Enchanted Forest - Modern Fantasy

Modern Fantasy

The use of enchanted forests shaded into modern fantasy with no distinct breaking point, stemming from the very earliest fantasies. In George MacDonald's Phantastes, the hero finds himself in a wood as dark and tangled as Dante's, una selva obscura that blots out sunlight and is utterly still, without any beasts or birdsong. The more inviting but no less enchanted forest in The Golden Key borders Fairyland and draws the hero to find the title key at the end of the rainbow. In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum depicted the wild and dangerous parts of Oz as being forested, and indeed, inhabited with animated trees with human-like traits, a common feature in children's literature.

J.R.R. Tolkien made use of forests as representing enchantment and the ancientness of the world: Mirkwood, Fangorn forest, and the Old Forest. He also made use of folklore about trees, such as the willow, believed to uproot themselves and stalk travelers, in Old Man Willow. His elves are strongly associated with forests, especially Mirkwood and Lothlórien. Still more, Tom Bombadil is a genius loci of the Old Forest, the wooded land about the Shire, and the ents acts as the forest come to life.

Following him, the forest is often a magical place in modern fantasy. It continues to be a place unknown to the characters, where strange dangers lurk. It is particularly close to folklore in fairytale fantasy, featuring in such works as James Thurber's The White Deer and The 13 Clocks. It features in other fantasies as well. For instance, in the contemporary fantasy Harry Potter books, the forest near Hogwarts is forbidden because of its magical nature. The home of unicorns, centaurs, and giant spiders, it continues the tradition of the forest as a place of wild things and danger. In Suzanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the Raven King's capital city of Newcastle in Northern England was surrounded by four magical wood, with names like Petty Egypt, and St. Sirlow's Blessing. These forests were supposedly enchanted by the Raven King himself to defend his city. They could move around, and supposedly devoured people approaching the city with the intent of bringing harm to it. Clarke brings the notion of magical places to life by contrasting this historical account within the story itself, to the actual depictions of magical woods within the story, where the trees themselves can be regarded as friend or foe, and have alliances formed with magicians. In My Neighbor Totoro, the forest home of the Totoros is an idyllic place where no harm will come to the heroines of the movies. In contrast, in the Touhou Project series by ZUN, the Forest of Magic is an extremely dangerous place crawling with Youkai.

The forest is often filled with magical animals, plants, maybe even magical rocks and creeks. Often there will be elves, dwarfs, and other mythical creatures that may or may not have been made up by the author on the spot, and trees that talk or with branches that will push people off their horses, and thorny bushes which will open to let people in but close and leave people stuck inside, and other plants that move, or turn into animals at night, or the like. Perhaps there will even be creeks which will turn unwary travelers into frogs if drunk from, and maybe sorcerers live somewhere in the depths of the forest.