Nature Horror in Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907)

Frequently found in anthologies of classic ghost or horror stories is Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” (1907).  Remarkably, the principal cause of the horror in the story is none other than the titular willows.   That small and widespread tree – Blackwood calls them “bushes” (The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell, Tor, 1987, p. 909) – of wet and neglected ground, considered a weed by some, is an unlikely cause of such cosmic horror as Blackwood is able to evoke, yet its effectiveness is undeniable.

  Blackwood sets the stage for horror by describing in knowledgeable detail the surrounding, which is a unique one: the Danube and the sümpfe or marshes of its flood plain between Vienna and Budapest.  The location is not further specified by Blackwood but has been linked with the Dunajské Luhy protected landscape area in Slovakia.  This setting is the first masterstroke, neither fully water nor land, a liminal space difficult to traverse and ever ready to claim the lives of the uncautious.  The narrator and his friend, known only as “the Swede”, are canoeing down the river and, in rising winds and heavy rain, camp for the night on a river island which is in danger of being submerged or washed away.  The island, as with the other river islands nearby, the banks and the flood plain, is covered with innumerable willows.  

  Characterisation in the story is minimal.  Blackwood never names his narrator, and gives no information on his background except to note that he and the Swede have travelled together many times before.   He has, essentially, no past, no psychological depths , no trauma plot. A character that can hardly be conceived in our culture: not reacting to the complications of his previous relationships, just existing in a set of circumstances that need to be dealt with. All we know of the narrator, like a person we meet for the first time in an emergency, is how he is reacting to those circumstances – with considerable alarm and fear, but in a reasonable and human manner.  Neither is there much in the way of plot: if you know the protagonists are caught in a Danube island on a stormy night, you know pretty much all there is to know.

  Without characterisation and plot, atmosphere is all in this story.  The river, weather conditions and isolated location combine to create an intense and realistic sense of peril.  If that were all, “The Willows” would be an adventure story.  But it isn’t.  From the beginning, the atmosphere is heightened.  There is something different about this place which the narrator struggles to define:

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness… [I]t had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature.  Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage. (911)

Though the association of the place with horror has yet to be established, there is a curious insistence on it as a living entity that will resonate throughout the story.  And, despite its “friendly and well-meaning” nature, there is a hint of darkness in its “violent desires”.

  When they escape the rising river to dock on the island, the suggestion of aliveness is renewed:

The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. (913)

The movement of willows with wind and its creation of the notion of a living landscape is a keynote of the story.  Almost immediately, Blackwood introduces an extraordinary simile to suggest life in the willows:

the willows… closed about [the river] like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink.  They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves.  They caused it to vanish from sight.  They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.  (913)

these acres and acres of willows, crowding, so thickly growing there, swarming everywhere the eye could reach, pressing upon the river as though to suffocate it, standing in dense array mile after mile beneath the sky, watching, waiting, listening.  And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.   (914)

Rarely have willows been presented to the imagination in such a formidable guise, recalling antediluvian monsters while intangibly evoking something yet greater and more terrible.  This is true cosmic horror, most often associated with H.P. Lovecraft, yet present in this work long before Lovecraft put pen to paper.  Lovecraft was fully aware of the influence and said of “The Willows”: 

Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note. (“Supernatural Horror in Literature”, At the Mountains of Madness, Modern Library, 2005, p. 164)

  When horror is as cosmic as this, not only terror is produced but also awe.  The word “awe” appears 9 times in the story and “terror” 14 times.  What produces such terror and awe can only be a deity of sorts, a creature or creatures beyond both nature and the imagination of man; creatures, as such, that can only be hinted at but not described. 

We had “strayed,” as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn a little thin. (933)

The awe and terror lie in some unknown and hitherto unsuspected mode of being.  The littleness and contingency of humanity comes crashing in upon the narrator and – of course in lesser degree – upon the reader.  Life is not what we small petty humans experience, or not only that.  As with Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”, “The Willows” is a post-Darwinian and post-Kelvin’s second law of thermodynamics brooding on the nature of life.  In a constantly expanding and dying universe, cold and infinite, one can only think with flashes of wonder but mostly terror of what lies beyond, of a cold, indifferent infinity prefigured in “fifty miles of willows, willows, willows” (938) across an unpeopled and chaotic mosaic of land and water in the middle of Europe.