Art - Ned Denny is bewitched by the pagan cruelty behind Arthur Rackham's illustrations

Arthur Rackham used to like taking his nephew for walks in Kensington Gardens and making him see the forms of animals and birds in the gnarled trunks of trees. He'd pretend to spot miniature doors at their bases ("the entrance to Fairyland") and said that little men lived under the roots and churned butter from sap. All of which paints a slightly more benign image of the illustrator whose name always seemed to carry associations of torture ("rack 'em") and piracy (John Rackham, hanged in Jamaica in 1720, was supposedly an ancestor). As a child, I'd always assumed that the man who illustrated Grimm's Fairy Tales would be as mean and wizened as one of his pictures. But hear this: Rackham also told his nephew that if he ever damaged a tree he'd have his navel nailed to the trunk and be wound about it until his guts came out. An obsession with fairies and all things diaphanous was common among late-Victorian illustrators, but it is this element of almost pagan cruelty that makes Rackham more than just a period piece. Once you've had one of his long-fingered trees rifling through your dreams, he's lodged in your head for good.

And it is those trees that people seem to remember. Trees whose branches are arms and whose roots are clawed feet, whose heads sprout a bristling crown of twigs. Trees with knots that might be eyes and gashes that seem to leer, trees that dance and point and gesticulate and generally mock the absurd pretensions of men. Even those that are less obviously ghoulish are still fearsome - black dragon-growths pockmarked with woody vortices, the branches seeming to burst from a dark and unspeakable density. These predatory, malevolent presences form a weird subtext to almost all of the books Rackham illustrated, from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Aesop's Fables and Mother Goose. But there was no call for them to be there, no explicit source in the texts. A quick glance at George Cruikshank's illustrations for the 1823 edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales shows the extent of Rackham's originality. Cruikshank has a lighter, wittier touch, but his trees are never more than a feathery backdrop, the sober, 18th-century Nature. Rackham's, by contrast, are fully individualised creatures that constantly threaten to disrupt the narrative. Drawn with a savage clarity, they aren't so much trees as tree-spirits.

Rackham's trees got me thinking about animism, that oldest and sanest of religions. In its purest form, and at the risk of sounding glib, animism holds simply that everything is alive and should be accorded proper reverence. It isn't so much a belief in the modern sense of the word as a visceral, fearful response to a world that has not yet been explained into oblivion. The tree cult that was widespread in Europe until at least Roman times was essentially animist in nature. Reading up on tree-worship in Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, I found that the punishment with which Rackham scared his nephew was no invention but an ancient Germanic law. Rackham the Germanophile would have encountered it in his studies. Similarly, his leering trees shouldn't be seen as the whimsies of an eccentric but as a peculiarly late flowering of animist thought. The dominant ideology of his day held that the world was both intelligible and perfectible, and yet when we look at Rackham's drawing of Hermia entering a wood ("Never so weary, never so in woe", 1908), we feel nothing but a deep foreboding. The trees are poised to crush her.

The opposition set up in this picture - between Hermia's delicate face and the dark frenzy of the trees - is one that recurs in various forms throughout Rackham's work. The faces of his fairies, elves and wide-eyed children tend to have a sickly, doomed innocence, whether confronting a pitiless-seeming forest or, as in Mother Goose (1904), the grotesque countenance of an old crone. But the archetypal Rackham image is surely the figure caught in thorns, tearing his clothes to shreds as he struggles to free himself. In "East Coker", T S Eliot speaks of being "in a dark wood, in a bramble . . . where is no secure foothold,/And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,/Risking enchantment". And this is where Rackham takes us with drawings such as the extraordinary Soldiers Caught in Brambles (1907), into a sharp and inescapable thicket. It would have been good to see a lot more of these pen-and-ink works, which seem to me to clarify and strengthen his strange genius. The curators of this exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery have tried to make Rackham respectable by including a number of his unremarkable watercolours, but at the cost of making him appear a far milder artist that he really is.

"Arthur Rackham" is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 (020 8693 5254) until 2 March

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