THE ERL-KING
According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Erl-King is a mythical character in
modern German literature, but with no existence in early mythology. Because of
the wrong translation of the word from Dutch, the figure is known as alderking’, whereas its correct name elf-king is not much used. It is personified as
an eldritch figure riding through the night in woodlands to carry away children
to death. It was popularised through Goethe’s famous ballad in which, in a
poetic rendering, the Erl-King takes away a little boy’s life.
Carter endows her Erl-King with his original destructive force and death
bringing nature. She chooses him to be a tree-king, though the alder seems to be
replaced by the elder. An extremely complex figure, he creates multiple
interpretative possibilities, contributing greatly to the general symbolic and
metaphorical richness of the text. Some of the notions he conceives seem, on the
surface, to be contradictory, and the main purpose of this paper is to find a basis
for some coherent interpretation of the figure.
The Erl-King lives in a wood which is like a lethal trap:
Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you out again for
there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety. (187)
Carter succeeds in endeavouring to create in the story the overwhelming
atmosphere of looming danger or even death, which is prefigured in the very
appearance of the wood. This is an autumn wood, where you find a haunting
sense of the imminent cessation of being (186). This is the wood in which you
get lost forever, which swallows you up’ (186). Notice how the following
metaphor used in the introductory description of the wood suggests what is to
happen in the story:
The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost
themselves in woods and hunt around hopelessly for the way out.(186)
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The Erl-King lives in the heart and is the heart of the wood. We see him
first upon a clearing, a garden where all the flowers were birds and beasts
(186); they are all gathered around the Erl-King, crouching at his feet and
clinging to him. His house is almost a part of the wood and he eats the bounty
of the woodland (188); he is totally sustained by nature and it is as if he came
alive from the desire of the woods (188). The metaphors and comparisons
Carter uses serve to forge in the reader’s mind a close association between the
Erl-King and a tree: he is tall as a tree with birds in its branches (190); he has
stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries and he is like a tree that bears blossom and
fruit on the same bough together (190). Consider also the following quotation:
When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall
out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and
he can stand as still as a tree when he wants the doves to flutter softly,
(...), down upon his shoulders... (189)
The Erl-King is as fused into the wood as a tree growing in it would be. He
knows the wood and any creature in it as a master knows its subjects. Even if the
equation of the Erl-King with nature were a too far going conclusion, he
definitely acts on its behalf, the earth being his accomplice (189) and his flesh
being of the same substance as those leaves that are slowly turning into earth
(189).
In the Erl-King there exists marked duality consisting in his being nature
like figure, signified by his ability to sustain and feed creatures, combined with
destruction he brings.  Erl-King will do you grievous harm (187) is the
heroine’s premonition. The character is made to be perceived as infused with
death: he has eyes green as dead sea fruit (191), eyes that can eat you (187),
and the cold air that blows over graveyards always goes with him (189).
However, harm and cruelty ascribed to him are mainly to be seen in the fact that
he, using his elder bird-call (187), attracts all birds to catch and enslave the
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sweetest singers (189). He weaves osier cages for them and there they sit and
sing for them (190). The heroine perceives him as ruthless in doing this:
His kitchen shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of
singing birds, larks and linnets, which he piles up one on another against
the wall, a wall of trapped birds. How cruel it is, to keep wild bird in
cages! But he laughs at me when I say that; laughs and shows me his
white pointed teeth with the spittle on them. (188)
No bird, however, can resist his powerful calling, such a sweet piercing call
(189) it is. They come in great numbers and trustingly, particularly when winter
comes, and it is difficult for all the birds to survive without his help. He is the
one who sustains them.
Much of the Erl-King’s destructive force is disclosed in the interaction
between him and the heroine. This interaction is of sexual nature, and the
heroine’s encounter with the Erl-King splits her life into two: pre-sexual and
post-sexual. The terms used are, in their content, almost equivalent to the terms
prelapsarian and postlapsarian, as life before sex is pictured as blissful
happiness brought to an end by the sexual initiation (the motif to be found in the
other texts from the collection). Consider the following quotation:
The white moon above the clearing coldly illuminate the still tableaux of
our embracements. How sweet I roamed, or, rather, used to roamed; once
I was the perfect child of the meadows of summer, but then the year
turned, the light clarified, and I saw the gaunt Erl-King, (...), and he drew
me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music. (190)
Entering sex is visualised in the text as entering an autumn wood (the season
that precedes the cessation of being), and going towards winter, leaving behind
spring and happy summer; the year with its seasons is a metaphor for human
life. After sex, and because of sex, there awaits anguish and danger. Typically
for Carter, it is the most important and mysterious experience in human life and
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it changes it irrevocably. Picturing changes sex produces in her heroines is one
of the central themes to be noted in her collection The Bloody Chamber. Carter
presents her female characters in a decisive moment of their lives when they are
somehow cornered into encountering sex; it becomes an experience they can no
longer escape. It is something they fear but also feel strongly attracted to. It
brings both satisfaction and pain, but, more importantly, nothing is the same
after it comes. Carter’s language confuses but is also most adequate for
rendering the dual nature of the feelings sex evokes in her heroines. Some
consideration should, therefore, be given to the way she depicts the sexual act in
The Erl-King. The following passage seems appropriate for doing this:
He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love;
skin the rabbit, he says! Off come all my clothes. (189)
One should notice, first, the contradictory phrase the tender butcher, as well as
comparing a love act to skinning an animal. In Carter’s writing it is very
difficult and painful to be naked because nakedness parallels revealing one’s
real nature, getting to know the deepest truths about oneself (compare The
Tiger’s Bride). The Erl-King strips the heroine to her last nakedness (190), and
she is like a skinned rabbit (190). She is mercilessly exposed and there is
nothing to screen her against whatever comes from the outside world. The
danger of sex lurks perhaps in its potential for transforming identity and making
vulnerable. Carter’s heroine has definitely been made vulnerable because it is
through sex that she comes under the powerful influence of the Erl-King. In a
sexual act the Erl-King undresses her in order to then dress her in his own skin
(190), in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water
(190). His touch is both devastating and consoling (190). On the whole, Carter
seems to have a genius for employing the vocabulary which, though used very
sparingly, is wonderfully suggestive of how the heroine feels about sex and of
what it does to her. These are her words:
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Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to
him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his
dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its
capacity for drowning. (191)
The phrase its capacity for drowning is just one of the numerous reminders in
the text of the danger sex brings, which, there is a further suggestion, falls
mainly to the female’s lot.
As it shall be seen, the text, conceiving a number of possible readings, can
also be interpreted as a feminist text, as it presents the theme of the female’s
setting free from male domination. When taking the sexual relationship between
the Erl-King and the heroine into consideration, one perceives her enormous
reliance on him contrasted with his almost limitless power. It is first to be seen
in all creatures’ (including the heroine’s) inability to resist his calling. The
heroine says:
I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling
straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands. (189)
Even this short excerpt reveals that it is the Erl-King who acts and decides, the
heroine being slightly passive: he lays her down and there she lies at his mercy.
His eyes exert tremendous pressure (191), drawing her inwards. She knows he
is going to harm her, yet she goes back and back to him, because, like birds, she
cannot defy his call. There is a parallel between a bird and the heroine
established, and, generally, birds stand for women in the text. She is not afraid
of him but of falling down. The following passage metaphorically defines her
feeling towards him:
Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the
winds in his handkerchief and knotted the ends together so they could not
go out. Then the moving currents of the air would no longer sustain them
and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for
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him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still
further. (189)
The harm the Erl-King causes consists in his taking away freedom; he catches
birds-women and enslaves them. The same is to happen to the heroine: she is in
danger of loosing her liberty. The green of the Erl-King’s big eyes catches
(191), and she is afraid of being trapped in it for ever like poor little ants and
flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the Baltic (191). It is
worth noticing how the language is used to diminish the heroine and, at the same
time, to aggrandise the Erl-King. He is a gradual extinction of her:
Your green eye is a reducing chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will
become as small as my own reflection, I will diminish to a point and
vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed
by you. I shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier
cages and mock my loss of liberty. I have seen the cage you are weaving
for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among
the other singing birds but I-I shall be dumb, from spite. (191)
After she has realised that, it is no longer birdsong she hears from the birds in
the cages, but cry. The birds cry because they can’t find their way out of the
wood, have lost their flesh when they are dipped in the corrosive pools of his
regard and now must live in cages (192). The heroine strangles the Erl-King
and sets the birds free. They change back into young girls, each with the
crimson imprint of his love bite on their throats (192).
The feminist theme of women’s becoming free and independent after
being oppressed by the male is fairy overt and straightforward. The Erl-King
standing for the male and the birds standing for the female, it is clearly seen
what the text suggests as to the relationship between the two sexes: the male
absorbs the female, reduces it and traps it. The excerpt quoted above about the
birds-women who have lost their flesh in the Erl-King’s regard (192) tells the
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reader about the way they are looked at and thought about by men: they are
diminished up to the point of non-existence. It would first seem that women are
satisfied with their caged condition, and with singing for men, but the truth
the text makes the reader realise is that they suffer. The heroine stands up to the
status quo:
I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages
though he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water
every day and fed them well. (191)
By destroying the Erl-King she brings about changes in women’s lives: they
become free and regain their flesh, their human shape.
What Carter tries to convey though her story is much more complicated
though. She makes her feminist message more complex mainly by means of
endowing her Erl-King with quite a multi-dimensional role. Thus, to claim that
the feminist theme in The Erl-King is limited only to producing a picture of
male power over women is to simplify it to some extent. More further meaning
are generated by the fact that the Erl-King is a fairy affectionate figure, showing
tenderness and arousing love. The heroine’s feelings towards him cannot be
doubted:
When I realised what the Erl-King meant to do with me I was shaken with
a terrible fear and I did know what to do for I loved him with all my heart.
(191)
Furthermore, the Erl-King cannot be perceived as responsible for or guilty of the
negative and destructive effects he has on the women-birds, as, the text makes it
clear, he is innocent in caging them. The heroine states:
But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although
I knew from the moment how Erl-King would do me grievous harm. (192)
It seems that the Erl-King enslaves the birds through affection, at least in the
heroine’s case. The cage he prepared for her is made of his embraces: they were
the branches of which the trap itself was woven (191). Thus, it becomes
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possible to say that it not solely the male that traps the female, but additionally it
is love and desire women have for men. Further ambiguities are raised by the
fact that the Erl-King is
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