Robin Harford meets storyteller Clare Viner beneath a flowering hawthorn tree in Devon to explore the living tradition of oral storytelling.
Clare shares how stories belong to everyone – not fixed texts handed down by celibate monks, but breathing, evolving things shaped by the teller’s felt sense and relationship with land.
They discuss how patriarchy silenced women’s stories, how rivers and plants carry their own narratives, and why giving yourself permission to tell an imperfect story is a radical act.
The episode closes with Clare’s spellbinding retelling of Merlin and the Lady Nimue – a love story rooted in hawthorn, heart medicine, and the dreaming earth.
About Clare Viner
Clare Viner has been a storyteller for 26 years.
Her roots are personal. As a child, her grandfather wove fairy tales for her. That inheritance stuck, and eventually became a vocation.
She has told to audiences of every age and disposition: toddlers, teenagers, the elderly, festival goers. Clare has performed in the children’s tent at WOMAD for the last 15 years. She works without books or props, and no two tellings of a story are ever the same.
Her book, The Emerald Dragon and Other Magical Tales of the Blackdown and Quantock Hills, reimagines the folklore of two beloved British landscapes from the perspective of someone who trusts and loves the earth. It was funded by a DEFRA grant.
She was writer in residence for Connecting the Culm, a river conservation project that culminated in a four-day River Story Pilgrimage, walking and camping along the water’s edge.
She runs workshops exploring the folklore of British wild animals and trees, including Spirit of Hare, Spirit of Deer, and others. Having once been terrified herself, she takes particular pleasure in guiding the terrified through the process of finding their own storytelling voice.
She takes old stories and dreams them new, again and again.
This Episode Is Brought To You By
– Robin Harford
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Transcript
ROBIN: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Eat Weeds podcast. I’m Robin Harford, and today I’m sitting with my guest Clare Viner by a beautiful hawthorn tree, with all the aromas wafting off her petals. Clare is a storyteller, and at the end of this interview she will tell a fantastic tale about the hawthorn. So stay with us. Clare, welcome.
ROBIN: I brought you on because — one — I find storytelling can be quite dry, even though I’ve listened to some of the supposedly top storytellers, however that’s defined. Many of them just don’t move me. And then you told a story at the weekend at an event we were at, and I just thought: you’ve got to come on the show. Because storytelling, for me, is very much a lived tradition. It’s a living tradition. And for me to be able to be lost in a story is really important. That doesn’t normally happen, but it did with you.
ROBIN: So tell me about this whole practice of yours, because you tell stories of land and plants and people — and that kind of entanglement that goes on.
CLARE: Yes. I guess I tell stories of land and plants and people, and animals, and fairy folk, and dragons, and giants — and this whole relationship that I believe we all have. To me, the fairy folk — you’ve just got to look at a hawthorn tree and the fairies are there. They’re little parts of the spirit of the tree.
I view the world as animated. Everything is alive. So it doesn’t really make a difference if you’re telling a story about a person or if you’re telling a story about a tree or a plant. They’re all just beings who have stories to tell. And the plants and the animals especially have stories to tell because they’re so much older than us. Modern humans are really newcomers to this planet. So we actually have a lot of listening to do — to listen to the plants and the animals and just see if we can hear. What are they trying to tell us? What are the stories they’re trying to tell us?
And that to me is what is exciting about oral storytelling — it’s not something that is done in a library or a study. As much as I possibly can, I get out and I tell my stories outside. And if it’s pouring with rain and I write my story in a café — which I quite often do — I will then, once I’ve got a gist of the story, take it outside and walk with it through the woods, and see how the natural environment wants to interact with the story. And generally it does, which is exciting and kind of magical, and adds to the power of the stories, I think.
ROBIN: You seem to have quite a unique twist. We had a chat before we got on the recording, and we were talking about — or you were talking about — how there are purists within this tradition who almost want it verbatim and unchanged. And then we talked about patriarchy and misogyny. You’re going to be telling us a story about the Lady Nimue. So — in that relationship — discuss misogyny, discuss the patriarchy, discuss the celibate monk.
CLARE: Well, that could take quite a long time. There are people who will say: oh, you’ve got the received version of the story, the story that’s written down. But I guess a bit like the Bible, really — it’s been written down by somebody very worthy and knowledgeable, and that writing down of the story is sacred and should not be changed.
I just don’t believe that. Word is a living thing, and people have been telling stories way, way, way before they could write. Most people in this country — and in most countries — were illiterate until, gosh, I don’t know, a few hundred years ago. Very recently. So say till two hundred years ago — and how many millions of years of history have we got before that? Modern humans have been around for about three hundred thousand years, but humans as a species have been around for about a million years, gradually changing and evolving. But in all that time, people have been telling stories. Those stories would be heard around a campfire, then the next generation would retell them, and they would change according to the culture and the people who were telling them.
And we also know that originally our lands were matriarchal, and the women would have told the stories. Of course the men would have told stories too, but the stories would have been told from a deeply respectful stance on women.
And when most of the stories that were written down were written down — in the sort of eleven-hundreds, that sort of time — they were mostly written down by celibate priests within the Christian tradition, who of course had their own agenda. And of course, women — and especially powerful and maybe sexy women — whoa, off limits. You don’t tell stories about those women. And if you do find those women are in the stories you’re wanting to tell, you’ve got to paint them in a pretty bad way. You’ve got to say that those women are evil, dangerous, and so on.
So that’s why I think so many of our old stories give us these wicked witches — which I think is starting to change. People are starting to question: what is a witch? What does that mean? Especially within the herbal communities, and that’s great. I think we need more stories dreaming into who these women were, and dreaming into the relationship with plants that both the women and the men were having a long, long time ago.
To me, the dreaming aspect and the spontaneous aspect of storytelling is really important because that feels like it’s part of the listening aspect of the story. If I just tell a story that I’ve got written down and it’s fixed, then it’s kind of dead in a way. But if I say: oh yeah, I’ve got this story in my head and I’m going to try and share it with you — and I try and just drop, and not be self-conscious, and just let myself feel: how do I really want to tell this story? How does the spirit of this story really want to be told? Then something magical can sometimes happen. And that’s alive. And it feels to me almost as if we can become a voice piece for the hawthorn, or the nettle, or whoever it is we’re trying to tell the story of.
ROBIN: Are stories spells? For those who think that’s a bit of an odd question — what I mean is that my understanding of magic and spells is that they’re another way to make change happen. A lot of people are doing political action with banners or whatever, to make change happen in the culture. But there are many ways of activism, many spokes of activism. And I wonder if storytelling is very much part of that process.
CLARE: I think where a very well-reasoned argument can change someone’s mind, I think a very well-told story can change someone’s heart. When I try and tell a story, I try and tell it with my whole body. So it’s not a head thing — it’s more of a body thing. And you’re nodding, because I think when you’ve seen me tell stories, I do move quite a lot. I’m moving my arms, I’m moving my hips. And I feel the story when I’m telling it. I feel it through my body. So I’m seeking to communicate what I can feel.
And that can be really powerful, because as human beings, we do respond to feeling. If we see somebody crying, or someone very happy and joyful, it affects us. We feel it in our bodies. We’re all a lot more sensitive than we realise — we do mirror each other, which is why if you’re with someone who’s really happy it makes you feel happy, and vice versa. And a story can bring all of that.
Some of the storytelling I’ve done has been with rivers, and that has been part of what I’ve been trying to get to — to get to this sense of introducing more feeling, more heartfelt understanding of the history of the river, and just the nature of what the river might be wanting to say to us if it could speak to us.
ROBIN: So let’s talk about that. I understand you did a project on — is it the River by Ella Hayes?
CLARE: Yeah, the River Culm.
ROBIN: The River Culm. Tell us — how did that come about, how did that unfold as a project?
CLARE: I went on a webinar about a new project being set up called Connecting the Culm. It was about wanting to restore the Culm — a river that runs through Somerset and down into Devon, with its confluence in the River Exe. It starts way up in Somerset, in the northern parts, and it’s polluted in multiple places and really needs a lot of TLC. There are conservationists and scientists and people like that who are working to do that work.
I introduced myself as a storyteller and said I would love to come and tell some stories about the river. Luckily, somebody on the project was up for that. So I started to walk along the river, to write blogs about the river, to research it — working with the name, like you struggled a bit to pronounce it. The River Culm. It’s a bit of an unusual name. Where that comes from — and then, you mentioned the patriarchy we live in — it felt like a bit of an instant conclusion that Culm comes from Colum, the saint, the male saint from Scotland, originally Ireland, who converted people to Christianity.
He’s famous for saying, when he got to Iona, that there were a lot of cows there, and he said: where there are cows there are women, and where there are women there is trouble. And apparently he cleared all the cows — and presumably all the women — from Iona in order to set up his monastery.
I didn’t really like that story very much. And I didn’t really like the association with the river. I discovered that Culm meant dove, and I liked that. But I thought: I don’t really like this story about this monk, so I think I’m just going to ignore it.
I was trying to ignore it. I was doing other research. And then I was on holiday and went out early one morning with my notepad to do some writing about the river. And a huge flock of doves — and pigeons, I think (I didn’t have the collective noun) — came swooping around. They flew around me. I didn’t take any notice. Then they flew around several times, their wings all kind of passing me, until I couldn’t ignore them anymore. And I looked closely and saw there were mostly pigeons but several doves. And I thought: oh, Colum. It’s Colum again.
And I got home and I thought: okay, alright Colum, I’ll look into you again. So I put St Colum into the internet a second time. And this time, a different Colum came up — a woman who comes from Cornwall. Now Cornwall is much, much nearer to Devon than Scotland and Ireland. So it seemed much more likely to me that that Colum was the Colum of our river.
And then I started to research her. I discovered she has links with the Arthurian tradition, with Morgwaz, with Morgana le Fay. She’s said to be one of the daughters, one of the Ladies of the Lake. Loads of wonderful mythology associated with this Christian saint who was obviously pre-Christian before she was Christian.
ROBIN: That’s really interesting because that immediately reminds me of Bath and the Roman baths. Bath is known for these Roman baths, but behind all that, underneath empire stamping its impression on land — literally building on top of — it was an ancient, ancient pagan site. Yeah, Sulis.
CLARE: Sulis. Minerva was the Roman goddess, and Sulis was the British goddess. And they couldn’t get rid of Sulis — she was so powerful that they just sort of said: okay, we’ll have Sulis Minerva. We’ll stick them together.
ROBIN: So there’s that layering of dominance when cultures get taken over by empire. What’s the Roman Empire? It’s just in our history, over and over again. But when you start digging out these old stories, you get little clues — little fragments of information that haven’t quite been stamped out. And that’s what I love to do with stories: find those little clues and then dream them alive.
CLARE: Almost like finding a little shard of bone if you’re doing an archaeological dig, and you go: hmm, I know a bit about bones. What would this bone have been attached to? What other bones would this have been attached to? What would the animal of this skeleton have looked like? What would the light in its eyes have been like? What would this animal really have smelt like?
And I think when I create stories I’m trying to do that. I’m finding my tiny bones and reflashing them from my perspective. We’ve all done it — the Romans did it in their way, the Christians did it in their way. And so I’m coming from a more earth-based perspective and I’m doing it in my way.
ROBIN: Do you think that is open to everybody? I mean, long, long before, we would have told stories around fire. Were there official storytellers, or was every member of the clan or the tribe a storyteller as well?
CLARE: I don’t think we really know. But I believe that everyone is a storyteller, in the same way that everyone is a singer. We’re so culturally conditioned — oh, I can’t sing, I’ve got a terrible voice, I was told at school that I couldn’t sing because my voice was too bad. And you’ve got a beautiful voice when you tell your stories — you hum and tra-la-la and it’s beautiful. Very resonant.
When I was at school I wasn’t allowed in the choir because I was told my voice was too bad. And I do tell people that sometimes, because I think it’s a good example of where we get put down. So many times I have people, when I’ve done workshops or a storytelling event, come up to me and go: oh my god, you’re so amazing, I wish I could tell stories like you. And I’m like: well, you can. You absolutely can. When I first started telling stories I was terrified, and I kind of blurted them out and I probably overacted them, and they were probably a bit wooden. But it’s just practice, like anything.
And we can all tell a story about, like, when you went on holiday. Tell me about when you went on holiday. Oh my god, it was great — we went to the beach and we had a picnic. That’s a story. We’re all telling stories all the time.
ROBIN: Yeah, I’ve got a t-shirt that says “We are all artists.” That comes from — I like unruly disruptive art movements, and there’s one called Fluxus, which was very anarchic. And it literally was: look, stop listening to the so-called experts, this kind of refined attitude to art in air quotes. You are a living human being. You are by default sculpting and creating a life. That is artistic just by default.
CLARE: Of course. We’re all so creative. Totally creative beings.
ROBIN: So if someone is curious — say they’re by a hawthorn, and they want to find stories — you talk about dreaming, and I’m very much into emergence. I teach practices called Domei, that basically tell people to try and leave their assumptions and their belief systems and their ideology on the outer circle, and go into the inner circle by a plant, and just sit and be in a receptive space where sometimes — not always, sometimes but often — things percolate up as we sink down. Things percolate up because of our bodies interacting with the bodies of other species. And I mean, sometimes that can be sound that they hear, or words that come into their mind, or images. And I quite like rapping — I mean, I find a lot of rapping discordant, but I like the process of it being quite spontaneous and just emerging in that moment of relationship. And I wonder if that’s how people could start.
CLARE: It’s just about permission, really. It’s about giving ourselves permission. We’ve been culturally told certain people can connect with spirit, certain people can do medicine. Obviously historically they were all men — highly educated white men — who were the people who could connect with spirit and heal people. And it’s total nonsense.
If I run storytelling workshops, I’ve had people in tears saying: I didn’t realise I was going to have to tell a story on this workshop, I can’t tell stories. And I have always got people telling stories by the end of the workshop because it’s just about saying: okay, just tell any old story. Tell a rubbish story. It doesn’t have to be a good story, it doesn’t have to be perfect. No first take. But as soon as you just give people permission to tell an imperfect story, often what comes out has a little moment that’s very beautiful. Because what you start to see as someone tells a story is the person who’s telling the story as well. And that is innately going to be beautiful, even if the person doesn’t think they’re beautiful.
I went on a workshop once with a lovely librarian. She said: you know, sometimes when I have a group of children I just make stories up for them. And she said: I’m pretty rubbish really, I’m not very good at making up stories. But the children always love it. And I loved that. We don’t have to be perfect, we don’t have to be amazing.
As soon as you say to someone — and I’ve seen it over and over again — as soon as you say: once upon a time, long ago… people become like children. There’s like a dropping, a kind of: she’s going to tell me a story, I don’t have to do anything, I just get to listen. And a kind of dropping into a story space.
ROBIN: Is that a liminal space?
CLARE: Yeah, I was just thinking that. Say you’ve got a small group of people or a large group of people. Someone says: once upon a time, long ago. Everyone understands we’re going into the world of story now. We’re going into a different world. We’re stepping out of the world of computers and webinars and technology and all the rest of it. We’re moving away from that world. We’re going into the world of story. It’s another world.
And I kind of believe it’s a world that we all want to spend more time in, but we’re not very often given permission to do it. And in the same way as you’re saying — when you sit with a plant and you just allow yourself to drop — it’s like you’re giving yourself permission. But often we need a teacher to say to us: this is what we’re going to do today.
ROBIN: Well, you’d be surprised. I always joke that I have hundreds of recipes on my website, and I get emails from people going: can I use one tablespoon of sugar instead of two? That just shows me how oppressed we are — that person felt a need to ask me as though I’ve got some authority. I just wrote a recipe. Riff with it.
For me, in the culture, my frustration is that there is that permission-seeking from outside ourselves instead of — as the old punk said — you are your own authority. Stop asking outside and ask within.
CLARE: I talk with my partner, and she sometimes says: oh, my internal head is telling me I can’t do that. The negative scripts from our life story still often control us internally. For me — I remember I had a reading by a Native American woman called Jamie Sams, who created the medicine cards. She had a most brutal childhood — beaten with barbed wire, raped, I mean a horrific story. But she had a fire in her belly because she was just not prepared to be beaten down by those experiences. And she said: whenever anything comes up in your interior that limits you from what you actually want to be doing, just go — goodbye, lie. And she would spit it energetically.
I said to my partner: I have those in my being as well all the time. They’re just commonplace. But I don’t listen to them. I tell them to fuck off. I use that language — that’s my particular way. I’ve tried being all gentle and nurturing with my interior kind of authorities and they don’t want to know. But when I really get quite tough with them and go: no, just shut up, I’m not listening to you — it sounds quite insane, having that kind of internal chat. But that’s my way to be free.
CLARE: Yeah, it’s like — no, it makes sense to me. I have an old grandmother who I sometimes — in my head — if I’m going: oh Clare, you’re a bit rubbish, you’re not really… she goes: excuse me, that’s quite enough of that. Stop those thoughts right now. And she gives me a good telling off if I’m not nurturing myself.
ROBIN: So she’s a positive —
CLARE: Yeah, yeah. She’s a bit scary. But she’s like your not-very-gentle voice that goes: that’s quite enough.
ROBIN: But it takes a presence of mind to be able to catch that, yeah? And not be absorbed by it — so it just takes over and we keep so conditioned. Creating a gap, creating a space to just think bad things about ourselves. And it’s so unhelpful.
I think with storytelling it’s just: permission, permission, permission. Just giving ourselves permission to tell the story we want to tell — and to change it. I say to people all the time: change the story. Just change it. If you don’t like it, change it. Anyone can go on the internet and check the story if they want to. All the information is out there. So if I tell a folktale, anyone who listens to this can go and check it later and get the recorded information. And then make your own decision. Which version do you believe? Do you believe the one that touched your heart, or do you believe the one that’s written down?
ROBIN: Like you say — it’s like the Bible. It was a living tradition. And so much of the kind of empire that we live in wants everything fossilised and dry and crackly and dead and fixed and you’re not allowed to move. And any practices that can liberate us in that way can only be good for the human soul, I think.
So I’m just thinking, as you’re speaking, about a podcast I’ve been listening to called Everything is Fake and Nobody Cares. And he’s talking about fakery and saying that our culture as it’s going now is just all about feeling, and that that’s fake, and that people are moving away from the truth. And that was something I was really curious about.
CLARE: For me, I feel like whenever I tell a story, I’m very careful — I check very carefully in with my heart and my body as to what feels right for me. So even though I might not be telling the recorded version of the story, I’m telling my version of the story, and that feels true to me.
ROBIN: Through your felt sense.
CLARE: Yeah, exactly. That I think the felt sense is so important for us to get more in touch with — whether you do that through movement, or dance, or singing, or storytelling, or playing, or craft, or whatever way we can re-experience… David Abrams wrote a book called Spell of the Sensuous, and it is the sensuous — the body — that’s the softness and the hardness as well, but it’s the felt experience that often is so much more important.
ROBIN: Yeah. And keeping checking in with ourselves. There’s a tradition that the hawthorn — it’s unlucky to bring her into the house. And I wanted to take some hawthorn into a building at the weekend because I was telling a story about someone who collected herbs and plants, and I particularly wanted hawthorn because I love her, and she’s so much of this time of year. I did hesitate. And I did think: is it really a good idea to pick hawthorn? People do say it’s bad luck, and I don’t believe that, but maybe I should just be a bit careful just at this moment in my life — I’m just about to move house, I don’t want anything to go wrong.
So I paused and I stood with the hawthorn plant for a moment and I breathed her in and I listened. And I had a real clear sense in my head of her saying: as long as you treat me with respect, I’m perfectly happy for you to take a little piece of me.
So I did that — I broke off a little piece of hawthorn and I was very careful with her. I kept the windows open in the car, which I had to explain to my person who I was travelling with. She was like: it’s a bit cold, do you think we should put the windows up? I said: no — the thing is I’ve got some hawthorn, I don’t want to upset her, so can we keep the windows down, please? And then at the end of the event, I went and put her back outside again.
ROBIN: I remember us talking a few days ago, you mentioned that about bringing hawthorn in because, as you say, the folklore is you don’t take the may tree indoors. Bad luck and all that. And one, it feels like you can’t bring the scent of woman into the house, yeah? So this again ties into patriarchy and how many of those supposed rules of folklore are more about excluding the feminine.
CLARE: Yes. And maintaining the masculine. And control. A lot of it’s about control, I think.
ROBIN: And yet when I was in Ireland at the Burren, there was a may tree. And in Ireland, it was the first time that I realised just how strong those folk beliefs are still — very present. Like really present. And there were some road developers creating a road, and the villagers got completely up in arms because they were planning on removing this lone may tree, this hawthorn tree. And they went up in arms, and the developers had to bypass it.
CLARE: Yay! Yeah, absolutely. How great.
ROBIN: But there was another thing with hawthorn — I was teaching there and I went to one of the sacred wells, the springs, and with all the hawthorn — there were hawthorn trees I’d never seen before, so old, really old — and they were like a circle of them. And yet on the hawthorn there were cardinals and saints on one side, and then there were coloured bits of ribbon and poems to the fairies and prayers to the fairies on the other. Very strange.
CLARE: I actually really like that — I really like the intertwining of the traditions. Because there are many aspects to Christianity which I like, and I feel like having grown up a Christian, if I can just take the stories that I like and ignore the ones that I don’t like, it can be very helpful and very supportive to me.
There’s an interesting story about hawthorn in Glastonbury — that Joseph of Arimathea planted a hawthorn tree there. So again this sense of the sacred. And it makes me wonder — something I’ve often thought and dreamt about — that early Christianity was very honouring of women and of the feminine, deeply. And that’s been again wiped out and twisted and changed into something else. I mean, the medieval mystics — Hildegard of Bingen, for goodness sake. The greening of things. Viriditas.
Did you know that there’s a piece taken from the Glastonbury hawthorn and planted in Exeter Cathedral?
ROBIN: No, I didn’t know that.
CLARE: Yeah, it’s there. Very close to the horse chestnut tree. If you face the abbey at the front, it’s round to the left.
ROBIN: Oh, I’ll go and find it. I’ll go and make friends with that hawthorn tree. Because I think someone cut down the Glastonbury thorn, didn’t they?
CLARE: Did they?
ROBIN: Yeah, quite a few years ago.
CLARE: That’s got to be bad luck. Who knows what happened to them.
I do feel as well that I want to just say, before the story’s told, something that will hopefully come through in the story — which is about the hawthorn as medicine being about love, and working with the heart. It is, as far as I know, heart medicine. And the extraordinary… I’m just looking at it as I’m speaking — just the extraordinary femaleness of the hawthorn in full flower. And this love story that’s associated with this tree in my telling of it. It’s a beautiful story.
ROBIN: Would you like to tell it?
CLARE: Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. OK, before you do, how do people find you if they want to get in touch?
CLARE: As I mentioned, I’m not very technological. So there’s not actually an awful lot about me online. But you can contact me — it’s my name, Clare Viner, at googlemail.com. I have got a rather antiquated website, which is just my name, ClaireVinerStoryteller.co.uk. So please — if you’ve enjoyed this, I would love to hear from you.
ROBIN: Have you got Instagram?
CLARE: I have, technically, yes.
ROBIN: Well, all those links are in the show notes for those who are listening. Thank you, Clare. Thank you.
CLARE: It’s great to have you on.
ROBIN: Thank you for having me. And let’s hear your story.
The Story of Merlin and Nimue
Told by Clare Viner
So this is a story that I often tell at this time of year, at Beltane, when the hawthorn is in full bloom, because she’s just so full at this time of year. It just takes my breath away, really — the fullness of her blossom. She’s so frilly, she’s so fragrant, she’s so immense in her power.
The story I’m going to tell is not scripted. It’s part of the oral tradition, and I don’t quite know how it’s going to come out as I tell it. But it’s my interpretation of an old, old, old folk tale that’s been being told for probably thousands of years. People associate these tales with the medieval era, and in my understanding these stories are much older than that. They were first written down probably in the nine hundreds, the ten hundreds, that sort of time — and then they all got rewritten down in the later medieval era, and that’s what you can find if you google this story later on. But this is my interpretation of it.
It’s a story from this land, from these lands. And it’s a story of the great wizard Merlin — the great and magnificent wizard Merlin, who I think most people will have heard of.
The story goes that Merlin’s mother was a priestess — a priestess of the tribal people who lived here on these lands — and that his father was a demon, or a fairy. And because of this, Merlin was half human, half fairy. But he lived with his mother in a reasonably human kind of way, in a small community in the middle of a forest.
It was when he was a little boy — one time — that he snuck out of the village and went running through the trees, and he found himself stopping by a hawthorn tree. And he just sat down by this hawthorn tree, and he was singing a little song to himself and playing with sticks and stones as little boys like to do, making patterns on the ground. When one minute he was looking at the tree — and suddenly there was a fluttering, like a bird’s wings. And out of the tree came a little girl.
And the little girl winked at him and giggled and said: do you want to play?
And he said: yeah, why not?
And they started to play — and she was running and he was chasing, and they laughed and they found things and they climbed trees. And she told him that she was called Nimue.
After a few days of going back into the woods and playing with this little girl — Nimue — she told him that she was a fairy.
“Do you want to see something?” she said.
“Yeah,” said the little boy.
And she started to shake, and she started to shimmer. And one minute he was looking at her, and then suddenly she turned into a bird and she flew up into the hawthorn tree and she sang a little song —
La la la la la la la la la…
— and she flew off and away.
The little boy just sat with his mouth open.
Well, after that, he saw her turning into many, many things. Often she would suddenly — when they were playing hide-and-seek — she’d become a tree and just disappear out of the woods.
“That’s not fair,” said Merlin. “You know I can’t do that.”
“You can,” she said. “Because you’re half fairy too.”
And sometimes she would teach him. And he would find that — not as quickly, not as fluidly as her — but if he really concentrated, he could turn himself into a tree, or sometimes an animal, a fox sniffing and snuffling through the woods.
When he told his mother, she just smiled. “Let’s see what comes next,” she said.
And not long after that, the little girl Nimue transformed herself into a powerful young woman and said: now it’s time for you to meet my sisters. And she led Merlin, the little boy, down to the lake. And there by the lake were a circle of eight more powerful-looking young women who all at once transformed themselves into trees and stood there blowing in the wind.
When the time came and Merlin had grown into a young man, Nimue changed herself into a young woman the same age as him. And she took his dark hand in her white hand and said: let’s go, Merlin. It’s time.
And she led the young man deep into the forest and up onto a hill, where there was a gathering of strong tribal men. And the leader of these men was a man called Arthur — Bear King, Artor. And the Bear King wore a great bear’s fur over his shoulders. And it was not a bear that he had killed, but a bear that had been his friend in life.
And that was how it was that Merlin was introduced to the great Bear King of these lands.
Arthur and the men who had gathered from different tribes all across Britain were trying to protect these lands from invading forces — trying to protect these lands from violence and desolation. Stories were being told of wastelands that were to come. But Merlin listened carefully to all of it and advised the king. And the king listened carefully to this man, this mysterious man who seemed to be able to do things that other men couldn’t do.
But at night time, when he had finished advising the king, Merlin would go into the woods. And the young woman about the same age as him — who was the Lady Nimue in her human form — would meet him there. And sometimes, especially at this time of year, in the spring, the Lady Nimue would sit down by a hawthorn tree and ruffle her white petticoats and her skirts, and lift up her skirts.
“Merlin, come and lay your head in my lap,” she would say.
Hmm.
Merlin laid his head in the lap of his best friend and his sweet, sweet lady. And she tasted of musk and sweetness and wildness and power. Hmm. Merlin was completely intoxicated with his fairy woman, who often seemed to appear around this blossoming tree, the hawthorn tree. He loved her with so much passion. And she loved him back.
And many, many years passed. And the love between them — it grew and it blossomed and it fruited.
Until one day Merlin was very, very old. Because he was only half human, he aged in a way the fairy folk don’t. And the old man sat outside the gathering of King Arthur and his tribal leaders. He sat down one evening and he looked up at the stars. And there in the stars he saw his destiny written. And he understood that it was time for him to go for his long, long sleep.
Just then, an old woman leaning on a stick, with white petticoats billowing in the breeze, came walking towards him.
La la la la la la la la la…
“Merlin,” she said. “What do you see in the stars tonight?”
“Oh my love,” said Merlin. “In the stars I see it is time for me to go for my long, long sleep.”
“Ah!”
And she became all at once a little girl standing in front of him, crying and crying.
“Not yet, Merlin. Not yet.”
And then suddenly she was the strong woman he had loved so much when he was younger too. And hot tears were pouring down her face as she grasped a hold of his hand and said: really? Is it really time? Don’t we have a few more years?
“No,” said Merlin. “It’s time.”
And if you’d been sitting in the gathering of men around the fire at King Arthur’s court, if you’d been sitting there with those men very early the next morning and happened to look over your shoulder — you’d have seen two very old people, as they appeared, leaning on their sticks with great cloaks billowing out behind them. You’d have seen them making their way out of the woods and over the hills.
And they walked, and they walked, and they walked.
Now there are stories told across these lands of different people who they spent the night with, different places where they slept. And they walked together for many, many nights and many, many days. But sometimes in the evenings they’d take shelter in the woods. And Nimue would lift up her white petticoats and say:
“Merlin, lay your head in my lap.”
Hmm.
And finally, finally, they arrived at Tintagel.
And there, as they came towards the coast — before they even got there — they heard the waves crashing in like lace. Great mountains of spray crashing in on the rocks. And as they got closer, they saw the sea stretching out before them. And there on the cliff’s edge, in her full array, in her full skirts, was the hawthorn tree. Little white petals blowing in the breeze. Sweet musky fragrance blowing there too.
And Merlin looked at his lady.
“I remember the first time I saw you,” he said. “I couldn’t work out if you were you, or if you were the hawthorn tree.”
And the lady giggled. And then she became very serious and she took him by the hand.
“Come, Merlin,” she said.
And she took him — they scrambled together down to the base of a magnificent hawthorn tree that was standing there on the edge of the cliff. She sat down rather slowly beside the hawthorn tree. And she lifted up her frilly white skirts and she said one last time:
“Merlin, lay your head in my lap.”
Merlin came and he laid his head in her lap. And he tasted her sweetness. And hot tears rolled down her cheeks and landed on his dear old wrinkled head.
La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la…
It was singing magic. And the wizard started to close his eyes.
“Goodbye, my love,” she said. “We will meet again one day. Because I am a fairy woman and I will live forever. And whenever it is that you wake from this long, long sleep, I will be there and I will be waiting for you.”
Merlin smiled, and closed his old eyes.
And the fairy woman started to tremble. And she started to shake. And then she did a big shake and she pulled herself together. And she kissed Merlin. And she laid his head very gently on the ground. And she stood up.
And she started raising her arms above her head. She started to sway her hips from side to side. She started to dance around and around the tree. And the roots of the tree rose up from the earth and became a kind of casket around the body of the old wizard. And she sang her song and she danced her dance. And the casket sank down into the earth. And the grass grew over. And everything was just as it had been before they had arrived.
The hawthorn tree, blowing in the wind.
The fairy woman threw herself down on the ground and she whispered:
“Sleep well, my love. Sleep well. For there will come a time when Britain will need your wisdom again. And when that time comes, you will wake up. And I will be waiting.”
Then the Lady Nimue picked herself up. She smoothed down her white skirts. And she walked, and she walked, for days and weeks and months — back to the gathering of the brave tribal men, tribal women too, maybe.
And it’s said that in that place, the Lady Nimue — in the very early text — continued to support and help the Bear King until the end of his days.
End of episode