Long before Dante found himself lost in a dark wood, forests have been put to metaphorical use by storytellers. They are perhaps the “symbol of symbolism”, as Robert Pogue Harrison has it in his aptly titled book Forests: The Shadow of Civilisation. “Why,” he asks, “should forests haunt the mind like some mystical dream or nightmare that every now and then spreads its long, prehistorical shadows over the ordinary clarity of things modern?”
The forest always lies beyond the familiar, ordered world, and we cross a psychological boundary as we step beneath the trees. There we might, like Dante, lose the path. Enchantment awaits, but so does danger. I’ve chosen 10 fictional forests that might not loom as large on our shelves as, say, Tolkien’s Mirkwood or Shakespeare’s Arden, but which excel in their roles as metaphors. The characters who enter them cannot avoid fateful encounters: with the subconscious, the self, the dark depths of human desire. All emerge changed, for better or worse.
