![]() ![]() Is our fascination and fear of the forest linked to something truly primal, a remnant from humanity’s earliest days, when we lived closer to nature, and were more vulnerable to it? Does its prominence and permanence in our mythology tell us something about where these stories come from in the first place? From Mirkwood and Lothlorien in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, to the ancient, spirit-haunted forest in Hayao Myazaki’s Princess Mononoke, to the forests walked by Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, the resonance of forests in our stories as places both sublime and infernal crosses cultural and temporal boundaries. Yet they also represent nature untamed, a landscape ungoverned by human husbandry, a labyrinth into the darker aspect of our own subconscious desires and intents, the animal buried by centuries of civilisation. Full of life and growth, they are generative, symbolic of growth and fertility. ![]() ![]() Forests are naturally places of mystery and wonder. ![]()
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