Forest as a Symbol in Fairy Tales

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Forests have traditionally had a strong association with the unconsciousness and serve as places for many fairy tale stories and romance legends of the world such as those about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Forests have a special magic power and magical people live in them whether they are Snow White, Goldilocks, Robin Hood or the characters from T.H. White's The Once And Future King.

Although forest symbolism is complex, J.E. Cirlot notes that it is connected "at all levels with the symbolism of the female principle or of the Great Mother." He says:

"The forest is the place where vegetable life thrives and luxuriates, free from any control or cultivation. And since its foilage obscures the light of the sun, it is therefore regarded as opposed to the sun's power and as a symbol of the earth... Since the female principle is identified with the unconsciousness in Man, it follows that the forest is also a symbol of the unconsciousness. It is for this reason that Jung maintains that the sylvan terrors that figure so prominently in children's tales symbolize the perilous aspects of the unconsciousness, that is, its tendency to devour or obscure reason."

Significantly, forests were among the first places in nature to be dedicated to the cult of the gods and places where offerings were suspended from trees.

The forest is the realm of the psyche and a place of testing and initiation, of unknown perils and darkness. J.C. Cooper in An Illustrated Encyclopaedia Of Traditional Symbols notes that:

"Entering the Dark Forest or the Enchanted Forest is a threshold symbol; the soul entering the perils of the unknown; the realm of death; the secrets of nature, or the spiritual world which man must penetrate to find the meaning."

Cooper observes that "Retreat into the forest is symbolic death before initiatory rebirth."

In the book The Uses Of Enchantment: The Meaning And Importance of Fairy Tales, Bruno Bettelheim emphasizes the importance of the forest in fairy tales. He notes the Brothers Grimm's tale "The Two Brothers" where two brothers went into the forest, took counsel with each other and came to an agreement. The forest where they go, notes Bettelheim, "symbolizes the place in which inner darkness is confronted and worked through; where uncertainty is resolved about who one is; and where one begins to understand who one wants to be." Bettelheim elaborates on this noting:

"Since ancient times the near impenetrable forest in which we get lost has symbolized the dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious. If we have lost the framework which gave structure to our past life and must now find our way to become ourselves, and have entered this wilderness with an as yet undeveloped personality, when we succeed in finding our way out we shall emerge with a much more highly developed humanity."

It is this ancient image, Bettelheim notes, that Dante evokes at the beginning of The Divine Comedy when he says "In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost." It is in this dark wood that he also finds a "magic" helper, Virgil, who offers guidance on the trip which leads first through hell, then purgatory and then into heaven.
He remarks that forest symbolism has represented "an outlying realm of opacity which has allowed that civilization to estrange itself, enchant itself, terrify itself...in short to project into the forests shadows its secrets and innermost anxieties." This projection of Western civilization's innermost anxieties was the subject of the oldest literary work in history, the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. The story concerns the battle between the hero Gilgamesh and a forest. The first antagonist of Gilgamesh is the forest. The hero's major exploit figures as his long journey from Uruk to the Cedar Mountain to stay the forest's guardian Huwawa.
The darkness of forests have stood in opposition to the light of religious divinity which comes from above. One of the more far-ranging speculations of Harrison concerns this point. He notes that "Where divinity has been identified with the sky, or with the eternal geometry of the stars, or with the cosmic infinity, or with 'heaven,' the forests became monstrous, for they hide the prospect of god."