Angharad Wynne, Wise Women’s Welsh storyteller co-author, brings an oral style to the book. These stories, originating from Ireland to Siberia, are designed to be read aloud, or to be memorised for future “fireside” retellings. A mild dissatisfaction is that I yearned for a brief technical description of how the writers worked together; this I had to guess at.
Blackie and Wynne acknowledge their reverence for the hundreds of years of anonymous indigenous European storytellers who passed these spoken tales on from generation to generation, before medieval scribes began netting them into books. Holding this gorgeously produced hardback, I sense a repository of distilled wisdom in my hands. The invitation is to embody this wisdom, and to pass it on as a story-carrier yourself.
The collection is precious, because it’s the first time that these rare, patriarchy-surviving remnants of powerful elder female folk stories have been deliberately anthologised. The genius of Wise Women – and the reason it can be put to such practical and uplifting use in the lives of eldering women – is that the stories are partnered by illuminating essays of symbolic psychoanalysis: maps to personal life application that Jungians can generate for our culture, which has lost the ancient skills of dream, myth and folktale interpretation. Wise Women has a radically transformative agenda: to reawaken powerful elder female archetypes buried in our unconscious minds; to redress the imbalance create.