Herbology News // The Sharp Issue

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viii: Foraging Through Folklore

Under the Skin Ella Leith Thinking about thorns, my mind immediately catches on the bloodthirsty imagery of folktales and Grimms’ fairy-tales. I recall the forest of thorns surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle; of Snow White being scratched by thorn thickets as she flees from the huntsman; of Rapunzel’s prince falling from the tower to have his eyes ripped out on the thornbushes below. Even more compelling to me are two folktales that I was lucky enough to hear, when I was a child, from the Scottish Traveller storyteller, Duncan Williamson. The first is the titular story transcribed in his published collection of tales, A Thorn in the King’s Foot (1989). For years, the only detail I could remember was that the thorn grows into a branch protruding from the king’s big toe— a horrifying image that I’ve never been able to shake. The other, which I knew as ‘Jack and the Moneylender’, tells of a magic fiddle that forces those who hear it to dance unceasingly. Jack uses it first to punish an old man he has tricked into crawling under a thornbush; later, he plays his fiddle as his last request on the gallows to blackmail the hangmen into pardoning him. I was fascinated by this story, torn between relishing the juxtaposition of joyful dancing and bloodied skin, and being outraged on behalf of the moneylender who didn’t seem to have done anything particularly wrong. It left a worse taste in my mouth once I learnt that it’s a version of the anti-Semitic international tale often called ‘The Jew Among Thorns’. The oldest versions of the story seem to be anti-clerical rather than anti-Semitic (Haas, 2007: 787), but I can’t shake the uncomfortable connotations any more than I can shake a macabre delight in the imagery of a forced dance inside a thornbush. Metaphorically as literally, thorns get under the skin. It’s not difficult to relate thorns to punishment in these tales. The forest of thorns punishes the princes for their audacity in attempting to reach the Sleeping Beauty (named Briar Rose— literally a rose amongst thorns) before the hundred years are up:

the thorns held firmly together, as though they had hands, and the young men became stuck in them, could not free themselves, and died miserably. The thornbushes below Rapunzel’s tower punish the prince who dared penetrate the witch’s defences: when the witch tells him that, “The cat got her and will scratch your eyes out as well. … You will never see her again!”, it is not she but the thorns that carry out her threat of blinding him. In ‘A Thorn in the King’s Foot’, a thorn fulfils the curse of an old woman against a king who tried to have his hunchbacked son murdered: as she passes him, it embeds itself in his foot and grows there for an agonising fourteen years. And in ‘Jack and the Moneylender’, the thornbush enables Jack to punish the moneylender for… being a moneylender. Thorns are associated with punishment elsewhere in folklore and early modern literature. The man in the moon, according to Chaucer, was exiled there as punishment for theft and given a thornbush to carry (Thiselton Dyer, 1883: 65). Supernatural destruction is wrought against those who cut down thorn trees themselves, as outlined in Margaret Baker’s Discovering the Folklore of Plants (1996). She cites examples of railway lines being rerouted and buildings redesigned to avoid disturbing a thorn tree, with dire consequences for those who cut them down without suitable reason or precaution. But alongside punishment, thorns bring protection. A lone hawthorn tree, a ‘fairy thorn’, may guard an entrance to the fairy kingdom; it may also protect passers-by from lightning strikes. According to one informant, ‘‘hawthorn among your hedging plants wards off bad fairies’’ (Baker, 1996: 69). Indeed, the forest of thorns surrounding Sleeping Beauty’s castle are protective: whereas a sharp point found in the domestic sphere— a spindle —causes her harm, the thorny hedges defend her sleeping person against intruders. Of course, the prince-skewering thorns are really defending the prescribed duration of the magic rather than the princess herself; they melt away

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