So much more than just trees and dappled light

‘Lions, tigers and bears, oh my!’

- Judy Garland (The Wizard of Oz, 1939)

The forest has been a prominent and recurring theme in fairytale literature since the dawn of recorded history and not as a coincidence. The woods are laden with symbolic meaning that reach back to Pre-Christian periods.  

However, the bulk of the fairytales to which today’s modern audience responds, has its literary origin in the Middle Ages. In this context, a time when northern and western Europe were rich landscapes of woodland, the woods came to represent the edge of civilization and beginning of the unknown. As the unordered place of society’s outcasts, the dangers were real and sprouted from both mankind and the natural world. Rogues and bandits took up residence in forests and preyed on unsuspecting travellers. It also remains a place in which a natural food chain was present. Therefore, predators, like wolves, were expected.

As a place of the unknown, it is also a place of challenges and trepidation. As such, the forest can be viewed as a place of nourishment, testing and initiation. Hansel and Gretel tells the tale of two children who find nourishment in the form of a house of candy deep in the woods, albeit one that belongs to a cannibalistic witch. It is also in the woods that Snow White finds refuge with the seven dwarves. Testing and initiation takes the form of the witch in Hansel and Gretel and they enter into a state of independence and greater worldly wisdom, having defeated the antagonist in their tale. The characters of fairytales usually benefit from their interactions with the characters in the forest, whether by learning a lesson or receiving help.

So why a forest? It is a place of adventure where the familiar is left behind along with the comfort attached to it. The forest is the realm of challenges and unpredictability. The woods are ungoverned by the laws of man and are the ideal setting for the unimaginable to occur. These landscapes are metaphors for the shadows of the child’s psyche. In an unconstrained setting, individual exploration and self-awareness is encouraged, according to psychologists. Fairytales do, however, somewhat direct this journey towards the light.

Furthermore, most fairytale characters that find themselves wandering into the depths of forest have come to do so due to their being abandoned or being cast out – another recurring theme in fairytales. They themselves become outcasts. Snow White is forced to take to the woods after being cast out by her stepmother. Hansel and Gretel, after being rejected by their parents in favour of their own nourishment, are abandoned in the woods.

The woods are used in fairytales as a stage of inevitable growth for an evolving protagonist. What the tales’ heroes and heroines encounter while journeying through unknown territory is vastly removed from that which they are accustomed to outside of or bordering the forests – what civilization offered. However, these are experiences and discoveries that are necessary for growth and are inevitable as it is civilization (or members thereof) that has cast them out.