The Erl King, Angela Carter

I love Angela Carter. I've posted an excerpt from The Magic Toyshop before, but I really love her stories based on traditional folk/fairy tales and myths (fairy tales themselves fascinate me). She is one of the best female writers I've ever read, because to me her writing is so deeply feminine, and she's so good at capturing the tension and beauty of being an adolescent girl especially. This story is about the Erl King, a sinister creature of the forest, rapacious, deathly and beautiful. In the story, a young girl wanders into the forest where she is surprised by and seduced by the Erl King (she first is aware of his presence in one of my favorite lines from the story 'the two notes of the song of a bird rose on the still air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound'), with his room filled with aromatic herbs and, most tellingly, cages and cages of trapped songbirds carelessly piled upon each other. Although she knows the mysterious Erl King 'will do you grievous harm', the girl allows herself to be seduced by him, with a surprising twist - but you'll have to read the entire story to find out. This is also one of the few stories where the food mentioned is somewhat fantastical (perhaps with the exception of chanterelles and oatcakes), but you can somehow imagine the taste, smell and appearance of the dishes mentioned perfectly.

The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only one room. His house is made of sticks and stones and has grown a pelt of yellow lichen. Grass and weeds grow in the messy roof. He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail.

What does he eat? Why, the bounty of the woodland! Stewed nettles; savoury messes of chickweed sprinkled with nutmeg; he cooks the foliage of shepherd's purse as if it were cabbage. He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotting fungi are fit to eat; he understands their eldritch ways, how they spring up overnight in lightless places and thrive on dead things. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow chanterelle with its fan-vaulting and faint scent of apricots; all spring up overnight like bubbles of earth, sustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.

He goes out in the morning to gather his unnatural treasures, he handles them delicately as he does pigeon's eggs, he lays them in one of the baskets he weaves from osiers. He makes salads of dandelions that he calls rude names, 'bum-pipes' or 'piss-the-beds', and flavours them with a few leaves of wild strawberry but he will not touch the brambles, he says the Devil spits on them at Michaelmas.

His nanny goat, the colour of whey, gives him her abundant milk and he can make soft cheese that has a unique, rank, amniotic taste. Sometimes he traps a rabbit in the snare of string and makes a soup or stew, seasoned with wild garlic. He knows all about the wood and the creatures in it.

... He is an excellent housewife. His rustic home is spick and span. He puts his well-scoured saucepan and skillet neatly on the hearth side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. Over the hearth hang bunches of drying mushrooms, the thin, curling kind they call jew's-ears, which have grown on elder trees since Judas hanged himself on one; this is the kind of lore he tells me, tempting my half-belief. He hangs up herbs in bunches to dry, too - thyme, marjoram, sage, vervain, southern wood, yarrow. The room is musical and aromatic and there is always a wood-fire crackling in the gate, a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glancing flame. But you cannot get a tune out of the old fiddle hanging on the wall beside the birds because all its strings are broken.

... Goat's milk to drink, from a chipped tin mug; we shall eat the oatcakes he has baked on the hearthstone. Rattle of the rain on the roof. The latch clanks on the door; we are shut up inside with one another, in the brown room crisp with the scent of burning logs that shiver with tiny flame, and I lie down on the Erl-King's creaking palliasse of straw. His skin is the tint and texture of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples, ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely.