For some time now, I’ve been inter­ested in folk­lore, espe­cially those tales relat­ing to other enti­ties, such as pagan gods and ‘faerie’ crea­tures, such as the Scan­di­na­vian elves, celtic sidthe, giants, bog­garts and so forth. Part of my inter­est is in see­ing the com­mon pat­terns in the myths, some­times pat­terns that go back to more ancient soci­eties — even as far back as the Sumar­i­ans, and I do sense that there are cer­tain pat­terns and ten­den­cies in the tales. A friend of mine once said that he was sad­dened, grow­ing up, to see that sense of magic the world has in child­hood dis­ap­pear, and that has me think­ing about writ­ing a fan­tasy story set in present times.

How­ever, there is some part of me that feels a need to give a ‘real­ist’ expla­na­tion for things that hap­pen in my sto­ries, and so I sim­ply don’t feel com­fort­able with just adding these enti­ties — there has to be an expla­na­tion for them. The inter­est­ing thing about the folk­lore that I’ve read, is how every­thing seems to have an amor­phous qual­ity to it — many of the descrip­tions and qual­i­ties of the gods/goddesses are incon­sis­tent between writ­ers and his­toric peri­ods (deities seem to merge and split and vary in their roles), and the same is often the case with ‘faerie’ crea­tures (by ‘faerie’ I do not specif­i­cally mean the cute, tiny winged crea­tures the Vic­to­ri­ans depicted them as, rather any myth­i­cal crea­ture who is not a diety — and yes, the def­i­n­i­tions often do blur).

It seems to me that these crea­tures are in some way a reflec­tion of both the zeit­geist of the writ­ers’ times, over­laid with their per­sonal psy­cholo­gies: These are the fac­tors shap­ing and mould­ing the changes in these crea­tures, and the sto­ries that con­tain them. In itself, I thought that was an inter­est­ing — and as far as I am aware — presently under-exposed per­spec­tive for writ­ing about them. Many sto­ries use the envi­ron­ment to reflect the inner expe­ri­ences of the char­ac­ters (e.g. lovers fight­ing dur­ing a storm), and I thought it would be inter­est­ing to extend this to their expe­ri­ences of these myth­i­cal beings.

How­ever, I still feel that I need an expla­na­tion for how peo­ple would expe­ri­ence these enti­ties — oddly, in folk­lore, their exis­tence is taken for granted, which to my mind is odd, given that none of the audi­ence would (one would assume) have come across them in their real lives, and would be expect­ing at least some level of sur­prise in the reac­tions of peo­ple in the sto­ries. Read More →