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.
Read more about this topic: Sacred Groves
Famous quotes containing the words sacred, groves, trees and/or fiction:
“For them it’s out-of-date and outmoded to perform miracles; teaching the people is too like hard work, interpreting the holy scriptures is for schoolmen and praying is a waste of time; to shed tears is weak and womanish, to be needy is degrading; to suffer defeat is a disgrace and hardly fitting for one who scarcely permits the greatest of kings to kiss the toes of his sacred feet; and finally, death is an unattractive prospect, and dying on a cross would be an ignominious end.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“The word unto the prophet spoken
Was writ on tables yet unbroken;
The word by seers or sibyls told,
In groves of oak, or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today—but the core of science fiction, its essence ... has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all.”
—Isaac Asimov (1920–1992)