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:
“Whenever a mind is simple and receives an old wisdom, old things pass away,—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it,—one as much as another.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then. Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round with horse-sheds for.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It was when the trees were leafless first in November
And their blackness became apparent, that one first
Knew the eccentric to be the base of design.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“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)