All great artworks—whether cinematic or literary—have their own wild forest. All great cultures communed with nature. Its primitive image lies dormant in the collective memory, instilled in fables and fairy tales.
Brokilon Forest in The Witcher. The Forbidden Forest in Harry Potter. Mirkwood in The Hobbit—previously known as Greenwood the Great and, after the defeat of Sauron, the Wood of Greenleaves. All these mythical and literary forests share the features of the real primeval, natural forests that we can learn about from forest biology and ecology. The same goes for Pandora’s thickets in the film Avatar, Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, and the fairy-tale forest of Narnia. The intuitions of talented fantasy and science fiction authors reveal the fundamentals of scientific definitions. They are a lesson in natural history.
The forests of literature and film present trees of great size and unusual shape, just like a real primeval forest. The viewer or reader can be certain that the ancients of Mirkwood were not planted by human hand (after all, Treebeard of Fangorn had known those trees “from nut and acorn”). So the forests from the stories of Tolkien, Rowling, and Sapkowski have been around for centuries. They are full of dying, dead, or fallen trees which give shelter but sometimes hinder the heroes’ journeys. There is no shortage of hollows, broken branches, or holes.
