When we started writing ZAMANORA: Ballad of the Witch, we decided to draw from the wellspring of folkloric tales that nourished our own childhoods, delve deeper into the trove of fables that derive from Balkan and Slavic origins, and become inspired to weave our own. At the same time, this decision came along with a challenge: will we succeed in implementing this rich folklore into a brand new setting, without falling into the trap of simply retelling the same tales?
Folklore is at the root of most, if not all, fantasy worldbuilding, whether directly or circuitously. Tolkien drew from it for Middle-Earth, LeGuin for Earthsea, and we’ve all been building with the same blocks ever since.
Therefore, the question becomes not “how do we use folklore” but rather, how do we make it relevant, “fresh” and profound for the current age of fantasy writing. A task made even harder by the fact that the original purpose of folklore was to explain the world and its ways to people who lived over a thousand years ago, making the messages and notions it conveys dated at best, and irrelevant or offensive at worst.
- Myths were created to explain phenomena we now fully understand
- Legends to propagate the kinds of heroic tales we now have seen hundreds of
- Fables to help us grasp moral teaching which have since been ingrained into our education and societies.
How, then, do we make it interesting again?
Trust the Classics
For our team at the Eren Chronicles, the answer is two-fold: Trust the classics, and rekindle the magic.
The first part of this circles around the notion that people can never have enough stories. We never really grow tired of a genre we love, even after a hundred iterations of it — even after seeing the same iteration repeatedly. How many times have we each rewatched the Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, or Star Wars?
Do we do it for the cinematic value, to discover something new? Most likely not. We do it because of the warmth that sliding into a familiar and beloved world brings, knowing that good will triumph over evil again and again, the treasure will be the friends we made along the way, the evil empire will be toppled and the heroes will live happily ever after.
To (mis)quote Brennan Lee Mulligan, “people don’t want you to discover a kind of breakfast food that isn’t pancakes, waffles or French toast but a secret fourth thing— they want you to make them a really good pancake.” That is exactly what folklore provides us; the mother dough from which all great baked goods are made.
Following that logic, when writing worlds based on folklore, we seek to lean onto those tropes and cliches that make them feel familiar and inviting.
- The gold-bedecked mayor is corrupt
- The hooded stranger at your door is a witch
- The hidden pond is definitely full of naiads
- The decrepit mansion is absolutely haunted
Don’t try to subvert the expectations of your readers (or players) in those aspects; that is where they will look to anchor and immerse themselves. Look instead to change the parts that have aged less gracefully, ideally squeezing the moral out of them while leaving the ugly conventions out.
In the Greek fable of the Bridge of Arta, the male head mason is compelled by a prophecy to bury his own wife alive within the bridge’s foundation, to stop the building from collapsing each night. With a modern eye the tale represents a tragic illustration of the expendability of women in Ottoman Greece, the myriad ways in which innocent femininities paid the price for the choices of despotic men.
In a version where the gender roles are equal, however, the fable could also tell us that great undertakings demand sacrifice, or how obsession with one’s vocation can harm their personal life and relations; a message carrying much weight in a society like ours, struggling with work-life balance.
When you are weaving your own story in a world inspired by these folkloric values, take those classic tales and remold them into something that resonates with you, by cutting out the rotten apples but keeping the robust roots.
While this approach provides a solid foundation for our worldbuilding, it is only half the journey towards achieving the true essence of folklore. These tropes and archetypes serve as comfortable entry points, but to truly bring it all to life, there is another ingredient missing. In the second part of this article, we will delve into how one can elevate this basic structure, preserving the wonder and mystery inherent in traditional folklore by tapping into the ability of these stories to evoke emotions and stir the imagination through the unexplained and the unknowable.
(To be continued in Part 2: Rekindle the Magic.)
