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Paper short abstract

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.