Sacred Woods, Groves and Trees in Fiction
J. R. R. Tolkien included many magical trees and woods in his fictional writings which he based on English and Norse mythology. George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire features "weirwoods", a fictional tree species that is worshipped, particularly ancient groves holding extra significance. In The Legend of Zelda series there is a location called the Sacred Grove in Hyrule, usually depicted as a gateway to the Temple of Time and thus the Sacred Realm, one of the most important locations in the series' backstory.
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Famous quotes containing the words sacred, groves, trees and/or fiction:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise ... that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It’s forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there’s a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)