Wise Child by Monica Furlong, 1987.
Juniper is an unusual woman in the community where she lives. Wise Child knows that she originally came from Cornwall, and now, she lives alone and unmarried. People also know that she practices magic and doesn’t go to church. Yet, although people are a little suspicious about her for that, they still call on her for help when someone is very ill because she is an excellent healer and can frequently help when others can’t.
Wise Child (a nickname given to her by her family) finds herself alone at the age of nine. Her mother, Maeve, had left her with her grandmother years before and her father, Finbar, is a sailor who is often away. While her father is away, Wise Child’s grandmother dies, and the community has to decide where Wise Child will live until her father returns. She wants to live with her aunt, but her aunt and uncle are poor and already have trouble providing food for their children. After church one day, the village priest asks the villagers if anyone else is willing to give Wise Child a home. Few people are willing to take on an extra responsibility and an extra mouth to feed. At first, the only people who are interested in taking Wise Child are people who want to use her as a little servant or extra worker. Wise Child fears going to live with them because she knows they use their own children as hard workers, feeding them little and beating them for discipline. Then, Juniper speaks up and says that she would like to have Wise Child.
The priest is reluctant to let Juniper take Wise Child, knowing that she isn’t a Christian. Juniper suggests letting Wise Child decide where she wants to live, but Wise Child isn’t sure what to answer. She fears the other families and how they would treat her. Juniper has been kind to her in the past, but Wise Child also fears her because of the stories people tell about her. However, Wise Child’s aunt sees that Juniper would take better care of her than the other families, so she lies and says that her father had previously said that, if anything happened to his mother, he would like Juniper to take care of Wise Child. Nobody contradicts this, so Juniper takes custody of Wise Child.
Wise Child is nervous when she goes to live in Juniper’s house, fearing that she will cast spells on her or that she has dead bodies hidden in her cupboards, like her cousins claimed. When Juniper asks her what’s worrying her, Wise Child surprises herself by admitting that she’s heard all of these stories about her and that she’s afraid. To her surprise, Juniper isn’t angry at her or at the people who have told Wise Child these stories. Instead, she says that she thinks Wise Child is brave for coming to her house even while fearing all of these things, and she reassures her that these stories aren’t true. As Wise Child becomes familiar with her house and with her, she will see that she and her house aren’t as scary as the stories say.
Wise Child finds that this is true. Juniper’s cupboards are full of very ordinary things, and the broom that people say Juniper uses for flying is just an ordinary broom. Juniper also doesn’t beat Wise Child, even when she does things wrong. Juniper promises that she will never beat her.
Wise Child finds that she likes living with Juniper. She had always wanted to go to school, like some of the other children, and Juniper teaches her many things. She teaches her some practical household skills, and she also begins teaching her about herbs and medicines. Juniper also promises to teach Wise Child Latin, although girls in their area don’t usually learn Latin because they’re mostly expected to be wives and mothers and to learn to take care of households. However, Juniper says that all truly learned people learn Latin. When her cousin, Coleman, comes to visit to see if she’s all right with Juniper, Wise Child assures him that she’s doing fine.
Juniper does have secrets, though. Wise Child isn’t sure what Juniper keeps in the attic of her house or what she does there. She begins learning Juniper’s secrets when Juniper gets a visit from an older woman called Yuni, who insists that Wise Child undergo a bizarre ritual. Yuni and Juniper smear some kind of smelly ointment on Wise Child’s skin that gives her a vision of flying on Juniper’s broomstick!
The next day, Wise Child questions Juniper about this ritual and whether the things she saw in her vision really happened. Juniper explains that she and Yuni are both magic-users. Some people might call them witches, but they refer to themselves as “Doran”, based on the word for “door” or a way into something. It has to do with people who see into things in ways that other people don’t. Dorans “live in the rhythm” of life, nature, and the changing seasons. Wise Child’s vision means that she has the ability to use magic and become a Doran as well.
As Wise Child begins to understand Juniper’s kind of magic, it awakens memories of her mother in her mind. Wise’s Child’s mother used to beat her and eventually abandoned her, leaving Wise Child with her grandmother while she ran away with another man. Wise Child feels hurt that her mother abandoned her instead of taking her along, wherever she went. However, she also begins to remember things her mother had and things she used to do that seemed strange. Wise Child asks Juniper if her mother was also a Doran, but she says no. Maeve practices magic, but it’s a very different kind of magic.
Wise Child comes to understand what Juniper means when Maeve returns and uses her magic to persuade Wise Child to come live with her for a while. She promises Wise Child a life of ease and luxury with no difficult or boring lessons, but when Wise Child sees what Maeve does and how she takes advantage of other people, she comes to appreciate Juniper’s way of life and lessons more. Maeve has even taken advantage of and hurt Wise Child and her father.
Gradually, Wise Child begins to learn the secrets of her own family’s past, the long rivalry between Juniper and Maeve, and other secrets about the land they live in, the things people who have lived there believed, and the things people have done for power and to control other people or the forces of nature. Wise Child feels conflicted between her beliefs in Christianity and the new knowledge that she’s been gaining about the Dorans. She doesn’t want to have to choose between them, although Juniper says that there’s no need. Juniper says that Christianity and the beliefs of the Dorans don’t really conflict with each other, and she also believes in Jesus. However, she admits that not everybody sees it that way. The village priest in particular is suspicious of Juniper and thinks that Juniper has corrupted Wise Child.
During a particularly bad winter, the priest blames Juniper for bringing on the famine and sickness. He brings in an inquisitor to question Wise Child and Juniper, and Wise Child fears what he and the people of the village will do to them. Will they find a way to escape, and if so, where will they go where they can be safe?
The book is available to borrow and read for free online through Internet Archive. It is the first book in a series about the Dorans, although the second book, Juniper, is a prequel to this one, and it focuses on Juniper’s early life.
My Reaction
I remember reading this book in my early teens, but there were many things about the lore it draws on that I didn’t understand back then. For me, it was just an interesting fantasy book. The story draws on witchcraft lore, but it’s not entirely historically accurate. To begin with, the term “doran” to describe witches or magic users is unique to this book and its series. It’s not an historical term.
The time period of the story is never explicitly defined, although it’s set in a small village in Scotland. I think, when I was younger, I took it to be sort of Medieval, and I think that’s probably what the author intended, but if so, there are various anachronisms for the Middle Ages. For example, Wise Child describes Juniper as giving her a kind of tea, but tea didn’t arrive in the British Isles until the 1600s and didn’t really become popular until the 1700s, so Wise Child shouldn’t have had that concept. Because the story’s time period isn’t really defined, I considered that the story could be as late as the 17th or 18th centuries, except that the village is clearly Catholic, with a priest and a monk serving as the inquisitor at the end of the story. There are no mentions of Protestants, and there should be if the story was set in the 16th or 17th century.
To be fair, Medieval people did make hot tea-like drinks of herbs or grains infused with water, but I don’t think they referred to these drinks as being “tea” because they weren’t familiar with the concept of “tea” then. In modern times, we refer to “tea” to mean a variety of infused drinks, but “tea” itself is a specific plant, the one used for black teas and green teas. Herbal teas don’t contain this plant, so they’re technically tea-like, not actually “tea.” I know it’s a technicality, but it’s the kind of thing I notice now that went past me when I was younger. When Medieval people made infused drinks, they didn’t have the tea plant in them, and they called them “waters”, not “teas”, like barley water or sage water.
Returning to the issue of whether or not this is pre-Reformation times or not, while the story seems to be set in pre-Reformation times, the type of witchcraft trial depicted at the end of the story is more in keeping with Reformation and post-Reformation Scotland than Medieval Scotland. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 made witchcraft illegal and led to a period of witchcraft trials that lasted until 1736. This is really the period of intense persecution of supposed witches, not the Middle Ages. Prior to the Witchcraft Act, it was more common for people to skeptically dismiss “witches” as being merely superstitious, delusional, or frauds rather than staging witch hunts and witch trials.
The type of witchcraft lore that the story uses is also somewhat anachronistic based largely around Wiccan lore and feminist sensibilities that had their basis in the 20th century rather than the type of herbal remedy healing that would have been found in the Middle Ages. (This documentary of the life of Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, is fascinating and explains some of the background lore.) Juniper has a sense that there’s a connection between psychology and emotional health and physical health that’s more modern than Medieval, and her notions of what to teach Wise Child wouldn’t have just been unusual as concepts to teach a girl vs. a boy but also generally unusual for anyone of their time and location, a small village where people primarily make their living in farming.
She is correct that, to be truly considered a learned person in the Middle Ages, Latin would be expected, but this is the reason why truly literate people were considered so rare during that time. It wasn’t that nobody knew how to read during this period, but books were highly uncommon, being expensively and painstakingly produced by hand. More people could read and write in a vernacular way during the Middle Ages (spelling also not standardized during this period) than most people suppose, using basic writing for utilitarian purposes like keeping business accounts or sending occasional personal messages, but only clerical scholars and those who trained with them knew Latin. What I’m saying is that what Juniper teaches Wise Child wouldn’t have been shocking in Medieval Scotland for being inappropriate for girls and ruining them for being wives and mothers, as portrayed in the story, so much as it should have been shocking as a thing that a woman who lives as a simple folk healer in a small farming community shouldn’t have known in the first place to teach anybody. The prequel book, Juniper, explains that there’s far more to Juniper’s past than most of the characters in this book know and that she was far better educated than most people of her time because she came from a royal family.
The part about the psychedelic ointment that produces the illusion of flying is based on witchcraft lore, and there is a scene in the book that involves the sacrifice of a willing deer that is eaten after the ritual is based around concepts of pre-Christian rituals in the British Isles. Most of the details we have of pre-Christians rituals in the British Isles comes from Roman writings, and details are sometimes questioned. I had forgotten about that part of the story since I read the book the first time, and I didn’t like it the second time around. Even if the animal seemed willing to be sacrificed and was eaten afterward, making it a public meal and not just a wasteful sacrifice, it was still a disturbing scene.
