This is an immensely rich cultural history of woodlands and covers a huge range of subjects, which makes it constantly fascinating and stimulating. Whether writing about folklore, cathedrals, contemporary environmental threats, art history or ever-changing, but often recurring, human attitudes to wilderness, Sax is both enlightening and a provoker of serious reflection.
Although full of pictures, this is no coffee table book, as every picture illustrates an argument or point of view and illuminates the text. For example, the 1860 map of Africa which has a huge blank south of the Sahara, or the famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich,’ Chasseur in the Forest’, which has a lone human figure on the edge of a looming forest.
A theme that comes to the fore over and over again, is how humanity has always oscillated between seeing forests as places of danger and chaos, or sanctuary and revelation, usually in a way which has been contradictory and was already apparent in the four-thousand-year-old Epic of Gilgamesh. We are reminded that Virgil wrote that the first Romans were birthed by trees very close to the time when Tacitus was mythologising German forests as impenetrable places of primitivity and peril. And that English landscape designers, such as Repton and Brown were simultaneously taming and exalting wildness, to suit the aesthetic tastes of the upper classes. Today, in Western Europe and North America forests are seen as places of adventure and sources of therapy.
The depth and range of this book can’t be exaggerated. Whether concerning the context, meaning and influence of Dante’s conception of the dark wood, the disturbing origins of the story of Sleeping Beauty, the colonialist shaping of the Tarzan stories, or the source of the story of Bambi and the influence on our impression of woodland created by Walt Disney.
Enchanted Forests is full of insights and for me has produced many ‘wow’ moments, such as that the Lebanese Cedar forests still survive and still have bears and how the word jungle became loaded with colonialist meaning. Sax provides excellent notes and further reading, and a particularly useful timeline to accompany his text. Even the ideas in the book which I questioned simply added to the urge to dig deeper and think more. I will be treasuring this book and reading it again. The past and future of forests being such a vital part of our cultural and actual landscape, this has felt like an urgent read, in the light of the words Sax quotes, which have been attributed to Chateaubriand.
‘ The forests precede human beings and deserts follow them.’
- Enchanted Forests by Boria Sax is published by Reaktion Books (£15.99). To order a copy go to reaktionbooks.co.uk
Ian Tattum
Ian Tattum is a priest in the Church of England who writes occasional pieces about the people who shaped the history of science and human and animal travel-real and fictional.
