The Forest of Arden
Oct. 14th, 2007 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustIf you follow the Meuse river through Belgium and into France, you pass through the forested hills of the Ardennes; in my previous post about this cross-border region I embarrassed myself by using the word "charm", a too-easy option which tells you no more than that I liked it - the scenery is not grandiose or spectacular, but much of it is beautiful on a human scale; the small towns are not so much pretty as comfortable, though there were some fine buildings.
Setting aside Rimbaud's disdain for his birthplace (Vous êtes heureux, vous, de ne plus habiter Charleville...): what else could a teenaged poet think? I had still thought of it as a largely industrial area; perhaps I should have anticipated the pleasures og the post-industrial north-east. Struck by a random thought this morning, I googled Ardennes and Arden: and found a tangle of debate about whether Shakespeare's forest of Arden was in Warwickshire or - like that of his source, Thomas Lodge - was in fact the Ardennes, translated. It wouldn't take much for me to digress into the magical nature of forest, the role of the forest in medieval romance and...
Anyway, so the Meuse runs through forest in the Ardennes, and the regional identity is tied up with the forest, primarily with the wild boar. They put boars on everything, from the menu (pâté de sanglier is a specialty) to the war memorials.
When we returned to our car from the viewpoint, the man who had been making a call on his mobile phone told us "This is the nicest spot in the whole département" - which I thought was modest. As we left, he admitted "I was looking for mushrooms, but I haven't found any."
A little further down the road, a red squirrel ran across our path; this isn't all that unusual, but since the last piece of work before leaving home had been to remake the home page of Red Squirrel Press, we took it personally.
Setting aside Rimbaud's disdain for his birthplace (Vous êtes heureux, vous, de ne plus habiter Charleville...): what else could a teenaged poet think? I had still thought of it as a largely industrial area; perhaps I should have anticipated the pleasures og the post-industrial north-east. Struck by a random thought this morning, I googled Ardennes and Arden: and found a tangle of debate about whether Shakespeare's forest of Arden was in Warwickshire or - like that of his source, Thomas Lodge - was in fact the Ardennes, translated. It wouldn't take much for me to digress into the magical nature of forest, the role of the forest in medieval romance and...
Anyway, so the Meuse runs through forest in the Ardennes, and the regional identity is tied up with the forest, primarily with the wild boar. They put boars on everything, from the menu (pâté de sanglier is a specialty) to the war memorials. When we returned to our car from the viewpoint, the man who had been making a call on his mobile phone told us "This is the nicest spot in the whole département" - which I thought was modest. As we left, he admitted "I was looking for mushrooms, but I haven't found any."
A little further down the road, a red squirrel ran across our path; this isn't all that unusual, but since the last piece of work before leaving home had been to remake the home page of Red Squirrel Press, we took it personally.
