Apple is abundance. Blossom across the hillside in spring, boughs bending with fruit in autumn. Carts and crates filled and driven to markets. Barrowloads tipped into presses. Runnels of pulpy juice. Barrels of cider. Jugs of cider. Apple is a generous tree.
Apple. Friendly word for friendly tree. Old English æppel, meaning any fleshy fruit, including eorþæppla, ‘earth-apple’ – cucumber – and the 15th century appel of paradis – banana. The apple with which the Serpent tempted Eve, whose Hebrew origin peri referred to fruit in general, even by the time of Milton’s Paradise Lost may not have referred to today’s apple. Legend has it that 4th century theologian Jerome, when translating Tree [peri] of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, chose the Latin malus – apple – whose similarity with malus – evil – became a celebrated pun. Apple and the Fall.
Of course Eve was tempted. Who could refuse a freshly plucked apple? Alongside blackberries, elderberries, damsons and the rare ripe fig, apples are autumn’s gift. Apple of the Fall – autumn. Bursting with flavour. Full of life. Apple of Life!
The apple tree is gateway to Otherworlds. The lake-isle of Avalon owes its name to the Old Welsh Ynys Afallon or Ynys Afallach (in Cornish Enys Avalow) meaning the isle of apple trees. Here, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Excalibur was forged. Here, according to Thomas Malory, Sir Bedivere, after much inner conflict, cast the sword into the lake, whilst the fairy queen Morgan sent a black boat to the lakeshore to ferry Arthur, mortally wounded at the Battle of Camlann, to the isle of apples. Here lies Arthur, having crossed the apple threshold, resting until summoned by his people. Some link Glastonbury with Avalon. Glastonbury is surrounded by orchards.
Prof. Ronald Hutton, in the magnificent book Stations of the Sun, devotes many pages to tracing across Britain diverse traditions of wassailing: honouring the apple trees and the orchards with libations of cider, song, poems, and feasting. ‘Here’s to thee, old apple tree,’ went a Devonshire wassail song from the 18th century, whilst the wassailers circled the apple tree thrice and drank thrice from the cider jug:
Whence thou mayst bud
And whence thou mayst blow!
And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!
Hats full! Caps full!
Bushel – bushel – sacks full,
And my pockets full too! Huzza!
Other wassail songs, continues Hutton, were not so innocent:
Apple tree, apple tree,
Bear good fruit,
Or down with your top
And up with your root.
Over a century before Hutton, Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden) published his 1862 essay ‘Wild Apples: The History of the Apple-Tree.’
Thoreau celebrates the crab, the ancestor apple, from original parent of all today’s many varieties, native to the Americas – malus coronaria – and to Britain – malus sylvestris. British crabs can live up to a century and produce small, acidic, fruit, high in pectin that ensures their intactness and edibility right through the winter. They are one of the few hosts of mistletoe.
Thoreau’s essay is a sensation, bursting with the wild apple’s sharp scents and complex, juicy, flavours. Poetic depictions of the wild apple tree and the fruit. History and folklore. Recipes and poems. Thoreau was apple-struck. ‘What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of life, the apple of the world, then!’
Indeed! Thoreau also praised the imperfection of the wild apple, and casually mocked the orchard-owners’ strict selection only of the blemish-free fruit. ‘All apples are good in November,’ he wrote. ‘Those which the farmer leaves out as unsalable, and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets, are choicest fruit to the walker.’ No supermarket regularity for Thoreau. Wonky fruit!
Thoreau looked with nostalgia at old British traditions of wassailing as a ritual tradition as important as the classical Dionysian or Bacchic. ‘Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but it behooves them to sing, else they will do no credit to their Muse.’
It behooves us all to sing, especially amidst the apple trees. Huzzah!
In his essay, Thoreau slipped in an easily-missed joke: ‘apples not of Discord, but of Concord!’ How is this a joke? His book Walden is named after Walden Pond, which lay on the land of Thoreau’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, near the town of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.
The apple of Discord, meanwhile, is an ancient tale, familiar to scholars of Classics such as Thoreau. This is the apple that led to the Trojan War, best recounted by Malaclypse The Younger in the magnum opiate: Principia Discordia or How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her:
It seems that Zeus was preparing a wedding banquet for Peleus and Thetis and did not want to invite Eris because of Her reputation as a trouble maker.
This made Eris angry, and so She fashioned an apple of pure gold and inscribed upon it KALLISTI (“To The Prettiest One”) and on the day of the fete She rolled it into the banquet hall and then left to be alone and joyously partake of a hot dog.
Now, three of the invited goddesses, Athena, Hera, and Aphrodite, each immediately claimed it to belong to herself because of the inscription. And they started fighting, and they started throwing punch all over the place and everything.
Finally Zeus calmed things down and declared that an arbitrator must be selected, which was a reasonable suggestion, and all agreed. He sent them to a shepherd of Troy, whose name was Paris because his mother had had a lot of gaul and had married a Frenchman; but each of the sneaky goddesses tried to outwit the others by going early and offering a bribe to Paris.
Athena offered him Heroic War Victories, Hera offered him Great Wealth, and Aphrodite offered him the Most Beautiful Woman on Earth. Being a healthy young Trojan lad, Paris promptly accepted Aphrodite’s bribe and she got the apple and he got screwed.
As she had promised, she manoeuvered earthly happenings so that Paris could have Helen (The Helen) then living with her husband Menelaus, King of Sparta. Anyway, everyone knows that the Trojan War followed when Sparta demanded their Queen back and that the Trojan War is said to be The First War among men.
And so we suffer because of the Original Snub.
The parallels with the Old Testament are immediately apparent. The apple of life, evoking emotion, awakening desire, inflaming passion. Profusion, plenty, lavishness, copiousness. Apple abundance.
In The Tree Ogham, Glennie Kindred explores the divinatory properties of apple, the Underlying Energy. ‘When we, like the apple tree, give all of ourselves freely and openly, our hearts are open and receiving more. Holding back is a symptom of greed and insecurity.’ Yes, we can learn from the apple. Give and give and give. Year after year. Rich fruit in abundance.
‘The apple is there to help all of us keep our trust in times of lack,’ she continues, ‘and teaches us our true power is built up by giving, in open-hearted generosity.’ Important lesson from a wise teacher, especially as we enter tough times of scarcity and inequality. The apple does not hoard, does not withhold. It is only through sharing that we thrive, only through sharing that we survive.
Hail Eris! Wassail! Huzza!