Image by Elena Ray
Over a decade ago, in If Women Rose Rooted, I wrote about the then-lost or forgotten stories of the divine feminine in Britain and Ireland which deeply connect women to the natural world. Because goddesses and Otherworldly women in our native traditions are not only guardians and protectors of the natural world: they’re quite literally forces of nature. They’re immanent in the land, and they’re immanent in the waters. Like Blodeuwedd, from the Welsh Mabinogion, they might be made from trees and flowers. Like the Cailleach, the Old Woman from Scottish and Irish Gaelic myth and folklore, they might be creators and shapers of the land. They might be Otherworldly, life-giving well-maidens whose rape at the hands of a disrespectful king, an old English story tells us, once turned the entire land into a Wasteland. Like so many more remarkable women I’ve written about over the years, whose stories I’ve now encoded in seven books. These stories, I first argued in If Women Rose Rooted, offer us a deep sense of belonging to the land, to the places in which our feet are planted. That book was not only a call to reawakening, but a call to arms:
‘In these times it’s not enough to awaken ourselves, to find our community: the world is in need of restoration, and each one of us is challenged to do the work of collective change. The day of the Heroic quest is over, with its all-conquering, dragon-slaying Hero saving the world one sword-stroke at a time. The Journey we need now is not a Journey of active, world-beating individualism, it is a Journey of collective re-enchantment – a re-animation of the Earth. It’s time to become native to our places again. It’s time for women to shrug off the yoke of the patriarchy, and reclaim our native power. The power that is the Earth itself speaking; the authority of the Voices which came out of the Wells. If there is to be change, it will come from us. Right here, where we stand. Women were always the story-givers, the memory-keepers, the dreamers. Listen now to the land’s long dreaming. Do you see what it’s dreaming? It’s dreaming you.’
This deep connection with the natural world is especially true of older women in myth and folklore. As I wrote in my 2020 book Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life: ‘Our old women are the dark heart of the forest, the stone womb of the mountain, immanent in the living land itself. They’re elemental beings: storm-hags, fire-keepers, grandmothers of the sea.’
Of the Cailleach, I wrote:
‘To become elder in our native traditions, then, following the Cailleach, is to fight for the integrity and health of the wild places and creatures of this world, and to be the fierce protector of the Earth, guardian of its balance. Her ubiquity throughout the landscape – not just in the grander ‘sacred sites’, but in scattered rocks and hills and lakes across these islands – shows us the necessity of being fully embedded in and belonging to our places. We can only engage in a meaningful way with the overwhelming scale of our current environmental crisis if we start with the place that we call home, so that, in whatever ways are open to us, we can take responsibility for, and help to protect, the land that we occupy – the land which we, like her, can merge into and personify as we age alongside it. The Cailleach also teaches the importance of understanding the language of the natural world, and the other-than-humans which inhabit it alongside us – because she exists in the wider flow of life, fully enmeshed in it.’
(And there are so very many more old land-shaping giant women scattered throughout the folklore of England and Wales too, whose stories can be found in my book Wise Women.)
In 2019, in Foxfire, Wolfskin and Other Stories of Shapeshifting Women, I extended all that research into the relationship between women and the natural world in our old myths and folk tales – this time to highlight stories of our kinship with the other-than-humans who share this beautiful, animate Earth with us. I took stories of women shapeshifters to explore our remarkable ability to transform ourselves in times of crisis – but also to explore the ways in which our innate association with the wild, and our kinship with nature, is reflected in a time of environmental crisis. Can such stories, I asked through this collection, help us renegotiate and reimagine our fractured relationship with the natural world today?
And now, I’d like to draw attention to my recently launched book Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, which continues and deepens this long, wild thread that has been so central to my writing, lecturing and teaching. Because fairy tales from our oldest oral traditions – a vast collection of stories from Britain, as well as from other parts of Europe – show us what it might be like to inhabit an animate world in which humans are fully enmeshed. In this world, animals always have something to teach us or gift us, and trees and plants might save us or cure us. That sense of awe, of connection, of belonging to a mysterious world which has many depths and layers to explore, is missing in so much of our contemporary life. And yet don’t we all long for it anyway, even if we struggle sometimes to express quite what it is that we’re longing for? Because somewhere, down all the long and listless days, the wild feminine was systematically tamed. Our deep sense of belonging to the land was systematically erased. The animals and trees who whispered their secrets into our eager ears were silenced. In a world in which another old certainty seems to crumble every day, a world which seems always to teeter on the brink of disaster and devastation, we need more than ever to find our way back to these beautiful, rich old stories. And we need the wild wisdom that’s always been so deeply encoded in fairy tales to go to work on rewilding us.
The benefit of extending this work from the realms of mythology to the world of fairy tales is that in these stories we’re not reading about goddesses: we’re reading about women – and women who are just like us, who face the challenges that we face and who walk out of the door with catastrophe always snapping at their heels. But the heroine in fairy tales is never separate from nature, as we so effectively have made ourselves today. The natural world isn’t just a backdrop, a setting for her story: it’s a complex web of relationships in which she’s fully enmeshed. Her companions are birds, trees and stones. Even her children might grow out of a rosemary bush, or a couple of flowers hidden beneath the bed.
This ecofeminist approach to our native mythology and folklore is more relevant than ever today, and it’s been such a pleasure and a privilege to see this work and these books thrive. Because, as I’ve argued for so very many years now, these are the stories we women should have inherited, those of us with roots in these lands – but we lost them a long time ago. It’s important that we reclaim them – and they’re right there now for the reclaiming. As I wrote in the opening pages of If Women Rose Rooted – and remembering that once upon a time, all of Britain was a Celtic-speaking island:
‘[R]ising high up on the heather-covered moorlands of Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man and Brittany, seeping through our bogs, flowing down our streams and into our rivers and out onto the sandy strands of the rock-strewn Atlantic seaboard, are the old Celtic myths and stories. Our own stories, no one else’s. Stories steeped in sea brine, black and crusty with peat; stories that lie buried beneath our feet, which spring directly out of our own distinctive native landscapes, and which informed the lives of our own ancestors. These are the stories we will visit in this book.
‘For women particularly, to have a Celtic identity or ancestry is to inherit a history, literature and mythology in which we are portrayed not only as deeply connected to the natural world, but as playing a unique and critical role in the wellbeing of the Earth and survival of its inhabitants. Celtic myths for sure have their fair share of male heroism and adventure, but the major preoccupation of their heroes is with service to and stewardship of the land. And once upon a time women were the guardians of the natural world, the heart of the land. The Celtic woman who appears in these old tales is active in a different way from their heroes and warriors: she is the one who determines who is fit to rule, she is the guardian and protector of the land, the bearer of wisdom, the root of spiritual and moral authority for the tribe. Celtic creation stories tell us that the land was shaped by a woman; Celtic history offers us examples of women who were the inspirational leaders of their tribes. These are the stories of our own heritage, the stories of the real as well as the mythical women who went before us. What if we could reclaim those stories, and become those women again?’
Order Ripening here
Ripening is now available for purchase worldwide, from all good online and bricks-and-mortar booksellers. You can find some good links to standard and special editions by clicking on the button below.
