Part One: You Must Become Lost
Part Two: The Hero’s Journey vs The Forest Story
Part Three: Who Goes into the Forest?
Part Five: The Ones We Meet in Darkness
The forest is dark, as I have said before, so it may take you a while to notice the great yellow eyes watching you from beyond a veil of leaves. It may be some time before you hear the rustling of something large moving through the greenery. It may not occur to you at first that you are the only living thing not frozen and alert and ready to bolt.
And then comes the Wolf. Out from the tangle of branches and brambles, padding on heavy paws, silver-grey and huge and terrible. And hungry. It is so very, very hungry.
The Wolf is a fairy tale staple, but it may not be the one with which you are familiar. There’s a good chance that when you hear wolf and fairy tale in the same sentence, you imagine the Big Bad Wolf of Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Little Pigs. However, this is a separate entity from the true fairy tale Wolf.
The Big Bad Wolf belongs not to fairy tales but to morality tales and what Tolkien would classify as beast fables. It’s also not particularly interesting, which is why I’m not talking about that cartoonish villain. I am talking about the Wolf one meets in the heart of the forest, with its long white teeth and its deep red hunger. That Wolf is the one we all must meet, the one we all must feed.
It is introduced in the following sequence: The Prince—it always seems to be a prince who meets the Wolf—encounters the beast once he is properly lost in the forest (and therefore lost on a psychological and spiritual level). The beast blocks his path; he cannot go on without somehow dealing with it. The Wolf asks the Prince for food, and the boy complies, giving it his aging and sickly horse to eat. Once fed, the Wolf grows strong and serves as the Prince’s steed and guide for the rest of the tale.
The Wolf is the shadow, and the shadow demands sacrifice.
The shadow is the part of yourself you do not see—or refuse to see. It’s similar to Freud’s id in some respects, but it is Jung’s idea and therefore inherently better. Basically (and I do mean basically, because there are all sorts of layers of complexity to Jung’s ideas better explained by someone who’s devoted a great deal more time to studying them) the shadow is one’s dark side. It’s frightening. It’s wild. It’s monstrous. And it is a part of you.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Or I don’t think it should. I think there are very few of us who reach adulthood without realizing there is something monstrous within us. I’d be willing to bet you have seen your own Wolf quite a few times by now, and just as willing to bet there have been times when it has gotten the better of you, when it lashed out with those huge white teeth and done something terrible.
Perhaps, knowing the Wolf as you do, you’d much rather kill it than feed it. You might prefer to do anything rather than feed it, anything rather than tend to the terror dwelling within your own heart. It’s an understandable impulse, but not a wise one. Killing the Wolf will do you no good, only leave you without its teeth—and you need its teeth. Badly.
You can’t make it through life without a good set of teeth. The world is full of threats, and there are only a few ways to deal with them: to run, to hide, or to fight. The former two are serviceable in many cases, but they do have certain disadvantages. For one, there are sorts of threats which cannot be run or hidden from, which must instead be defeated. For another, there are sorts of threats you need not fight, whether it is because you are perfectly capable of running or hiding from them or because they simply hold no danger for you—but unless you fight them, they will harm innocents who cannot run or hide, let alone fight.
This is why you feed the Wolf. Because you have to tame it, because that’s how you can have its teeth without fearing them. A tame Wolf makes a good dog—a true Dog, I mean, and truly Good. Defender of home, family, and flock.
That’s why, but it’s also important to address what. The Prince always feeds the Wolf the same thing. He always feeds it his horse.
That seems a bit cruel, doesn’t it? There are versions where the horse is already dead, but often enough it’s still alive when the Prince gives it to the Wolf. The horse is uniformly sickly and old, the worst and ugliest nag in the King’s stables. Still, is that reason enough to kill it? Why is the Wolf—who is itself often in rough shape when it encounters the Prince—so much more deserving of life than the horse?
Yes, it’s another symbol. I’m going to be honest with you, dear reader—I don’t know that I can define what the horse symbolizes precisely. But I also don’t think the horse is precisely one thing, not in the way the Wolf is.
When I first began thinking about the horse—this was well over a year ago; I’ve been dwelling on the Forest and what happens within it for some time now—I found myself focusing on the aspect of sacrificing the conventional for the strange. This is mainly due to the fact that the Wolf replaces the horse as the Prince’s mount, as well as taking on the roles of companion, guide, and mentor. The normal thing—which only hinders the Prince—is given to, destroyed, and replaced by the strange one—which turns the Prince from a lost boy in the forest into a hero.
Although I’ve never actually seen it explicitly addressed in a fairy tale, this exchange inherently distances the Prince from the rest of society. The man who rides a monster cannot be one who rides easily among other men and their ordinary mounts. No matter how much control he has over it, a monster is still a monster, and there will always be people who choose to distance themselves from it and its master. The Prince who leaves the forest astride a Wolf looks at a glance less like a prince and more like a wild man, like a mad hermit or devilish enchanter. There is danger in this man, danger outside the realm of normalcy.
It’s not the worst theory I’ve ever had, and it may even be right to some extent, but I don’t think it covers the whole of what goes on in that symbol. I think what’s really important about the horse is that it is the thing which holds the Prince back. Whether it is normalcy or some other, greater weakness, it is something he must give up and replace with the dark and wild shadow. He can’t keep limping along forever. He’s going to have to run, and he’s going to need teeth.
I said you probably know your Wolf already. I expect you already know your horse, too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t like the idea of feeding it to the Wolf. We get attached to our weaknesses. It doesn’t change their nature.
Dear reader, dear traveler—the beast is already watching you. It will be upon you before you know it. When it comes, it will ask something of you. Be ready. Feed the Wolf.
Thank you for reading this, the fourth post in a short series on the fairy tale forest. At the risk of sounding like a cheesy, insufferable influencer: Please like, subscribe, comment, and share—all of those things that please the dark algorithm entities.
Seek the forest. Feed the wolf. Be brave, be clever, be kind.
Sound theory, and as ever, insightful.
I wrote a superhero who espouses exactly what you describe.