Guest post written by After The Forest author Kell Woods
Kell Woods is an Australian historical fantasy author. She lives near the sea in Jervis Bay with her husband, two sons, and the most beautiful black cat in the realm. Kell studied English Literature, creative writing and librarianship, so she could always be surrounded by stories. She has worked in libraries for the past twelve years, all the while writing about made-up (and not so made-up) places, people and things you might remember from the fairy tales you read as a child. Now on bookshelves, After The Forest is set in the Black Forest of Wurttemberg during the mid-17th Century and a stunning meld of love-story, fairy-tale, magic and history.
Often, when someone asks me about my debut novel After the Forest, the conversation goes something like this:
Kind and curious questioner: ‘You’ve got a book coming out? That’s so exciting! What’s it about?’
Me: ‘Thank you! It’s a re-telling of Hansel and Gretel set in mid-seventeenth century Germany.’
Kind and curious questioner: ‘Oooh, I love fairy tales. What age group is it aimed at?’
Me: ‘Adults.’
Pause.
Kind and curious (and now slightly confused) questioner: ‘Adults? Really?’
Me: ‘Really. It’s got gore, sex and swearing, and in the opening pages you find out that a bunch of men have been ripped apart in the forest.’ (Between you and me, it also has body horror, blood, violence against animals, child abandonment, imprisonment, grief, and trauma, amongst other things.) ‘It’s definitely not for children.’
This will be met with one of two reactions. From some, I’ll receive a look of vague disgust, followed by a narrowing of the eyes, as though they’ve never really seen me before. But from others, I’ll get a knowing sort of nod. ‘Oh yes,’ they’ll say. ‘The old versions of fairy tales are very dark.’
Yes, they are, I usually agree. And frightening, sinister and grim. They’re also very old. Fairy tale scholar Kate Bernheimer describes fairy tales as representing ‘hundreds of years of stories based on thousands of years of stories told by hundreds, thousands, perhaps even millions of tellers.’
The fairy tales many of us recognise from the story books of our childhoods were brought to us by Charles Perrault in the late seventeenth century, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm in the early nineteenth and Hans Christian Anderson half a century later. The Grimms, in particular, re-wrote the tales, cutting away (pardon the pun) the gorier sections to make them more palatable to a younger audience. And so the tales were watered down and sweetened, their far older, far darker and far grimmer roots – steeped in oral traditions spanning generations and geography– lost.
But if you dig a little, you can find them.
Perrault’s original Sleeping Beauty, for example, has a little known second act that involves a cannibalistic mother-in-law who plans to kill and eat Beauty and her two babies. Rather than freeing the cursed prince with a kiss, the princess in the Frog-Prince has a tantrum and dashes the frog against the wall ‘with all her might’. Bluebeard is the stuff of horror films: his young wife, upon opening the forbidden chamber, finds the corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives hanging from hooks on the walls. Cinderella’s stepsisters butcher their own feet to fit into the coveted glass slipper, the Sea Witch cuts out the Little Mermaid’s tongue, and Snow White’s evil stepmother is forced to dance herself to death in a pair of burning hot iron shoes. It goes on, and on. Identity theft and forced servitude. Cannibalism, murder, incest and necrophilia. Rape, torture and poison. These tales are brutal enough, but dig even deeper and you’ll find that they’re not always just stories. Many fairy tales are based on people and events that happened long ago, when life was short, unpredictable and brutal.
Let’s take a look at little Red Riding Hood. It’s as gory as they come – in one version the huntsman cuts open the wolf’s belly to free Red and Grandma, and then fills the wolf’s body with stones and sinks it in a lake. (Seems needlessly messy – not to mention labour intensive – to me.) But the tale serves as a warning, too. In Perrault’s 1697 version, the wolf tricks Little Red into getting into bed with him – and then eats her. That’s it. The End. This is because the tale aimed to caution young women to resist the lure of lascivious men (wolves) and preserve their virginity. Accordingly, when Little Red fails, she is punished with death. There is another clear warning in the tale, too: stay out of the woods. If you were living In Early Modern France and you strayed too far into the forest, there was a very real possibility that you would be attacked by wild animals. It’s no coincidence that the regions in France that saw the highest numbers of wolf attacks also have the highest number of Red Riding Hood variations.
Hansel and Gretel, which I used as inspiration for my book After the Forest, is, quite frankly, terrifying. It includes abandonment, cannibalism, imprisonment – and a little girl pushing an old woman into her own oven, burning her alive. It’s believed to have originated in the 14th century, when the Great Famine struck Europe. Repeated crop failure and livestock disease resulted in mass death, crime and disease – as well as a surge in child abandonment, infanticide, and even cannibalism. Set against this horrific background, a tale about a father who leaves his children in the woods because he is struggling to feed them makes sense, as does the lure of the delicious gingerbread house and the cravings of the cannibalistic witch.
It’s dark, it’s grim, it’s sinister. And to me, it had the perfect bones (again, excuse the pun) for a novel that asks the questions: could these children – who survived abandonment, loss, imprisonment – really have lived happily ever after? What would their lives have been like if they were real people, in a real village in Early Modern Germany, where war and witch trials were part of daily life? History and imagination offered up endless possibilities for such a story, but one thing was always abundantly clear: it was never going to be for children.
