. St Brigid and the Wolf

25. Thomas the Thatcher

26. One Tree Hill

27. The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle

28. Jack and the Dancing Trees

Telling Stories with the Seasons

Natural History Index to these Stories

Source Notes for the Stories

Further Reading

FOREWORD

Nature makes patterns and so do we. That is because we are part of nature and nature is part of us. The web of life is inclusive and interconnected.

After nearly two million years of human activity, life on planet earth has reached a crisis point. Either we humans rediscover our connectedness in all aspects of shared existence, or nature’s life will go on without us. Which would be a shame since, amidst all the damage done, humanity has also made beauty, loved, and dreamed truth.

So thank God for the storytellers at this point of crisis. They understand patterns of connection and weave new understandings through their narrative web. Here are two fine examples – Allison Galbraith and Alette Willis. They live their art and their ecological awareness in mind, language, body and imagination. Here, they have produced a lovely resource of eco-tales, so that we can be part of the magic – and of the engaged, creative living that can reshape planet earth.

Read, dream and tell. The patterns are changing – new shapes are born from the old – and we can make something unexpected for the future. Stories are for pleasure, curiosity, learning and imagination. They are for everyone, together – all ages and all the families of these islands and the whole world.

Breathe fresh life into the wise old stories and let the new stories begin!

Donald Smith, August 2016Director, TRACS (Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like all storytellers, we wish to acknowledge the generations of tellers who stand behind us, who kept these stories alive over the centuries and added their own details and nuances to them. We thank these tellers, those whom we were able to name (please see the detailed source notes at the end of the book) and those who have been lost to the tides of history. Second, we would like to thank everyone who works to bring people into more harmonious relationships with their local places and ecosystems, the planet and all that dwell here, through stories. A few of you we’ve had the privilege to work with, some of you we have been fortunate to meet, but most of you we don’t yet know. This work of reconnection is the important work of our times. Thirdly, we’d like to thank our audiences, who have helped us hone these stories over the years. Stories are co-created between the teller and the listeners. Alette would particularly like to thank those whom she has had the joy to meet through the Talking Trees at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and the audiences who are sometimes surprised to find a storyteller at the Edinburgh Zoo. Allison would particularly like to thank all the community gardeners, foresters, countryside rangers and wildlife champions she has had the pleasure to work with and learn from over many years.

Now for the individuals to whom we owe a debt of gratitude. A big, huge thank you to Tessa Wyatt – we felt as if Christmas had come early when we saw the beautiful illustrations she had made for this book. We thank Donald Smith for his foreword and for introducing us to The History Press Folk Tales series. We thank our editor Matilda Richards at The History Press for seeing the value in a book such as this one. Also, a special thank you to the irrepressible Mairi McFadyen for her support and encouragement along the way.

Where possible, we have drawn on multiple sources for each story retold here (again, see sources at the end of the book). However, some individuals require mentioning here. Linda Williamson needs a special thank you for advising us regarding permissions to retell stories from the estate of Duncan Williamson and for steering us in the right direction with regards to the Scottish Travellers. We wish to thank Routledge for the stories sourced from the late Katharine M. Briggs, whose magnificent Dictionaries of British Folklore, are like a holy book to us. Tony Robertson, thank you for your kind, generous response in sharing your father, Stanley Robertson’s tale, ‘Old Croovie’, which we have retold here as ‘Jack and the Dancing Trees’. Thank you James Spence for your advice regarding ‘The Laddie who Herded Hares’. Eric Maddern, whose fleshed out version of the legend of St Baglan’s Church ‘The Tree with Three Fruits’ is retold here, needs a special thank you for being an inspiration for environmental storytellers everywhere.

RE-ENCHANTING THE WORLD

A CREATION STORY FOR OUR TIMES

‘How did you put those pictures in my head?’ the boy asked the storyteller, after a session of tales in his inner-city classroom.

‘Through the magic of story,’ she replied, smiling.

Once upon a time, stories wove the known universe together, connecting communities to each other, to the land where they lived and to the plants and animals they shared that land with. Local folk tales and legends belonged to the landscape they emerged from and to the people who lived there. These ties were particularly strong in the Celtic lands of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Despite waves of immigration and cultural change, despite technological developments from the printing press to digital media, the threads of these bonds are still discernible in the myths and legends, ballads and folktales that have survived into the twenty-first century.

Storytelling and people evolved together. Our human brains are wired for the intimate connection of listening to someone tell a story. The simple words ‘once upon a time’ transport us to the archetypal hearth of our ancestors, a place where all humanity meets to share lasting wisdom. For most of human history, people carved stories out of raw experience as a way of creating truths to live by. Those tales that contained the wisest words were the ones that were remembered and retold, and remembered and retold down the centuries, until the printing press and the rise of science changed societies’ relationship to narratives.

When Sir Isaac Newton, Sir Francis Bacon and their colleagues launched the scientific revolution, people began to tell new stories about the world around them and about their place in it. These stories began to separate people from the landscape and organisms around them, putting detachment and objectivity on a proverbial pedestal. As people became entranced with the shiny new things science could do, they stopped telling the old stories and they began to believe that people could live on a diet of cold hard facts and logic alone. Of course people went right on telling stories, but many of these stories were flimsy things, flat, not meant to last. People forgot that stories had once been quests for a good way to live, not just pleasant distractions for the end of the working day.

Lately, however, the stories emerging from the halls of science have been less than reassuring. The scientific community has become more and more concerned about the state of the world, outlining with increasing alarm the global crises the world is facing: deforestation, pollution, climate change, losses of habitat and accelerating rates of species extinction. Our earth is tired and drained. Robbed of enchantment, her abundant lands and oceans transformed into natural resources to be harvested and mined, she is on the verge of exhaustion. Their minds trained on screens for hours a day, people have forgotten that they are part of the earth and have ended up exhausted and depleted themselves.

For the better part of a hundred years, environmentalism pinned its hopes on technical rationality and technological fixes. However, in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, with things still getting worse rather than better, the Earth Summit conceded that technical solutions alone were not going to move us to a sustainable future. The resulting Agenda 21 emphasised the need to facilitate shifts in peoples’ attitudes and values as well. And what better way to bring this about than through stories.

What the world needs – what we need – is an infusion of storied magic to bring us back into life and back into the ecological community to which we belong. Fortunately, our foremothers and forefathers bequeathed us exactly what we need.

At the same time as attitudes and values were making it onto the environmental agenda, science was beginning to show that human brains are meant to do much more than process facts and complete logic puzzles. Since then, experimental psychology has shown that when people make decisions, they go to stories first, constructing narratives out of the situations they’ve found themselves in, and then relating these to the stories they have encountered. This is backed by neuroscience brain scans that demonstrate story is as essential to human life and reasoning as what we have come to know as facts and logic are. When it comes to values and attitudes, stories are even more central to human life.

Aristotle was the first to observe that a good society needs more than technical know-how. More than 2,000 years ago, he argued that in order for people to become good citizens, they also need practical wisdom. Recently, philosophers of ethics and psychologists of education have returned to Aristotle’s writings, observing that practical wisdom is best developed through reflecting on personal experience through stories.

Facts alone will never be able to teach us how to love, because it is through story that we learn how to be in relationship with each other and with the world around us. Nor will facts ever be enough to show us how to live a good life, how to answer the question Socrates thought to be the most important question under the sun: How should I live?

If we are to learn how to live well, in harmony with each other and the other inhabitants of Earth, then we need more than facts. We need stories of wisdom and connection, love and magic. These days, we are used to finding stories in books, like this one, but once upon a time they only existed in people’s memories. Each time a story was told, it would change slightly; another layer would be added through changing experiences, changing needs, changing audiences. In this way, the traditional tales that have come down to us are weighted with the insights of many tellings over many generations. A story that has lasted for centuries as a told tale has a certain substance to it, a multi-dimensionality that is lacking in so much contemporary culture. We feel the weight of these stories when we encounter them. The stories we have collected in this book have this kind of weight to them.

In the 1960s, for the first time, science sent men into outer space – achieving the greatest separation in relation to the planet that any human had ever managed before. These astronauts looked back at the planet that had birthed them and saw it, not with cool detachment, but with love. In the same period, James Lovelock invoked the old stories when he named his scientific theory of the interdependence of life on Earth after a goddess: the Gaia Hypothesis. Love and stories, we cannot escape them.

But before we get too nostalgic about stories, we need to remember that modern humans did not invent selfishness or cruelty. Wisdom stories are not the only tales that have been handed down from our ancestors. People do not always seek to know the truth. Too often they act out of greed or envy, fear or insecurity. As we trawled through archives, searching for tales to include in this collection, we sifted through stacks of folk traditions that justified the slaughter of very real birds and mammals, the cutting down of groves of old trees, and the scapegoating of other people for no good reason at all. Crows and wolves were the most consistently and viciously attacked by such traditions, but others including the cheerful yellowhammers and even little wrens suffered as well. Societies ruled by story alone can also be led down the wrong path.

What we need are the resources to tell stories that will support the sorts of shifts in attitudes towards nature that we know through science and rational thinking are needed, stories that can lead us on our journey towards a sustainable future. We hope that this collection will be one source of many for you to bring such stories into your life and your work.

This collection brings together tales from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Many of these stories have their roots in Celtic traditions, which value connections with animals, plants and the land. Others travelled long distances before arriving in these parts and being transformed by local communities through the addition of local flora and fauna and the melding of cultures. All the stories in this collection invite tellers and listeners back into relationship with the more than human world in which we live. While based on traditional materials, we have retold these stories in the context of current environmental crises and in line with the goals of this book. They are weighted not only with the cumulative wisdom of the past, but also with our scientifically-informed knowledge of the present and our hopes for a future in which human communities come to live in harmony with the rest of the natural world.

FOLK TRADITION AND NATURE

At first I am as white as snow Then as green as grass I grow Next I am as red as blood And finally as black as mud. What am I?

(A riddle, learned from Scottish storyteller, David Campbell – the answer is: A bramble, or in English, a blackberry!)

The journey we took with this book began with a common interest in Celtic culture and an awareness – born out of our own storytelling practices – of the power of stories to connect people to the natural world. From this starting point, curiosity pulled us towards other strands of British folklore. Travellers’ tales, Aesop, Norse epics, the Continental traditions of the Normans and those recorded by the Brothers Grimm all had an influence on the folk tales of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. And we soon discovered that they too had something to contribute towards nurturing an environmental sensibility. This collection, therefore, includes stories from a range of periods and traditions, all chosen for their ability to speak across cultures and centuries to contemporary global audiences. Given the diversity of sources, it is useful to know something of the background context. With this in mind, we will begin again with the Celts.

Celtic stories resonate with the natural environment that they emerged out of and the myriad life forms that dwell there. While each period of Celtic storytelling developed its own particular emphasis and style, they all shared a common weft of supernatural beliefs and magical powers, woven together with observations of nature and common sense, resulting in a tradition of stories that remain exciting and meaningful today. The central role of animals and nature in the Celtic world shaped and flavoured their stories, filling them with a rich source of environmental wisdom. That wisdom is the inspirational spark for this collection of stories.

The great age of Celtic pagan culture, when Celtic tribes covered great tracts of Northern Europe and the British Isles, span from around 600 BCE to CE 400. These tribal cultures were very much bound to the land, seas, plants and animals around them. Their livelihoods of hunting, fishing, farming, herding, building, and crafting all depended upon nature’s generosity and abundance.

Being so intimately tied to their environment, it is not surprising that these early pagan Celts focused their spiritual beliefs and holy practices on environmental forces, the landscape, and the creatures they lived amongst. These Celts worshiped every imaginable aspect of nature. Their most important divinities included the sun, moon, stars, thunder, fertility and water, but the landscapes they lived in were populated with all sorts of other deities who were attached to rivers, springs, boulders, rocks and mountains. Cults of celestial gods, the mother goddesses, water and trees were common to all of the different tribes, but plants, trees and animals also held important positions in Celtic life. Each was believed to possess its own spirit or numen, and all were respected and worshiped for their everyday and supernatural qualities.

This Celtic pagan religion was gradually replaced by Christianity and their stories might have been lost, had it not been for the early Christian monks who took an interest in Celtic culture. They wrote down many of their stories and sagas including creation myths, epic tales of supernatural heroes, and stories of pagan gods and goddesses, shape-changers and magical animals. It is thanks to the monks of Ireland and Wales that we have the earliest written fragments of these stories, dating back to the sixth century CE. These ancient Celtic stories were told and re-told from one generation to the next and the monks’ manuscripts were copied and re-copied from century to century, evolving as the dominant culture changed.

From the pagan period we have included two stories: ‘Ceridwen’s Cauldron’ and ‘Saving the Forest’. Ceridwen is from the Welsh tradition, a primeval mother, a moon-goddess from the oldest of the cyclical Celtic myths. In this story we witness her power as a shape-changer and are taken on a breathtaking chase as different animals hunt their quarries. Our re-telling of ‘Ceridwen’s Cauldron’ helps us to explore the web of life in our own fragile eco-system.

Two faces of the Cailleach, another ancient Celtic goddess, feature in ‘Saving the Forest’, a story from Scotland. But there are also elements from Scandinavian culture in this story, which in one early source is titled ‘The Norse King’s Daughter’. The Viking influence in Scotland is reflected deeply through these old stories. In her youth this Celtic/Norse goddess is Bride, the goddess of spring and summer. Beara is the mature woman, the side of her which brings the dark months of the year and winter to the land. The story explores what happens when the seasons get out of balance, a lesson that is all too relevant to us today in this era of climate change. The story ends on a note of hope, with the wisdom of the young saving the day. All of the stories collected in this book reflect these basic values of respecting our fellow creatures and living in harmony with the world around us.

When Christian monks arrived in Ireland in the fifth century, they didn’t just document the Celtic culture they found there, they absorbed a lot of its values, incorporating them into what is still known as Celtic Christianity. The early Christian saints of Ireland, Scotland and Wales were portrayed as having a special relationship with birds and animals and they continued the tradition of bardic nature poetry well into the twelfth century.

From the early Celtic Christian era we have included the stories of ‘St Mungo and the Robin’, ‘St Brigid and the Wolf’ and St Baglan and ‘The Tree with Three Fruits’. The robin is also a popular figure in Scandinavian folklore; so again, a mixing of these traditions is in evidence.

St Baglan’s story reminds us of the contributions that plants and animals make to human existence, while St Mungo provides a model of standing up to those who do not value life. St Brigid of Kildare, with her love of nature and her concern for the poor, is in many ways resonant with the more widely known St Francis of Assisi. Like the pagan stories before them, a great sense of reverence and love of nature is evident in these early Christian stories.

Through the Middle Ages, literary men and women – mostly monks and nuns – carried on transcribing Celtic stories from earlier periods and composing nature poetry. However, after this period, the literary tradition began to be replaced by more popular forms of storytelling. The bulk of our collection comes from this later, folkloric, period. Many of these folk tales may well have originated from much earlier pagan times, but the historical thread has been lost over the centuries.

By this period, Britain was already a multi-cultural space, with immigrant communities from a range of backgrounds meeting with and infusing earlier traditions with new stories and new ways of telling. These traditions would have included Aesop’s fables, likely influences on the ‘King and Queen of the Birds’, which we have included here. When the Norman traditions met with the Celtic, King Arthur was born, represented here by the story of ‘The Sleeping King’. Incomers from the forest regions of the continent would have met with the thriving forest-based communities here (partly represented by ‘Saving the Forest’) and new stories would have been born. We associate these forest stories mostly with the Brothers Grimm these days, but many of the stories here also demonstrate this sensibility. For example, we have included ‘Magpie’s Nest’, a witty tale from England about how the birds learned to build their nests by copying the magpie, which is filled with real nest-building truths. Also, ‘The Old Woman Who Lived in a Vinegar Bottle’, a fantastical and funny campfire story about over-consumption and greed. This concept is as relevant for today’s audiences as it was many generations ago.

From the earlier Celtic stories through to influences from Aesop, Christianity, Scandinavia, Continental Europe and beyond, all the stories collected here demonstrate a common wisdom for respecting nature and the other creatures we share these islands with. Stories travel, they have no respect for national borders and when they cross them, they have a tendency to morph into something new, to mingle and merge with local stories and, in general, to go about making themselves at home wherever they find themselves. Through bards, ballads, sailors, immigrants, travellers and grandparents, these stories have arrived on our shores and settled in our consciousness.

Several of the stories in this collection are from the Scottish Travellers’ tradition – ‘Jack and the Dancing Trees’, ‘Margaret McPherson’s Garden’, ‘Archie’s Besom’, ‘Seal Island’ and ‘Thomas the Thatcher’. These tales, like the Travellers themselves, are firmly linked to the land, the sea and to rural life. They deliver strong messages about respecting nature and living in harmony with the world.

The Travellers in Scotland are a nomadic people who have been recorded as living in Scotland since the twelfth century, but may have been present for much longer. They are a distinct ethnic group, believed to be descended from Northern European tribes.

In settled communities, the rising popularity of books, gramophones, radio, theatres and concert halls began to overtake folk storytelling traditions, all but wiping them out. However, the Traveller community maintained a complex, highly developed oral culture well into the twentieth century. During the 1950s students from the School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh began recording and collecting their tales. Many anthologies are now in print, the most numerous being those of the late Duncan Williamson, edited by his wife Linda Williamson.

Until recently, the Travellers lived close to the land and many of their tales concern living in harmony with the Earth and its creatures. These stories are filled with environmental wisdom about taking what you need from nature while leaving enough berry, fish, tree, or wild animal stocks so that they can replenish themselves over the following years. A moral tone of modesty over greed is often found in these stories, which suits the contemporary environmental message well.

While their stories are grounded in a life lived in intimate relationship to Scotland’s landscapes, plants and animals, the roots of these stories come from all over the place. The selkies and the fairy folk in the tales undoubtedly have Celtic roots, but Duncan Williamson himself thought ‘Thomas the Thatcher’ was a story that had originally come from the Netherlands. Meanwhile, ‘Jack and the Dancing Trees’ has deep resonances with stories told in the forested regions of the Czech Republic and Germany.

Largely through the generosity of Traveller storytellers such as Duncan Williamson, Stanley Robertson, Jess Smith, Sheila Stewart and many others, these stories have become core to the contemporary storytelling revival in Scotland and are, therefore, part of this collection no matter where they may have originally come from.

All of the tales in our collection connect us through their Celtic and folk roots with the natural world, on which our own existence depends. They have been discovered through careful digging and happy happenstance. Some we heard before we read them, others we only knew on the page before we began to tell them as part of our own storytelling repertoires. A few have been created from the tiniest tantalising scraps; others are stories that are well known here in the British Isles and are regularly told all over the world.

In the time-honoured tradition of oral storytelling, we have retold these stories with a twenty-first-century audience in mind and in the context of the environmental concerns of our time. Although they are told in our words, in keeping with our themes of respect and interdependence, we have included notes and telling-tips with each story, and full source information and comments at the back of the book. We have also included a guide to telling with the seasons and an index to the flora and fauna that makes an appearance in these stories.

This collection represents a contemporary take on a centuries-old Celtic and folk tale tradition of connecting to nature through careful observation and imaginative storytelling. It is our hope that these stories will travel far and wide, meeting with other stories and with other listeners and storytellers that share a reverence and love for this earth and her creatures.

May these stories speak to you not only of the past, but of a future in which people remember their interdependence with the rest of nature and seek to live in harmony with the world around them.

BRINGING STORIES TOGETHER

This book brings together two types of stories: traditional tales collected from a range of sources and the stories that each person carries with them about who they are and what their options are for being and doing in their lives. We want you to enjoy these stories, but more than this, we hope that these stories will do their work in the world by helping you, the reader, and anyone you share these stories with, to answer the important question, ‘how should I live?’ in ways that lead to sustainability for ourselves and the planet.

In the remainder of the book, we share our own retellings of some of our favourite stories from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. These may be read by yourself in silence. They may be read aloud to a group of pupils or a party of site visitors. Or, they may be told out loud.

Even if you have never done so before, we urge you to learn to tell some of these stories orally, without depending upon the words on the page. Something magical happens when stories are told in the old way. To tell a story is to create a sacred space, a space that contains not just you and your audience, but also all the other tellers and all the other listeners down through history. When we bring stories into our bodies and give voice to them, they become part of our lives. When we know a story by heart, we can connect more strongly with the people we are telling it to. As the Scottish Traveller saying goes: ‘a story needs to be told eye to eye, mind to mind and heart to heart.’ When we tell stories in this way, we connect emotionally with our audiences, we begin to create and to strengthen the bonds of community and we open up an opportunity for transformation to take place.

Storytellers conjure up worlds of adventure just by giving breath to words. In the hushed space between speaker and audience the stories form. The teller gives them shape, but the sensuous experience of story, the images, feelings, and emotional resonances, are supplied by the imaginations of the people listening, making it one of the best mediums for supporting individuality while building community.