Enchanted Forest - Medieval Romance

Medieval Romance

The figure of an enchanted forest was taken up into chivalric romances; the knight-errant would wander in a trackless forest in search of adventure. As in the fairy tales, he could easily find marvels that would be disbelieved closer to home. John Milton wrote in Paradise Regained (Bk ii. 359) of

Fairy damsels met in forest wide
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,

and such ladies could be not only magical aid to the knight, but ladies for courtly love. Huon of Bordeaux met Oberon the king of elves in the forest. Guillaume de Palerme hid there with the princess he loved, and found a werewolf who would aid him. In Valentine and Orson, the Queen is sent into exile and so forced to give birth in the woods; one child, taken by a bear, turns to a wild man of the woods, who later aids Valentine, his long-lost brother. In the "Dolopathos" variant of the Swan Children, a lord finds a mysterious woman – clearly a swan maiden or fairy – in an enchanted forest and marries her. Genevieve of Brabant, having rebuffed a would-be lover and found herself accused of adultery by him, escaped to the forest.

This forest could easily bewilder the knights. Despite many references to its pathlessness, the forest repeatedly confronts knights with forks and crossroads, of a labyrinthine complexity. The significance of their encounters is often explained to the knights – particularly those searching for the Holy Grail – by hermits acting as wise old men – or women. Still, despite their perils and chances of error, such forests are places where the knights may become worthy and find the object of their quest; one romance has a maiden urging Sir Lancelot on his quest for the Holy Grail, "which quickens with life and greenness like the forest."

Dante Alighieri used this image in the opening of The Divine Comedy, where he depicted his state as allegorically being lost in a dark wood.

Into the Renaissance, both Orlando Furioso and The Faerie Queene had knight-errants who traveled in the woods.

While these works were being written, expanding geographical knowledge, and the decrease of woodland for farmland, meant the decrease of forests that could be presumed magical. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare wrote of a forest that was enchanted specifically by the presence of Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen; like many forests in Shakespeare's works, it becomes a place of metamorphosis and resolution. Others of his plays, such as As You Like It, take place in a forest, which contains no enchantments but acts much as the forest of folklore.