Wilderness is not so much an ecological condition as a cultural invention. It is defined by an absence of human modification--though whether this connotes an appealing purity or appalling desolation depends, essentially, on when you're living. The term has been applied to a wide variety of landscapes, often places with a deep legacy of human influence not apparent to naive travelers, like the Americas. For our purposes, wilderness is an ancient, alien, inhospitable landscape with a deep reserve of mystery.
Cultural relationships with wilderness have undergone some tremendous changes over the last few hundred years, and fantasy has reacted to and occasionally played a part in that evolution. If you're unfamiliar with the topic and are looking for some background information, my conception of wilderness comes from Bill Cronon's seminal essay, The Trouble with Wilderness. Cronon is a brilliantly readable and insightful author, and the essay is well worth the read if you're at all interested in the topic.
The city-wilderness dichotomy in fantasy can be traced back to some of the oldest recorded mythology, when Gilgamesh and Enkidu enter the divine Cedar Forest to kill the monstrous forest spirit Humbaba. This story already holds many of the iconic elements of the fantasy story - aristocratic men journey into an enchanted wilderness to kill its chimeric monster avatar.
art by Jason Bennett
Christian formulations gave the wilderness a new spiritual spin. It is the setting for Exodus, the 40 year test of faith, and the scene of Christ's Temptation by the Devil. Hermits, saints, and mystics undertook wilderness trials that self-consciously imitated the Temptation. Harsh landscapes offered great tests of faith, but also the possibility of greater spiritual attainment. Demons made mountaintops their homes, but if they were conquered, one was unusually close to Heaven. Depictions of the Temptation also continue the chimera motif, giving the Devil goat horns or chicken legs to communicate his unholy nature.
Art by Simon Bening
Chivalric Romances are more or less explicitly modeled on these Biblical stories. Knights are judged for their strength and skill in battle, of course, but their most important attribute is their purity. The trials haunting the mysterious forests of Arthurian legends are more likely to threaten a knight's virtue through temptation and trickery than to attack his body directly.
The monsters, witches, and fairies haunting the forest weren't its only fictional flavor, however. European forests were simply not the dense, unfamiliar, and wild places these stories often depicted. Forests were used intensively for charcoal, firewood, animal forage, and other wood products. They were coppiced, pollarded, and occasionally even planted. Royal forests were carefully managed to encourage, and frequently even stocked, with game animals, carefully monitored by hunting staff to be conjured on a whim for royal hunting parties. While the medieval world was swathed in geographic uncertainty, rife with hostile factions, and bounded by mysterious frontiers, the European forest was, by and large, none of these things.
In Don Quixote, Cervantes calls attention to this mythic exaggeration. Quixote sets out to find evil knights and monsters haunting a mythic landscape, but instead encounters only working people in a working landscape. Inns become castles, muleteers become brigands, and of course windmills become giants. The distinction has been lost a bit for contemporary audiences, but Cervantes' point is clear: fantasy romances require a wilderness; if there is none at hand, one must be imagined.
Art by Juan Gallego
As fantasy proper emerged in the Romantic period (several centuries after the classic Chivalric Romances were published, of course), its wilderness setting was increasingly pushed out of the contemporary landscape and into new compartments. Gothic novels cordoned the fantastic off within haunted houses and cursed family lineages. Post-apocalypse stories turned the landscape into a wilderness through the passage of time. But the primary current of Romantic fantasy existed in fairy stories--not literary fairy tales, which were also quite popular at the time, but stories about magical and mischievous societies inhabiting parallel or microcosmic worlds, drawing extensively from Celtic and Germanic folklore.
Fairy stories reified the dichotomy of wilderness and domesticity, remaking the spiritual wilderness of the Chivalric Romance as the magical land of Faerie. Depictions of Faerie vary wildly, but it is generally reached through some sort of Portal--generally found in a natural setting, in the woods again, or down a river, or within a bramble thicket--though sometimes a cabinet or wardrobe will do. It is generally either overlain directly on our world, visible only to those initiated by magic spells, places, or fruit, or found in microcosms much larger than they appear from the outside.
The "portal to Faerie" device has fallen out of favor to some extent, and in the 20th century fantasy works have embraced the "secondary world" model canonized by Tolkien. In some sense, this can be seen as a return to the fictive wildernesses of the Romances--characters begin at home, on the farm, and some event sends them off on a journey to a distant goal across a countryside filled with war, monsters, and witches. But where earlier fantasies were largely (and my generalization brush is fairly thick here) more dreamlike, mythic, and often allegorical, Tolkien's wilderness was an obtrusively physical place. Pragmatic concerns like food, while addressed with fantastical elements like lembas bread, are as much a concern for the hobbits as maintaining their faith. (The spiritual element lingers in Tolkien-it is not a coincidence that Frodo's wilderness trek in the wastes of Mordor lasts forty days).
This pragmatic view of wilderness paralleled cultural developments like the outdoor recreation movement and the environmental movement. The ideological forces in Lord of the Rings illustrate some of the contradictory tendencies in 20th century views of the environment: the Shire represents civilization, but in a picturesque agrarian format that was rapidly disappearing due to industrialization. Wilderness hinders the Fellowship, but it is Sauron's military-industrial complex that is truly antithetical to civilization.
A more concrete wilderness has enabled fantasy to engage with nature in more materialistic ways. Dragons are objects of scientific study in A Natural History of Dragons and geopolitical hard power in A Song of Ice and Fire. Geralt, protagonist of the Witcher series, refuses to kill any monsters whose species are endangered. The entire fantasy wilderness world is marketed as a tourist attraction in Diana Wynne Jones' Dark Lord of Derkholm.
The Romantic era also brought a new appreciation of wilderness as an aesthetic phenomenon. Wild landscapes, especially those with enormous trees, jagged rocks, waterfalls, and above all, grandiose topography, were glorified as "sublime," natural temples where the glory of God was especially apparent and spiritual communion was facilitated. The aesthetic of the sublime has been one of the biggest influences on the depiction of fantasy landscapes, serving up topography ostensibly even more excessive and "epic" than nature can provide.
Only in the last 30 years or so has the genre opened up to stories set primarily in cities, which illustrates the depth of its historic attachment to wilderness. Urban Fantasy follows urban ecology in deconstructing the artificial divide between city and wilderness, embracing a worldview in which cities hold as much magic as the countryside--if one knows how to look for it. China Mieville's Kraken makes the city of London a vital magical entity in its own right, and populates it with a wilderness of monsters and magicians dense and varied as its cosmopolitan inhabitants.
For the rest of this series, I might dive into some of these examples in greater depth (let me know if anything sparks any particular curiosity for you!), explore some of the social denizens of fantasy wilderness, like ruins, werewolves, and fairies, and track their interactions with broader cultural ideas about wilderness.
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