Forests can be eerie places. Views are obscured by trunks and branches, making distances hard to judge; sounds can be muffled or unnervingly close. Walk just a few paces in, and broad daylight is replaced by dusk. For the disoriented visitor, the uncanny is all too easily imagined. As Boria Sax puts it in Enchanted Forests: ‘in folklore, fairy tales, psychology and alchemy, the forest is a point of convergence for mind and matter, life and death, dream and reality, time and eternity, the natural and spirit worlds’. It is the forest’s slippery, in-between quality that sustains its appeal for writers and dreamers.
At the heart of Sax’s wide-ranging and erudite book is a single question: what does the forest mean to us? His answers send him flying across cultures and continents, from Little Red Riding Hood and the Epic of Gilgamesh to Dante’s selva oscura, via Walt Disney, the ruins of former civilisations and much else besides. He begins, however, in a patch of woodland in New York State that had been bought by his Jewish grandparents after they emigrated from Russia in 1914. Having long been enchanted by the wood where he played as a boy, Sax inherited it in 1985; ever since, it has not only inspired his research but also involved him in the practicalities of woodland conservation. The book’s focus on literary culture and folklore is enriched by the author’s hands-on knowledge and sense of personal responsibility for an arboreal eco- system – a considerable challenge in an era of rapid and unpredictable climate change. On a cultural level the forest may act, as Sax suggests, as a green-tinted mirror reflecting our fears and desires back at us, but an equally important strand of the book is woodland’s own mysterious life – and its vulnerability.
Sax’s chapters tackle huge, meaty themes – spirituality, conquest, death, dreams, politics – and in his discussions he makes bold leaps between cultures in search of echoes and archetypes. He links the Green Knight who bursts into King Arthur’s court in the 14th-century Gawain story, for instance, not only to the enigmatic Green Man in Christian art but also, more unusually, to Al-Khadr in ancient Islamic tradition. His chapter ‘Mythic Beings of the Forest’ lines up a global gallery of terrifying monsters that ‘give a tangible form to the amorphous fears that the forest can inspire’. They range from the Kenyan Nandi bear that scoops out and eats the brains of passing humans and the Native American Wendigo, a cannibal of barely comprehensible size, to the giant spiders and goblins thought to inhabit the forests of Japan. The form of each fiend is certainly illuminating about the particular culture that conjured it up; even so, I might take the long way round, just in case.
The illustrations are lavish and support the text with an impressively eclectic range of imagery from oil paintings and manuscript illuminations to popular prints. Sax, however, is not always the most acute guide to visual art. In discussing Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s 1767 painting The Swing in a section on eroticism in the Rococo forest, for instance, he remarks that the young man hiding in the undergrowth is enjoying a glimpse of his girlfriend’s bare leg, whereas, to judge from his viewpoint, he is being vouchsafed rather more than that.
Among the most thought-provoking and lyrical passages of Enchanted Forests are those in which the author ponders time and the tricks such settings play with it; ‘let us remember’, he writes, ‘that a river, especially in a forest, never runs entirely straight.’ The forest also, he suggests, operates like a vast archive, storing up not only carbon dioxide but also our shared sense of history and culture – the things that make us who we are. An eloquent advocate for forests as places to which we entrust our stories, Sax gives us yet more reasons to value and preserve them.
A version of this article also appeared in the January 2024 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
