Enter These Enchanted Woods

Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
Nothing harms beneath the leaves
More than waves a swimmer cleaves.
Toss your heart up with the lark,
Foot at peace with mouse and worm,
Fair you fare.
Only at a dread of dark
Quaver, and they quit their form:
Thousand eyeballs under hoods
Have you by the hair.
Enter these enchanted woods,
You who dare.
~ George Meredith

I’ve always loved stories about enchanted forests. There’s something about those wild places under the canopy that stirs the imagination. The air feels different, the sounds more muffled and also more intense, rain falling through a chorus of leaves is a completely different experience from rain falling out in the open.

Forests, enchanted or not, feel alive and seem to keep secrets.

Although I’m a big fan of both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, my favourite scene in either story is when Bilbo and the dwarves get lost in the forest of Mirkwood. In the dark and terror of the wood, they suddenly, like a miracle, see lights and hear the sounds of laugher and smell cooking food.

They follow the lights and the sounds and the smells.

The promise is there, of a magical otherworld that exists secretly beneath the trees. And it is beautiful and warm and wondrous in a way that this dreary world could never be. It is salvation.

But then it all vanishes.

Benighted travellers now lose their way
Whom Will-of-the-wisp bewitches
About and about he leads them astray
Through bogs, through hedges and ditches.
~ Sir William Davenant

Then the lights return in a different part of the wood. This happens over and over again, the lights and music and feasting appear, drawing in Bilbo and the dwarves, and then disappear only to reappear again in another part of the forest. It is as though the elves (the beings behind those lights) are simply going about their business, going quiet because they are aware of intruders like children whispering past their bedtimes going quiet when they hear the adults stir in the other room.

But then the sinister part, the sense that Bilbo and the dwarves are being lured and lost on purpose, that the pleasant lights and sounds are all just an illusion, a trap waiting to snap.

Of course in the end, we discover there’s a whole kingdom hidden beneath the trees in Mirkwood, one that doesn’t take too kindly to outsider intrusion.

The suggestion is that these two versions of the enchanted forest exist simultaneously. There is a wondrous otherworld that is warm and beautiful and full of magic, and there is a world of terror, the consequences of crossing boundaries we were never meant to cross.

Maybe the forbidden nature of these places is part of their lure. It’s the same pull that runs through so many old tales. The locked door in the castle that Bluebeard’s bride is told never to open. The one chamber in a fairy palace that must remain closed. The path in the wood that everyone warns you not to take. The very prohibition makes the desire burn hotter.

But the stories are clear. There is always a reason we are being kept out. The forbidden door conceals horror. The wrong path leads into terror and darkness. The spirit of the forest, Artemis and her nymphs and dryads, demand their privacy. To cross the boundary is to pay the price, often one far greater than we can imagine.

But this isn’t just about old tales. Even today there are plenty of stories of people vanishing without trace in the woods. I’m thinking of the “Missing 411” cases: children found miles from where they disappeared, across mountains and rivers they couldn’t possibly have crossed on their own. Hikers who leave no footprints, no trail, as if the trees themselves swallowed them up. Sometimes they are found, dazed, with no memory of where they’ve been. Sometimes they are never found at all.

These aren’t fairy tales written down hundreds of years ago. They’re police reports, search-and-rescue accounts, fragments of testimony from our own world.

So what’s going on out there in the forest? A kingdom of light and music, hiding just out of reach? Or something else entirely, ancient and indifferent, that has always been there and always will be? A boundary, a portal maybe, to another place operating with a different set of rules?

Attempting to answer that question is part of the reason I wrote my novel, but as much as I can offer a guess in the form of fiction, the truth is that the forest keeps its secrets.

And sometimes, it would seem, it keeps us too.

This month’s video features nine allegedly true encounters from people who believe they encountered a fairy of forest or tree.

🧚📗 Featured Artist

This month’s featured artist is Nellie Peters and her book Repaying the Wrongs. This book is a magical retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, one of the weirdest of the fairy tales.

A noblewoman longing for freedom. A soldier drowning in misfortune. And a tragedy that could destroy the kingdom.

Check it out here.

Until next time,

Your Scary Fairy Godmother