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This paper examines the forest in Greek folk tales, especially from Tinos, as a space where human and nonhuman worlds meet. It highlights the forest as an active narrative force, entangling nature, culture, and ecology in folk imagination.

Paper long abstract

The forest constitutes one of the most powerful motifs in folk narratives worldwide. Often situated at the margins of human habitation, it emerges as a liminal space where nature and culture meet, interact, and transform each other. This paper examines the representations of the forest in Greek folk tales, particularly those collected in the Cycladic island of Tinos, while also situating them within a broader comparative framework.

In the narratives, the forest functions as both a physical environment and a symbolic landscape: it can be a site of danger, exile, and death, but also of refuge, transformation, and initiation. Heroes who enter the forest confront not only supernatural beings, witches, dragons, or animal-helpers, but also the uncertainty of nature itself. These encounters highlight the entanglement of the natural and the supernatural, the human and the non-human, within a space that resists binary oppositions.

By tracing these motifs, the paper argues that the folk-tale forest operates as an assemblage of nature-culture: a place where ecological imagination and social values intertwine. The analysis further considers how such representations shift in relation to historical and environmental contexts, and how the narrative forest can be re-read today in light of contemporary ecological concerns, including climate change and the human impact on natural environments.

Through this approach, the study seeks to demonstrate that the forest in folk narratives is not merely a backdrop but an active agent of storytelling, mediating human experiences of nature in ways that remain relevant to both past and present.

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17th C. French women's fairy tales view the forest and nonhuman agents as vital, autonomous actors, not just backdrops. This ecological consciousness promotes symbiosis, revealing that moral virtue is tied to nature, and nonhuman aid is key to heroines' proto-feminist empowerment.

Paper long abstract

Sophie Raynard and I will examine the ecological vision embedded within ten fairy tales of d'Aulnoy, Murat, L’Heritier and Bernard, as featured in our forthcoming volume Damsels in Charge. While these narratives are celebrated for their proto-feminist critique of patriarchal court society, this analysis argues that they simultaneously deploy the nonhuman world—the forest, animals, and plants—not as symbolic backdrops or props, but as essential, autonomous agents that actively mediate and shape the heroines' quests for empowerment and autonomy.

The forest is established as a dynamic ecological space, often a refuge from patriarchal failure, where new social and environmental contracts are forged. D’Aulnoy’s “Finette Cindra” and Murat’s “Belle-Belle” show that the heroines’ initial acts of resistance and subsequent success are directly enabled by showing kindness to nonhuman agents, such as enchanted horses, which then become indispensable allies and moral compasses.

The theme of nonhuman metamorphosis further deepens this interpretation. Tales like d’Aulnoy’s “The White Cat” and “The Bee and the Orange Tree” present transformations where human relationships continue within plant and animal forms, challenging anthropocentric boundaries and portraying interspecies romance and emotional bonds. The narrative action often hinges on the heroines' ability to nurture and understand the natural world, illustrating that moral virtue is an ecological act—loyalty to a pot of carnations, for instance, breaks a powerful curse.

We conclude that the conteuses offered a profound and specific ecological consciousness for their time, one that promoted symbiosis and conservation, positioning human destiny as inseparable from a vibrant, natural and nonhuman realm.

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This paper will explore how representations of forests in d'Aulnoy's fairy tales reflect the neo-classical ideal of nature perfected by culture but also approximate Donna Haraway’s notion of “natureculture,” the recognition that nature and culture are intertwined and mutually constitutive.

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D’Aulnoy’s Forests and the Nature/Culture Divide

Lewis C. Seifert

Brown University

In Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilizations have defined themselves against forests, making them the antithesis of culture. Many Western European fairy tales, of course, substantiate this claim: forests are often spaces where heroes and heroines, having left home, encounter antagonists or accomplish difficult tasks which, once overcome, allow them to leave the forest and return to (human) culture set aright.

The contes de fées of late 17th-century France can be seen to both confirm and complicate this scenario. On the one hand, the fairy tales of Charles Perrault accentuate the divide between culture as a domesticated space and the forest as threat to or a retreat from that space. On the other hand, the forests in fairy tales by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy blur the boundaries between nature and culture. Even as forests unleash existential threats to human protagonists, they are also frequently pastoral retreats that are the product of the magical melding of culture with nature. Focusing on Gracieuse et Percinet, La Princesse Printanière, La Biche au bois, and Le Prince Marcassin, this paper will explore how the representation of the forest reflects the neo-classical ideal of nature perfected by culture, but also how, at moments, d’Aulnoy’s forests approximate Donna Haraway’s notion of “natureculture,” the recognition that nature and culture are mutually constitutive. In various ways, these forests lay bare the interconnections between nature and culture, leaving human protagonists and human culture transformed.

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This paper uses ecofeminism to analyze the occurrences and different functions of the forest and its magical creatures in Amalia Schoppe’s tale collection. The primary focus is on how the protagonist engages with the natural setting and its inhabitants and how these encounters change their life.

Paper long abstract

The forest is one of the most common and multilayered settings in European fairy tales. Some forests are dark and enchanted or home to wild animals and magical creatures. Others are seen as a symbol of longing, memory, and as a sanctuary. Nearly half of the 200 tales by the Brothers Grimm have scenes set in a wooded location. At the same time as the Brothers Grimm became famous with their Children and Household Tales (1812), Amalia Schoppe and other German women writers published their own fairy tale collections. Their tales were widely popular and often quite different from the shorter, formulaic tales by the Grimms. Schoppe’s outwardly traditional tales frequently disguise more progressive notions, and her forests are often home to earth sprites and angel figures. This paper uses ecofeminism and post-humanism to analyze the occurrences and different functions of the forest and its magical creatures in Schoppe’s tale collection Kleine Mährchenbibliothek (1828) and compares them with select Grimm tales. The primary focus is on how the (female) protagonist engages with the natural setting and its inhabitants and how these encounters change their life.

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This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the portrayal of enchanted forests in German Realism and Romanticism from the perspective of queer theory and ecocriticism, as well as an examination of the role of strange, genderless children in nature’s ‘agency’.

Paper long abstract

With the literary eras of the “long” 19th century, there are numerous examples of works that address a theme related to nature: The relationship between humans and nature, the dichotomous division of all aspects of life between nature and culture, the immeasurable and violent power of nature, and the tumultuous category of ‘agency’, are motifs that undoubtedly characterize both German Romanticism and Realism, which are in reality much more alike/hybridized than the artificial division of certain canonical readings allow to appear.

For example, when reading Adalbert Stifter’s story “Katzensilber”, one can recognize defining features of E.T.A. Hoffmann’s fairy tale “Das fremde Kind”: a strange, genderless child appears in the neighbouring forest and exerts a decisive influence on a pair of siblings, namely on the way they see and determine their existence in nature. With Stifter’s narrative, German literary research focuses mainly on the antithetical nature-culture conceptual pair, whereas Hoffmann’s work is taken as an opportunity to examine the opposition between imagination and reason.

However, I intend to focus on the structural resemblance of the above narratives, by examining aspects such as hybrid identity, the performativity of nature, and human interaction with nature from a queer and ecocritical perspective. Moreover, I aim to understand to what extent the spatial structure and associated representation of nature in Hoffmann’s work can be understood as a critique of a capitalist cis-heteronormativity, and whether Stifter’s story could (or should) actually be read as a fairy tale, in order to grasp its full transgressive potential.

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Despite Iceland’s treeless landscape, forests appear in fairy tales as both a narrative device and a symbolic space. This paper explores their role as liminal zones of danger and transformation, shaped by medieval literature and oral storytelling.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the enduring motif of the forest in Icelandic fairy tales—a space that, while ecologically scarce in Iceland, features prominently in both written and oral narrative traditions. Drawing on the legacy of medieval chivalric and legendary sagas, Icelandic fairy tales inherit and transform the forest as a symbolic site of danger, enchantment, and transformation. Although largely imaginary in the Icelandic landscape, the forest persists in oral storytelling as a powerful narrative device—an echo of foreign literary models adapted to local cultural contexts.

The paper situates the forest and wilderness within a broader constellation of narrative spaces, including the farmstead, bower, castle, shore, and island—each representing distinct symbolic and social realms in Icelandic fairy tales. Wilderness spaces function as liminal zones where characters confront the nonhuman, undergo trials, or experience profound change, while domestic or fortified settings often symbolize order, kinship, and authority. The interplay between these spaces reflects deeper cultural negotiations between isolation and belonging, nature and civilization, human and nonhuman.

By tracing how medieval spatial motifs were reimagined in oral folklore, this paper reveals the creative continuity between written saga literature and vernacular storytelling—and how imagined landscapes helped structure the moral geography of Icelandic fairy tales.

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In the Maiden who Seek her Brothers tales, the brothers live as birds in a far-off, uninhabited land, preserved from death in a liminal state, until their sister's sacrifice releases them. Once released, they witness an execution, unrelated to their crimes, that balances life and death in the text.

Paper long abstract

A couple has many sons and then finally a daughter. The sons are sent to their death or abandoned, but instead transform into birds. Years later their sister comes to find them and makes a sacrifice, transforming them back. This tale type, ATU 451: The Maiden who Seeks her Brothers, appears three times in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, from multiple female sources and another variant predates them in the 1801 Fairy Tales by an anonymous woman writer. The brothers’ transition into animals, represents a temporary liminal state in between life and death, which protects them, but also will result in death if they remain too long. They flee to the farthest reaches of the forest, or, in one case, to a glass mountain beyond the sun, the moon, and the stars. In this both the animal transformation and the position in an uninhabited land act as a way for the brothers to temporarily escape their death. Their sister, however, must make bodily sacrifices of her own, the loss of her voice or her finger, in order to transform them and bring them back to humanity and to human-inhabited lands. Finally, three of these four tales ends with a brutal execution of the sister's mother-in-law. Though the execution is for a crime unrelated to the brothers, there is a relationship between this death and the death that the brothers escaped, indicating a need for balance in life and death in this environment.

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This paper argues that Emma Perodi’s Novelle della nonna (1892–93) reflects the ecological ideas of George Perkins Marsh. By linking Perodi’s landscapes to Marsh’s environmental thought, I propose a “fairy-tale ecology” that reimagines forests as sites of ethical human–nonhuman relations.

Paper long abstract

The goal of this paper is to explore the connection between the lives of Emma Perodi and George Perkins Marsh, the U.S. ambassador to Italy in the late nineteenth century and who has been termed the first environmentalist. According to the recently published epistolary, it is known that Perodi knew Marsh’s wife. The conjecture of this paper lies in speculating on the relationship between Perodi and George Perkins Marsh. I argue that Marsh has influenced Perodi’s writing, and that this is visible in her fairy-tale collection Le novelle della nonna (1892-93). Although such connection cannot be verified, there are traces of Marsh’s though, particularly in his Man and Nature (1864), that are reworked in Perodi’s collection. Following these ideas, Perodi infused the Tuscan landscape of her stories with principles on how to interact with the natural world.

This reinterpretation of a mode of living within the natural world not only helps us rethink the role of Emma Perodi, but it can also be used to promote a notion of “fairy-tale ecology,” that is, a particular use of fairy-tale magic and wonder to renegotiate the role of human-nonhuman relationships. This way, fairy tales can be considered pedagogical tools that inform and instruct readers in a more ethical approach to the natural world, emphasizing coexistence and collaboration with all entities, human and not.

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This paper aims to analyse the narrative function of the forest in Madreselva, a contemporary ecocritical fairy-tale by Gerardo Spirito. The use of forest imagery within a modern folkloric tale highlights the search for an anti-capitalist and mystical relationship with the environment in our time.

Paper long abstract

The paper aims to analyse the narrative function of the forest in Madreselva (published in 2025), a contemporary ecocritical fairy-tale narrative by Italian writer Gerardo Spirito. The adoption of folkloric imagery as a lens for an ecocritical perspective on human history underscores the enduring bond between the fairy tale and ecology, even in contemporary literature. Set in a village near a forest on a mountainside in Southern Italy, the tales of Madreselva evoke a raw, mystical, and cavernous reality. The characters, shepherds, wanderers, men of faith and of superstition, are present but not central. Rather, it is nature, and the forest in particular, that plays a crucial role in shaping an environment where the non-human element intertwines with collective human agency. The forest functions both as setting and as origin for agrarian and primordial cults: the rite of transhumance, the veneration of roots, hollow trees, mossy crusts, and visceral fat. It profoundly influences the life of the community. The paper focuses especially on the absence of boundaries between forest and civilization, and on the constant interchange and mutual influence between the two domains. From this analysis arise crucial questions concerning the recourse to a sacralised forest imagery as a way of narrating an anti-capitalist and mystical relationship with the environment in our times.