What is the name of the wood of suicides in the seventh circle?

The wood of suicides in Dante’s seventh circle is the Wood of Suicides. It forms the second ring of the circle, where souls who took their own lives are transformed into twisted, thorny trees.

The punishment reflects Dante’s medieval moral theology: those who rejected their bodies in life are denied human form in death. Harpies nest in the branches and tear at the trees, while the souls can speak only when a branch is broken, causing the tree to bleed. Dante discovers this when he snaps a twig and hears the lament of Pier delle Vigne, a powerful adviser to Emperor Frederick II.

The episode draws heavily on Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneas encounters trees that bleed when wounded. Dante also places the squanderers in this same ring. They run through the wood while pursued by savage black dogs, crashing into the trees and adding to the suicides’ torment.

A common mix-up is calling this place simply the “Forest of Spirits” or confusing it with the dark wood where Dante begins the poem. The Wood of Suicides is specifically a subdivision of the seventh circle, which punishes violence.