“Finns have the power of darkness, Finns are wizards”

This was the cry of the Viking warriors who feared nothing… nothing but the power of the Finns in their dark forests. (source)

I have been doing a lot of thinking about fantasy tropes and one thing came to mind. The Dark Forest. Consider any medieval fantasy, and maybe some urban ones, the forest is one trope you can always expect to find. Having read a little bit about this and myself being an opinionated sort of fellow have decided we need another article on this. Hopefully though I may bring a quite different perspective to it.

So what is the underlying reason a forest shows up so many times in Fantasy?

In Lord of the Rings, you have Fangorn, Mirkwood, Lothlorien, The Old Forest. So, the dark woods, in part, represents the unknown to the hero or adventurer. Think about a real life forest. There is inherent danger there. If you get lost, and don’t know what you are doing, nature will kick your rear. No bow-wielding Ranger wearing a hooded cloak will show up to save you. They’ll find you laid up against some tree, dead as a door nail. It represents a place where magic could happen. As a kid growing up in the backwoods of East Texas my cousin and I roamed all over the woods. To this day, I can walk into the woods and get an excited knot in my stomach. I don’t know what’s out there. What will I see today? A deer? A wolf?

A shadow of movement ahead

I remember back in 2013 I was training for the Run For Your Lives Zombie Run and would run down the pipeline easement beside my house, then turn West to come up through the woods behind my grandfather’s old house. There is one area where it’s downhill and shady. I’d be more alert there every time. And on one of those runs, I came across a bobcat. It was dusk and I was finishing my run and there was a shadow of movement ahead of me. She stopped and looked my direction. I stopped, stood stock-still and gave her the right of way. Bobcats aren’t huge but they can be formidable. I wouldn’t want one to get after me. It was an awesome experience.

The forest represents the untamed

It’s wild, beyond our control. We crave adventure, the forest calls to us, and it whispers come tame me, but we never can. Where else can you hear the lament of the wind on a gray winter’s day than through the dead leaves of the oak and still-green needles of the pines? That my friends is a beautiful song. We seek solace in such places and take refuge from the hustle and bustle of the big city. Why is hiking so popular? Because no matter who you are, the forest calls you. It is the last bastion of adventuring into the unknown, fuel for our imagination, and represents something primeval.

You walk into the forest and you see a dark shadowed hole in the ground. It gives you pause. What caused that? Did something dig that? Our thoughts are freed at what we might expect. We as fantasy readers have been programmed to expect Elves in the woods and Dwarves under the mountains. We have an expectation of the forest.

We want there to be some mystery left in the world

The dark forest gives us that something mysterious. It gives us a sense of foreboding. If we take that step, and walk into that forest, we prove that we are brave. We overcome some fear we have. See? The water is fine, come on in! Never mind that dragon, who just ate…a local villager…that I tied to a tree…in the dark forest!

What are your thoughts? Does the dark forest hold that sense of the untamed, unknown for you? Let me know below, I would love to hear from you.