Multiforms of the Two Trees’ pattern incorporating the motifs of bees and honey were common also in modern Russian fable. One particular nominal motif of person was usual in such Russian tales—the popular Saint Nicholas. Sometimes he is the honey-trickster, and sometimes an alter-ego of other tricksters. For example, a tiny text recorded in the district of Perm in the 19th century contains the whole pattern.151
An inveterate burglar is one day observed in the act of stealing and flees from that city, whence a posse pursues him into a nearby forest. He traverses the forest, but is still being chased when he reaches its farthest limit. Before him lies an open steppe many miles wide; there, he realizes, his pursuers can easily see him at a distance and run him down. Terrified, he suddenly begins to pray to Saint Nicholas to have mercy on his sinful soul and conceal him. He offers in return for this kindness to dedicate a ten-kopeck candle to the saint at the first opportunity.
Suddenly a middle-aged male figure (the saint) materializes, makes the thief repeat his supplication, and hears his confession. Then he points to the rotting carcass of a dead head of livestock lying nearby, and recommends that the thief conceal himself in it. The thief complies despite the terrible stench. The posse arrives, looks about, sees no one, and departs empty-handed. The thief emerges from his place of concealment in the dead beast to see the saint taking a comb from a honey tree a little way off. Nicholas tells the thief that because he is an odious sinner, the stench from his thief’s candle would stink in the saintly nostrils no less than the carcass did to the thief when he hid in it. Never again, says Nicholas, will divinity respond to any wrong-doer who prays for remission of the earthly consequences of his crime. This said, Nicholas vanishes.
This example of the Two Trees is so brief and obvious that it hardly needs comment. The living forest dominates the first part of the tale, accompanied by the usual violent absence of recompense: the thief who flees to the greenwood neither repays his victims for their losses nor do they succeed in exacting civilized penalties for his constant disregard of property rights. Thievery, the burglar’s erstwhile source of bounty for which he paid nothing, suddenly becomes in the greenwood the source of mortal danger to him. Here in the wood the thief hides himself, and here too the saint surprisingly reveals himself to the thief twice over. The verdant wood, which had seemed the place of the thief’s certain and permanent separation from the rest of mankind, nevertheless turns out to be the scene of his social salvation, for the saint sends him back to civilization with an express commission to tell other men about divinity’s future policy toward the supplications of transgressors.
In the present legend of Saint Nicholas there is also the usual contest between tricksters at the bee-tree. The saint effectively tricks the thief’s pursuers by affording concealment to the fugitive in the dead carcass. But the thief is the arch-trickster who in the end tricks even the trickster, for despite the saint’s edict about future saintly morality in such matters, the thief still gets clean away with both his own freedom and the stolen goods.
Setting the limits of transgression, Nicholas is obviously the cosmotact, as he is also the hewer of the piece. Once he has severed divinity from future access by such unworthy men as the thief, never again in the Orthodox cosmos shall the twain meet. The saint’s dilemma is also obvious, contingent as it habitually is for the cosmotact in this pattern upon the mixed stinging and sweetness of the bees and their honey. Nicholas was in popular Russian Orthodox hagiography the saint preëminently responsible for such aspects of civilization as property rights, legacies, social hierarchy, equitable distribution of wealth, duties of the young toward their elders, and suchlike. Yet like any other saint, he is sensitive to the appeals of those who need divine help in matters within his saintly jurisdiction. In an affair concerning property, such as the predicament in which the thief finds himself, Nicholas is plainly the saint to whom a supplicant should turn no matter what the merit of his appeal. Nicholas’s dilemma is how to reconcile his responsibility to protect property rights with saintly mercy toward a devoted client. If he resolves the dilemma badly, it can only be said that so he usually does, as the following tale about him will further show.
Compromise, engendered by the familiar dilemma-motif in the Two Trees’ pattern, dogs Saint Nicholas no less in European oral fable than in European Christmas custom with its ubiquitous clogs and evergreens. Even tales once thought too lewd to be printed in ‘serious’ books display the full paradigm.152
The young wife of an old peasant secretly takes a lover. The husband discovers it and tells his wife that he has learned the whereabouts of saintly Nicholas the Hermit, who has the power to grant anything asked of him. Next day he seats himself in the forest in the hollow trunk of a live pine and waits, pretending to be Nicholas. Soon his wife arrives with a basket of dainties for the hermit. Not recognizing her disguised husband, she begs the false Nicholas to grant that her old husband may be struck blind. The masquerader declares that it shall be so and sends the woman home.
When he has eaten up the dainties, the old man cuts a heavy stick and taps his way home with it, feigning that he has suddenly fallen blind. That evening the woman boldly receives her lover, giving him delicacies to eat and telling him that they now have nothing to fear from the old man who she supposes cannot see. While the lover is rapaciously eating, the faithless wife leaves the room for a moment to fetch a lubricant sauce lest he choke. While she is gone, the husband shoots his cuckolder dead with an arrow, then stuffs the victim’s mouth full of food to conceal the real cause of death and make it appear that he has suffocated by eating too greedily.
Returning to find her lover dead, the wife hides the corpse under the stairs where her “blind” husband will not come into contact with it, then she goes to bed. Deprived of her lover, she shamelessly invites her old husband into bed with her, but he refuses. During the night he cries out as though in a nightmare that he has seen the lover’s body under the stairs, but she reassures him that he is only dreaming. Later he drags the corpse to the house of a wealthy peasant, where he poses it as though it were in the act of stealing honey from one of that man’s casks. Duped, the man cudgels the body on the head, and supposes he has killed it. The old trickster then springs out from a corner where he has hidden himself and accuses the “murderer,” who pays him richly to dispose of the body. This the old man does by mounting it on the back of the village priest’s horse as though it were a horse-thief. When the priest tries to stop the supposed thief, the horse bolts and knocks the corpse’s head against a rafter so that it again appears freshly killed. Again the trickster blackmails his dupe, and finally buries the corpse.
Once more the scene at the live pine in the greenwood is one of seemingly benevolent, mutual service and donation that is destined, however, to change suddenly and violently into lethal lawlessness. The cozy three-part unity of husband, wife, and lover that seems to develop at the verdant wood in reality holds the promise of dissolution for all the bonds that hold them together: husband~lover, lover~wife, and even husband~wife, for not even the successful and successfully concealed murder of his young rival is enough to make the old man accept his wife’s offer of her bed.
As usual, the green pine presides over a zone where free nourishment is given and received. It is in sharp contrast to the young lover’s mortally costly eating in the cuckold’s house after the old man has hewn for himself the thick walking-stick, the emblem of his feigned blindness. Between this hewn staff and the stable rafter that finally dispatches the euckolder out of the tale, retribution and price are the whole burden of the story once hewn wood has been introduced into it.
The old man’s tricks with his dead rival’s corpse are firmly in the tradition of the honey-trickster, as the use of the honey-cask motif plainly implies. There are, indeed, exactly seven distinct contests in the trickery of concealment and discovery in this tale, echoing again the numerical cadence found so often in the trickery of the Two Tree’s pattern the world over:
The historic-geographic or “Finnish” school of folktale scholarship would have us believe that such features of traditional fabulous narrative as the Two Trees are like populations of ferns, toadstools, birds, insects, or other plant and animal species, and that they have relatively recent histories of adaptation and evolution which can be traced like those of biological forms through comparative analysis of the fossils which they have left on the territories they now occupy, or have formerly occupied. But tales neither flower, fly, swim, nor creep upon the earth; they live in the minds of men, and only in the mind. We possess, furthermore, no evidence whatever of any specific evolutionary change in human intellect since the very earliest arguable attestation of any matter stemming from fabulous narrative tradition. It may be (though it has nowhere yet been proven to be) of some peculiar local interest to specialists in Russian cultural history, for example, to know whether, or how frequently, the green tree is represented as a pine in Russian traditional oral fable. In other words, the contexts and distribution of the pine as a nominal motif at a given moment in this or that particular ethnic tradition may be of some interest in a local sense. But such things can hardly be of very great interest even locally in the absence of a rather better understanding of the universal necessity of individual fictional motifs than is now widely available.
Of course not every pine in Russian oral fable belongs necessarily to the pattern of the Two Trees. But every pine and every other motif in that tradition (or in any other) does belong to some generic pattern, and the generic patterns are in no way derivative from nor contingent upon the specifically modern Russian body of fabulous tradition, nor yet upon any of its specific ethnic precursors within historic times. Patterns and their constituent generic motifs are, on the contrary, the concrete universals of oral fabulous tradition wherever it is found. They are not any such diffuse, abstract categories as are for example Jungian archetypes, Freudian ego and id, Straussian binary pairs, or Proppian ‘moves,’ which dissolve away into pure philosophical vapour in the face of every determined attempt to isolate them in specific texts from specific story-tellers. Rather, generic motifs are just such specific, easily recognizable, concrete facts of individual tales as the green wood and the hewn. Nothing is gained by flogging Russian, Irish, ancient Minoan, or any other single evident tradition for an original explanation of these basic elements in fable.
Yet nothing fundamental—nothing that lies deeper than the surface of any worthwhile traditional oral tale—can be understood about fable without a thorough knowledge of patterns, their constituent generic motifs, and the principles of their articulation one with another. That is because without these very concrete and isolable patterns there is not, nor could there be, any such thing as traditional oral story-telling anywhere in the world. Without the web of generic motifs that constitutes it, there could not be any such thing as “true fiction” that is memorable and repeated in poetic modes of speech wherever oral narration is a tradition. The universal tradition of story-telling is universal because each of its constituent elements belongs to a universal genus, and its genera are universal because the intellectual analysis of reality that inheres in them is superior to that in any idiosyncratic description of perceived actuality which any one individual could independently render from the fund of his own personal culture at any one time in any civilization.
For this reason one must dismiss the perennial, presumptive opinion that oral fables of any genre must “have...their diffusion from one definite point of our planet.”* The notion that every tale in oral tradition must once, however long ago, have had a single author continues as an a priori proposition to grip the minds of even otherwise well-informed scholars in our own time, whose pragmatic experience of fabulous narrative should have led them inductively to the opposite opinion; so, for example, Claude Lévi-Strauss in the concluding chapter of his study, Mythologiques: “...tout mythe doit, en dernier ressort, prendre son origine dans une création individuelle...chacun [récit] ait été imaginé et narré une première fois par un individu particulier.”** And together with the baseless ‘theory of single authorship’ one must discard also the kind of narrative analysis that grew out of it in nineteenth-century European learning. It is a terrible and dangerous folly to butcher anything so universally valuable to the intellect as traditional oral fiction in the compulsively uncomprehending way in which one habitually sees it dismembered by the institutionalized motif- and type-indices of the Finnish School.
According to an opinion widespread among contemporary social scientists, it is only the local, ethnic use of cultural material that gives it importance. But if one puts aside the sentimental attachment to strange peoples and the romantic inclination to geographic or temporal exoticism that has motivated so many anthropological and sociological investigators in the twentieth century, it is hard not to believe that what is best and most worthy of outside notice in the life of small and marginal ethnic groups is precisely the ingenious and determined efforts of some of their members to sustain a cultural tradition that transcends themselves. Oral fable is and always has been such a tradition. Social scientists as a class have mostly been interested only in the characteristic uses to which the peoples they describe have put this or that element of oral fabulous tradition—if, indeed, they pay any attention to that aspect of culture at all. It is entirely understandable, even inevitable, that such an approach has sometimes helped its followers gain insight into the workings of particular societies, but rarely yielded more than an occasional fleeting glimpse of the fundamentals of oral narrative tradition itself.
In their own way, many humanists who are authorities on narrative have also neither known nor cared to know very much about the fundamental constituents of narrative traditions. This scholar is a classicist intent upon particular ancient civilizations, while that one is a mediaevalist absorbed, let us say, in the culture of western Europe in the twelfth century; similarly, this one knows best the relies of ancient Akkadian civilization, while that one studies modern novels. Unlike social scientists, such humanists concern themselves little with the actual uses to which their subject peoples have put the stuff of story in their several epochs, for often little or no certain information about that survives from either recently deceased or long-dead civilizations. Instead, humanists of this kind have fastened upon such issues as ‘motivation’ and genre to guide them toward a better understanding of fable. They have for example made a great thing of distinguishing between epic and romance, hagiography and legend, ballad and folktale. If they could discern, for instance, that among a certain people in a certain period of history, ‘romance’ was mystical and epic mundane, they would feel satisfied that they had understood something basic about that people’s reasons for storytelling, and hence something basic about the stories themselves. To them, nothing has been more revealing about narrative than the rationalizations of it which they can extract from the documents of a given time and place.
But while that too could result in contributions to understanding the ‘spirit’ or distinctive idiosyncracies of various peoples in their own times, in truth it has added little to understanding the basic categories of oral fabulous tradition, which like intellect itself have always been available to reason and adaptation, but never to any essential alteration by the terms of anyone’s particular civilization. So in the ancient Near East the tale of the Two Trees was sometimes part of the myth of the state, or part of cosmology; in modern Irish it may be pure once-upon-a-time fairy tale; in Africa or in the Balkans, it was epic; in Russia, hagiography and bawdy story; in twelfth-century western Europe it was allegorical romance, and in twentieth-century Australian blackfellows’ culture it was legend pertaining to witchcraft and sorcery. The uses and the reasons for fable are as infinitely variable as the intellectual activities to which men have or may yet apply themselves. But the basic content of oral fabulous narrative was long ago in prehistory refined to such a superb degree of adaptability that it has not needed, any more than the human minds which have continually learned and recomposed it have needed, any fundamental modification to suit it specially to a particular cultural application. The critics have called us to marvel at one ethnic application after another, but the real marvel, and the one most essentially in need of explication, is the wonderful tenacity and universality of narrative patterns and their generic components in oral narrative everywhere.
I do not mean ungratefully to denigrate the services of the many minds who throughout the history of western learning, and especially during the last two centuries, have observed and studied various parts of the universal fabulous tradition. They have been cautious because the state of knowledge in their time required them to be; they have known securely only what their personal command of languages has permitted them to know, and under that hard regimen all cultures seem ethnically delimited.
Thus, the Celticist inclined to comparative studies might within his own competence go confidently no farther afield from Britain than to Ireland, to Normandy, or vice versa. In time, the Indo-Europeanist, relying on the foundation of knowledge amassed in many ethnic fields akin to Celtic or Germanic or Greek, might venture speculatively to range over so extensive a tract as the territory from Ireland to as far away as India. But never yet has the Europeanist of any kind consorted comfortably with information about autochthonous cultures in such remotely distant zones of civilization as East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, aboriginal Australia, or the Americas; nor have the scholarly authorities on those regions felt any impulse more strongly than a desire to protect the understanding of their fields from the misapplication of alien conceptions, especially those of Europeanists.
Ineluctably the state of learning has however changed, in no small part just because of accumulated parochial knowledge, and so must we too change who study narrative. Even the most venerable authorities on different aspects of the same ethnic civilization have latterly come to rely upon one another for subsidiary knowledge of their own specialties. We can therefore at least allow authorities on other cultures to tell us in their editions what tales they have found there; for in reality, there is in the twenty-first century no longer any absolute dearth of dependable information about oral narrative traditions in far places, such as formerly prevented an accurate appraisal of elements continuous from one zone to another in the spectrum of the world’s ethnic civilizations and continents. Scholarly caution is a necessary trammel, but refusal seriously to examine what previous generations of careful scholars and collectors have laid before our very eyes would be inexcusable. And if we do examine their data carefully, then we must reckon for all that it implies with the plain fact that there is no generic difference, for instance, in the narrative content of an allegorical Middle English metrical romance and a blackfellow tale from an aboriginal Australian culture.
Consider, for example, the Breton Lay of King Orfeo, a twelfth-century metrical reprise of the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice consisting in its surviving written record of six hundred and three rhymed verses that many will admit derive at no great remove from oral story-telling, though few would argue that the extant text is an immediate, unalloyed transcript of oral performance. It tells of a King Orfeo, an expert harpist bereft of his wife, who like his ancient eponym set out to retrieve her from captivity in another world. But the medieval King Orfeo of Middle English is not exactly the classical Orpheus; he is successful in winning back his wife as Orpheus was not, and he is a manipulator of hewn wood, while his wife, Queen Meroudys, is a victim of the preternatural at the green wood:153
Dame Meroudys falls asleep one spring morning under a fruit tree in an orchard. When she awakens in the afternoon she is seized with a fit of madness, tearing her hair and rending her cheeks with her fingernails. Taken home to her chamber, she recovers enough to explain to her husband the king that she has had a vision whilst sleeping under the green tree. In her dream a fairy prince has abducted her, shown her his rich castle and estate, and commanded her that she must, whether she please or not, meet him again next day under the same tree, when he will carry her away to his country to remain with him and his court permanently.
King Orfeo accompanies his wife to the green tree in the orchard to dispute his fairy rival’s claim on Meroudys; nevertheless, she is spirited away at the appointed hour. To remedy the gratuitous injury inflicted on him by the preternatural at the green wood, Orfeo turns to the hewn. Voluntarily he exiles himself from his own domain, taking with him only two articles, both artifacts wrought of wood:
A staff to hym he gan take 230
—He had nether gowne ne hode,
Schert, ne non other gode,
Bot an harpe he toke, algate—[A staff he did take with him
—Neither gown nor hood,
Nor shirt, nor yet any other thing,
But only his harp, which he did also take—]
Orfeo proceeds to the application of his hewn wooden implements by way of a second tree that is also green. Like the Lamba Mr. Squeezer in Central African fable, the Middle English hero too recovers his abducted kin by travelling to the wilderness with wood hewn to musical utility:
In a tre that was holow,
There was hys haule, evyn an morow. 270
When the wether was feyre and bryght,
He toke hys herpe anon ryght;
And mydys the wodde he sett hym dounne,
And temperyd hys herpe wyth a mery sounne,
And harpyd after hys awne wylle
—Over all aboute it was full schylle.[In a tree that was hollow,
There was his abode-hall morning and evening.
When the weather was fair and bright
He took up his harp, tuned aright,
And in the midst of the woods he sat him down
To play his harp with a merry sound,
And he harped the tunes that pleased him best
While round about the sound rang out.]
All the beasts of the wild gather to listen tamely, and eventually the retinue of the fairy king appears too. Orfeo sees Meroudys among them, and resolves to follow her. Again the means to assertion of his right and the recovery of his lawfully wedded queen are the two articles of hewn wood:
He toke a staff as he spake, 345
And threw an herpe at hys bake.[As he spoke he took up his staff
And slung the harp upon his back.]
The exile comes to the fairy castle and gains admission as a minstrel to entertain the king. There among various other horrors he sees Meroudys lying under her tree. He harps for the fairy king and craves Meroudys as his fee; the king donates her to him. When he returns with her to his own realm, his harp is the token whereby his steward recognizes and reinstates Orfeo as king after the ten years of his absence.
From the beginning of this medieval western European metrical romance it is apparent that the hero has a skill to use hewn wood for every encounter and mishap that may befall him and his dame in the presence of green trees. Verse 34 of the text tells us in so many words that no man was ever Orfeo’s equal in manipulating the harp:
So gode herper never non was.
Against the great acquired skill which the man Orfeo has earned by dint of learning and long practice, the woman Meroudys and her several female companions soon juxtapose green wood with its implication of untutored and unearned natural increase:
It befelle in the begyning of May, 49
When foules syng on every sprey,
And blossom spring on every boughe
...
Than the quen, Dame Meroudys,
Toke wyth hyr ladys off grete price,
And went in a undryn-tyde [forenoon]
To ply hyr in an horcherd syde. 55
The rest of the narrative is simply an account of how Orfeo, handling his artifacts of wrought wood, step by step imitatively counters and vanquishes the lawless violence and caprice of the green wood’s precinct.
First dame Meroudys goes mad beneath a fruit tree in the orchard where she has gone to amuse herself. Then in her report to Orfeo of what befell her there, she introduces the green tree into the poem for the second time and discloses how she beheld the person of her abductor beneath it. Next, the same fruit tree is revisited for the third time, when Meroudys departs on her journey to fairy-land.
Orfeo responds to these three occurrences of green wood with his staff and harp. In an act of calculated madness of his own, he tells his steward (who thinks the resolution insane) that he is abdicating his throne in order to go naked into a self-imposed exile in the wilderness; this said, he picks up staff and harp and departs. Then, countering the green tree where Meroudys saw her abductor, Orfeo harps to behold her, the victim of the abduction. Next, he reposts to the green tree that was Meroudys’ point of departure on her journey to fairy-land with his second taking-up of staff and harp as he departs on his own journey to the same fairy-land.
The fourth instance of green wood in this Middle English metrical romance is the hollow tree in the wilderness where Orfeo lodges for ten years. It is both the place and the token of the undeserved separation from his wife. To this too he has a hewn antidote: once in the fairy palace, he puts his harp to work to earn a deserved reunion with his wife. While he harps, she lies silent under the fifth green tree, which marks her restoration by the elphin king’s donation of her to renewed queenship in her own country. Correspondingly, Orfeo’s harp finally betokens his restoration by right to kingship in his own land. The entire romance is a bilateral web of Orfeo’s hewn artifacts and Meroudys’ live trees in six successive permutations:
Medieval Christian moralists, scholastics, and modern medievalists have together attributed a truly marvelous assortment of esoteric meanings to the charming medieval tale of King Orfeo, and attempts at explanation of that sort will no doubt continue to proliferate in the future. It is even conceivable that some such allegorical implications or cryptic moral intent as latter-day humanists have posited for such tales as this did occasionally also occur to the minds of individuals who lived in the age when the story of King Orfeo was current.
But unless one feels personally compelled to relive or improve upon the cultural life of the Late Middle Ages in England and western France, there is no reason to linger over the hermeneutic peculiarities of previous opinion about this Breton lay. One central fact governs its meaning, and any secondary local significance that it may have had must have been be a refinement or elaboration consistent with that fact. The metrical romance of King Orfeo is constructed on the pattern of the Two Trees. Meroudys’ green trees are about donations and uncompensated exploitation, lawlessness and unpredictability, monstrosity, concealment, and ultimate separation. Orfeo’s hewn wood is inversely about rights and compensation, equity and dependability, measure, discovery, and ultimate reunion. Local, esoteric interpretation may ring any changes it will upon these generic meanings, but so long as the tale endures those generic meanings remain its inviolable principles. The only way to overturn or abjure them is to destroy the tale itself.