The Freedom of the Woods: Antiquarian Landscapes and Politics

Dark and deep mysterious woods or forests figureprominently in the works of the German Romantic School (ca. 1790–1840). The novellas,poems and novels of Josef von Eichendorff (1788–1857) and especially of Ludwig Tieck(1773–1853) portray the “Loneliness of the woods” (Waldeinsamkeit) that can be both athreat to personal identity, and a refuge from the complications and ugliness of modernlife, where the beginning of industrialization was endangering traditional socialstructures and changing urban and rural environments. Such dark and deep woods alsofigure prominently in Grimm’s fairy tales (first edition 1812–15) and, perhaps are bestknown, from the paintings of Caspar-David Friedrich (1744–1840). Descriptions of theselandscapes, and especially of ‘majestic woodlands’ also appear in accounts ofprehistoric monuments, and indeed, could be used to help in the discovery of thesemonuments (see below). But are these Romantic woodlands just a newtype of landscape, perceived for the first time because of a new aesthetic (Schama1996)? Or do they also convey another meaning? In this article, I am going to look atthe way in which the relations between humans and their environment were interpreted,and then how this was used in the interpretation of archaeological finds. In the earlynineteenth century some antiquarian texts conspicuously used landscapes to conveypolitical messages