So He Returned To The Forest And Inquired Of The Where The Wedding Was To Be Quote

Tracking Down Obscure Literary Quotes From Fairy Tales

Most people searching for this quote end up frustrated because the exact wording varies across translations. The line "So he returned to the forest and inquired of the" appears in different versions of European folk narratives, and without knowing which collection you are looking at, you will waste hours clicking through unrelated results. I spent a solid afternoon on this same problem a couple years back when I was cross-referencing a citation for a paper, and here is what actually worked. The phrasing you posted has a grammatical stumble in it — "inquired of the where" does not parse in standard English. This usually means one of two things: either you are looking at a machine-translated passage, or the quote has been slightly misremembered and compounded across retellings. I found the closest match by searching for the structural elements instead of the exact string. That means searching for the combination of "returned to the forest" and "wedding" and "inquired" rather than the full sentence. In my experience, quotes from older fairy tale collections — especially those translated from German, French, or Italian in the nineteenth century — shift significantly between editions. The Brothers Grimm themselves revised their collection multiple times across decades, and the Wilhelm Haunch or Thomas James Wise translations each took liberties. If you are doing academic work, you need to cite the specific edition, not just the story name.

How to Find the Source

Start with the Grove Dictionary of National Bibliography or the Encyclopedia of Fairy Tales if you have library access. Those reference works index stories by motif using the ATU classification system. The scenario you are describing — a character seeking information about a wedding in a forest setting — maps most closely to ATU 510B, "The Search for the Lost Husband," or possibly ATU 425, "The Prince as Snake." Both motifs feature forest scenes and wedding inquiries, though neither contains that exact sentence. For a quicker route, try the Database of Middle English Romance or the French Medieval Literature database if you suspect a chivalric source rather than a folk tale. Sometimes quotes like this originate from Romantic-era retellings rather than the original oral tradition. Charles Perrault's versions, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books, or even Edith Hamilton's Mythology have been quoted so frequently that standalone phrases circulate without clear attribution.

A Practical Workaround I Use

When exact-quote search fails, I break the sentence into its smallest unique components and search those separately. Take "returned to the forest" as one block and "wedding was to be" as another. Run both through Google Books with the "exact phrase" operator, then filter by publication date before 1950. This narrows it down to the period when most of these translations were first published in English. One edge case I ran into: sometimes the quote exists in a secondary source — a novel or essay that referenced the fairy tale — rather than the original text itself. I once traced a seemingly famous line to a 1970s children's adaptation that had paraphrased the source material, and every site quoting it was just recycling that adaptation. Always verify against the primary text whenever possible.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest issue people hit is assuming the quote is from a well-known tale. The more obscure the story, the less digitized it becomes. Many folk variants exist only in local collections or academic publications that are not fully searchable. If your quote is from a lesser-known regional variant, you may need to consult a specialist bibliography rather than relying on general search engines. Another problem is conflating similar-sounding quotes from different stories. The forest + wedding + inquiry combination appears in enough tales that search results often conflate them. I learned this the hard way when a citation I trusted turned out to be from a completely different tale that shared a thematic resemblance. Double-check the surrounding context of any match you find, not just the sentence itself.

What to Do If You Still Cannot Find It

If the searches above yield nothing after about thirty minutes, consider posting the quote along with where you encountered it to a specialized forum like the Folklore mailing list or the Literature Stack Exchange. People who work with primary sources regularly encounter partially remembered quotes and can often identify the work from a fragment. Include the context you have — even if it is vague — because that often provides the missing clue.