cover image From the Forest: 
A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales

From the Forest: A Search for the Hidden Roots of Our Fairytales

Sara Maitland, photos by Adam Lee. Counterpoint (PGW, dist.), $28 (288p) ISBN 978-1-61902-014-6

In this lovely, inventive book, Maitland (A Book of Silence) pursues the psychic juncture between forests and fairy tales. This may sound maudlin or overly fanciful, but the author’s research is diligent, her analytical skills sharp, and her prose lean and compelling. Each chapter begins with a walk taken by Maitland in a northern European forest (Airyolland Wood, in Scotland, and the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire, England, are among those she visits) and an essay, in which she deftly juggles ecological history, the “‘anthropology of woodland,’” and exegesis of beloved fairy tales. Each alternating chapter is a retelling of a fairy tale (“Rumpelstiltskin,” “Tom Thumb,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and others) and these, thankfully, are neither precious nor obvious. The author’s light touch belies impressive intellect; she is equally at home discussing the forestry laws under the Plantagenet kings and a “sinister” physiological condition that affected oak trees shortly after 1900. The argument she makes for a connection between the woods and the fairy tale is a convincing one and so finely constructed that this odd marriage between fiction and essay proves successful and thought-provoking. Photos. (Nov.)