The Silver Bough Quotes

“They were supposed to be immortal,” he said. “Once the island was grounded, though, they lost that magical protection and became more like ordinary folks. They began to age, and suffer from ordinary infirmities. They intermarried with the incomers. According to the stories, some of them became Christians and were happy to exchange their pagan immortality for life everlasting. As for the others—well, they didn’t die, but they kept getting older, and after a hundred or a hundred and fifty years they began to shrink and shrivel, getting smaller and smaller until they were no bigger than newborn babies. Their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren had to look after them as they aged, but since they ate less and slept more, like the babies they began to resemble, they weren’t much trouble to keep. Even so, as the years went by their descendants tended to forget about them, and instead of recognizing them as their ancestors, they thought these tiny little people living in cupboards and odd corners of the house and garden were some sort of supernatural beings, elves and fairies, to be treated with great caution—”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“What was it?” she whispered. “The sluagh,” he said in his normal voice. “What?” “They’re some sort of spirits—some people call them the host of the unforgiven dead. They were believed to go flying about above the world in great clouds, doing evil when they could, and constantly fighting with each other. In the morning you’d see their blood splashed on the rocks. The blood of the hosts—fuil nan sluagh—is another name for red crotal, that’s the lichen used for dyeing Harris tweed.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“I had no idea how the queen of the annual fair was chosen; this was a “women’s matter” and too frivolous for me to question, until my daughter was involved. By tradition, she would be crowned by a stranger, an unknown man who would step out of the Fair-day crowd at the appropriate moment. This, at any rate, was the story, but it was no more to be uncritically believed than any other bit of folklore. Young ladies of an age to be chosen for this role often had sweethearts, whether or not they were recognized by possibly disapproving parents, and even I had noticed how very often, and swiftly, past queens ended up married to the “strangers” who had crowned them!”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“Checking her map, she found the hill was named Cnoc na Beithir, and although she’d never seen it before, she remembered the name from a winter’s evening of map-reading. Cnoc was a round hill, and her Gaelic dictionary had given four distinct definitions for beithir. It was “a prodigiously large serpent” and “lightning bolt” and “bear” and something else she couldn’t remember—some sort of fish. It had made her wonder how people could have managed with such an unnecessarily confusing language.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“According to Irish tradition,” says Professor Watson, “Arran was the home of Manannan, the sea-god, and another name for it was Emain Ablach, Emain of the Apples. This is, I suppose, equivalent to making Arran the same as Avalon, the Happy Otherworld.”… To enter this Otherworld before the appointed hour of death, a passport was necessary. This was a silver branch of the mystic apple-tree, laden with blossom or fruit—though sometimes a single apple sufficed—and it was given by the Queen of Elfhame or Fairy Woman to that mortal whose companionship she desired. It served not only as a passport, but also as food; and it had the property of making music so entrancing that those who heard it forgot all their cares and sorrows.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“A few minutes later Jade crept close to Ashley, and whispered, “Don’t be scared of them. They’re nice, really. I don’t think they mind if we talk about them.” “I’m not scared,” she said, rather haughtily. What she felt primarily was confusion. It had been one thing to listen to Graeme arguing the reality of magical beings; it was something else to find out Shona believed it, too. “Anyway,” Jade went on, no longer whispering, but still speaking quietly, “I don’t think they’re listening to us. I think they sleep most of the time. I know what happened to them: They stopped having babies and got older and older, and littler and littler, and they moved their houses underground, and they don’t come out much. They don’t mind if people come here and visit, just so long as nobody builds their house up here, because the reul is theirs and always will be.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“This is, possibly, the oldest settlement on the Apple. It’s never been excavated—not professionally—but it looks like people lived here in stone houses about, oh…” He puffed out his cheeks to consider. “Four or five thousand years ago, I guess. We don’t know exactly what happened to them—” “Yes we do!” Jade objected. “At the time that Appleton was established as a new town, settled by incomers, there were already people living on the Apple,” he went on. “But they were incomers, too, mostly from Kintyre and Aran, and even from Ireland. They settled by the sea—some in Southport, and others on the stretch of bay known as the Ob—and they farmed the lower glens. But nobody came up here to settle. These hills belonged to the old, original inhabitants.” He paused to take a swig from his can. “They had lived all over when the Apple was still an island. Afterward, when the incomers came, they withdrew into the interior—here. And the incomers kept their distance. They were respectful. They knew what most people have forgotten now—”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“There are different traditions. And I’m not sure the two ideas are totally incompatible. The great hero’s saved from death, but he’s not alive in the usual sense, he’s in another state of being, another world. And to the Celts, that other world was both physically real—a place that you could get in your boat and sail to—but at the same time it was a spiritual realm, insubstantial, accessible to mortals only in dreams, or after death.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“From Mythology of the Celts
by F. X. Robinson
(Hale, 1902) AVALON, the idyllic “Island of Apples” where King Arthur was taken after receiving his fatal wound, is that same Land of Youth, always located on an island on the western horizon, to which Celtic heroes were summoned to dwell in eternity. Bran, as we have seen already, was beckoned by a beautiful woman bearing an apple-branch silver-white with blossom to Emain, described as an island in the west where apple trees are perpetually in flower and fruit at the same time. The connection between apples and immortality is of course very ancient, and found throughout Europe. In Scandinavian legend, the gods owed their eternal youth to a diet of magic apples, guarded by Idun, the goddess of Spring and renewal. The Greeks, too, had their magical apples of the Hesperides—those Western Isles again. From Ireland comes the tale of how Cu Roi hid his soul in an apple, that he might not be slain in battle, only to be destroyed when Cu Chulain split the fruit with his mighty sword. For a suggestion of why this should be, we have only to look at the language of symbolism and its reflection in the natural world. When an apple is halved crosswise, each half reveals the image of a five-pointed star. This, of course, is one of the most ancient and universally recognized emblems of immortality; a sacred sign, like the apple itself, of the Great Goddess and her supernatural realm.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“Once upon a time, lust was a deadly, dangerous sin; it made people outcasts from society, broke up families, destroyed lives. These days…well, these days society could hardly function without it; lust was not merely acceptable, it was practically a duty. You could get by perfectly well without love so long as you were “in lust” with someone. People thought there was something wrong with you if you weren’t constantly moving from one object of desire to another. Maybe the word had simply become debased and misused, maybe it was greed or boredom that made people want so many things they didn’t need, but everything was so sexualized now. People “lusted after” clothes, cars, Godiva chocolates, and new gadgets in the same way that they shopped for new lovers.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“apple trees could live more than a hundred years, although they usually stopped bearing fruit after fifty.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“Nell had been fascinated by the stories of wonderful new apples discovered growing out of garbage heaps, behind chicken houses, or in old, abandoned gardens: Mannington’s Pearmain had come from cider residue tipped beneath a blacksmith’s hedge in the eighteenth century; Granny Smith sprouted from a heap of apples dumped into an Australian creek in the 1860s; Bloody Ploughman grew in the 1880s from a rubbish heap where a bag of stolen apples was thrown after the thief was shot…”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“Their potential variety was practically infinite, because apples don’t breed true from seed. Each apple seed is different from all others, and, if planted, may produce a type never known before. If the new apple was special enough, it could be preserved and reproduced either through a root sprout, or by grafting a twig from the new tree onto the trunk of another; they would then fuse together and grow into a tree identical to the one from which the twig was taken.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“And yet, said he, legend had it that once in a lifetime one single golden apple would appear among the usual heavy crop of reds. This golden apple could not be treated as part of the common crop. It must be picked at its moment of perfect ripeness, to be shared by two lovers who would thereby be granted their hearts’ desire, and peace and prosperity would reign over the land. If, however, the golden apple was selfishly consumed by any one person—or sold—or, worst of all, left to rot, untasted, then, alas, some terrible fate would befall the whole community.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“WHENEVER business or pleasure takes me north of the border, I seize the chance to savour one (or more) of Appleton’s Fairest, as these dappled, cone-shaped beauties are never to be met with in England. The reason is not that they do not travel well, for in fact, properly packed and stored they keep beautifully, and indeed, for maximum enjoyment they should be eaten not only when fresh from the tree, for although they provide a brisk, juicy, sharply piquant treat in late September, by the New Year the stored apples have become sweeter and drier, with a magnificent yet subtle aroma, and a honeyed, almost nut-like flavour, particularly good taken with cheese and a fine Port wine after dinner, and in this state they will last, as they say “til the apples come again,” with no diminution in goodness. I myself have partaken of the Fairest as late as August, when the new crop is still a-ripening on the trees. No, the only reason they do not adorn the tables of discerning connoisseurs in England as well as Scotland is that the Scots love them too well to export their small crop for the pleasure of the “Sassenach,” and keep them a closely guarded treasure.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“Even if the Apple Fair was invented to attract tourists, however artificial its beginnings, it could not remain cut off but would soon have been pulled into the service of the local magic. Some aspects are recognizable from other Scottish traditions: that it was supposed to be a dark-haired stranger who crowned the Apple Queen reminds me of the preferred “first-footer” on Hogmanay. My mother always used to say that the first person to step across the threshold of the house on New Year’s Day should be a tall, dark-haired man. If the first caller chanced to be fair-haired, bad luck could be averted by tossing a lump of coal in ahead of him, but if it was a woman, we’d have bad luck all year. “After the last Apple Fair, we never had any luck in the town,” one elderly woman told me. “It was her fault, the Apple Queen. If she’d married her man, everything would have gone on as it always had. But she went away. They both did—only not together as they were meant to. And ever since, nothing’s gone right with the town.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel

“She walked among the shelves that housed the local collection, touching the backs of old books, occasionally taking one down. Some remnant of childhood animism made her feel sorry for those which were overlooked, left too long untouched.”
― Lisa Tuttle, The Silver Bough: A Novel