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are determined both by the internal logic of narrative itself, and long literary
tradition of representation of nature. The main character of the romance, the
errant knight, begins his quest to confront the unknown, thus the defamiliarization
of a well-charted territory produces just what romance calls for: a
realm of adventure.
The Middle Age west has borrowed its cultural models from the Bible,
where the “wild nature” – desert – as the symbol and as the historical and a
geographical reality are ambivalent and is considered as an opposition of the
civilized world – the city. The Biblical interpretation of desert as a “place
of seclusion” has been transformed in the medieval romances to the forest;
however it maintained the original, Biblical meaning of the wild area that is
contrasting to the civilized habitat.
The forest also had its own contrasting element, which in the Middle Age
system of values was taken on by the court/castle, as the civilized, organized
environment. In chivalry romances it is the court of King Arthur (compare
with Arabic, Indian and Mulghazanzar court idylls depicted in The Knight
in the Panther’s Skin) – the embodiment of elegance, delicacy and courtesy.
But the antithesis court/forest is more complex than it may at first appear,
because in this case a reader can observe another binary opposition – hunting/adventure
forest. Thus, the king and his knights could be regarded as the
people of the forest, who periodically, in order to diminish the strain of court
responsibilities, visit the hunting forest; there they delve into the same level
of comfort and elation which they are used to at the castle (compare with the
hunt of king Rostevan and Avtandil in the Knight in the Panther’s Skin). On
the other hand, in the wild forest the errant knight is feeling abandoned and
lonely. Away from the ceremonies of the court, he is surrounded with indifferent,
austere décor, the one in many ways antithetic to the exquisite culture
and manners that the knights used to. Thus, for the depiction of forest scenes
the authors use same motives as they do to depict the court life, but in the
negative module. The court is an ideal locus,where the courtly values can be
explored, but in the accounts of the forest a concern for standards or refinement
can continue to be a preoccupation of the narrative, precisely because
it is cast as the inverted mirror image of the court or castle. The result is a
setting capable of providing contrast without fragmenting the outlook which
these romances offer on their fictive world.