The Moving Forest ruse and its 596 date are recorded in the Chronicle of Fredegar, a 7th-century source written after the events it describes and generally considered less contemporaneous and less reliable in its details than Gregory of Tours' account — worth treating as a traditional, well-known episode rather than a forensically verified one. The historical ruse involved ordinary camouflage with cut branches; the novel's reframing of it as literal Enochian sorcery animating the trees is an entirely fictional elaboration.