Culture In Nature: Writing On Wood

Apart from Scandinavia with its enduring runic tradition, most medieval literatures have little use for wooden inscriptions. This may come as a surprise given the ubiquity of such artefacts in the Middle Ages, which even lend their name to writing and written objects: etymologically, the Brothers Grimm proposed, the German word for letter (Buchstabe) and terms like Gothic bôka and Old Saxon buok derive from the early Germanic words for “beech tree” (Buche in present-day German).1 Moreover, inscriptions in wood feature prominently in both antiquity and the early modern period, where we witness a large amount of narrated tree inscriptions especially in Pastoral poetry. These pastorals were closely linked to ancient textual traditions which were rarely available in the Middle Ages.2 Consequently, there is a gap in vernacular literary history concerning tree inscriptions and wooden inscriptions in general,3 beginning roughly with Vergil’s Eclogues (c. 40 BCE) and ending with the Pastoral renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth century (e. g. Petrarch, Sannazaro, Boiardo) which subsequently shaped Europe’s literary landscape. This article examines some medieval exceptions in this void, turning first to the Scandinavian runic tradition and the Continental reminiscence of wood’s magical power. Secondly I examine the sad, short, love story between the nymph Oenone and Paris, as retold in several accounts of the Trojan War. Finally, I take a closer look at Marie de France’s and Gottfried von Straßburg’s stories of Tristan and Iseult, both of which present letters on wood as a form of secret communication. Although there is little evidence with which to develop a broader argument about inscriptions on wood, this scarcity is itself worth considering. In fact, instead of lamenting the sparsity of examples, we should make an argument of it. The rareness of writing on wood, I propose, is due to wood’s categorisation as part of the realm of nature rather than culture. As such, wood is a counterpart to the courtly sphere with