GENRE 101 – Folklore

“Scylla was not born for death: she is a thing of terror, intractable, ferocious and impossible to fight.”

Homer’s Odyssey

Folklore is this wonderful monster that lurks in all the well lit corners of your entire world. It is like the Matrix – everywhere, you see it but you do not recognize it. It is in your clothes, in your food, in your house, in your songs, in your books and under your Christmas tree. It has been there forever and it is there to stay. Rarely questioned but constantly compelling generation after generation to observe it, it is a show-off, it needs to be seen to survive. You honour it by continuation, like your parents did and your grandparents before. It is everything you never learned in school yet know for sure. It has been woven into your conscience by ancient builders, priests and storytellers.

Folklore is more than just the myth of the ghost in the well or the legend of a king. An architect may look at the other buildings in town before putting something in place that simply does not fit. Folklore musicians do not merely teach the words and melodies of times gone by, they may also know how to build and play the traditional instruments. It may as well be that your family’s butter bean recipe is a Folklore item, and that a hundred years from now the open source code for everyone’s favourite graphics program will be too. Folklore determines how people create their future by showing them pieces of the past.

This works for material lore and customs as well as the oral tradition, when we tell stories of ancient events to our children.

Folklore tales are a wonderful source of inspiration for a writer. Some of the greatest literary works have been conceived by remembering the old legends. William Shakespeare has, by writing Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, tapped into several sources of oral tradition and merged distinctive aspects of the known themes into a stage play that can now become part of Folklore itself thanks to public domain law. Sooner or later, when the story has been told a hundred times in different variations, Shakespeare’s Hamlet may turn into a myth or, if you believe the Danish prince was really crazy and only imagined his father’s ghost, even a legend. What is the difference and why would an author looking for inspiration care at all? Because we can be under the false impression that the version we know is the only possible way to tell a story.

There is a connection between the age of the story and the level of realism it holds. If you go back in time far enough you will reach a point where all stories are neither hear-say nor made-up, because both kinds need inspiration. At some point you may find the original witness, the one who actually saw an event unfold. Today that may be a reporter standing at the outskirts of a war zone describing a great battle. In the unforeseeable future he will become the first narrator of a legend. What was reality for him will first be remembered, then it will be elaborated and misread. It becomes something entirely different. It has always been so and it will be again.

Legend – Saga – Myth – Fairytale

The Legend is as of today an unverified story that might have been intended as a historical account of something the ancients deemed important. It is old history and the basis for many deriving tales of Folklore that are more and more improbable in time and have very little to do with the original.

This does not mean that all legends are bound to be true. We can not verify the validity of tales as old as time, we can often not even verify reports on events that happened only hours ago. The longer it is passed along, the more people have been telling it, the more unlikely it has become in the forms it takes today.

If we look at the first mentioning of King Arthur he seems like a genuine historical figure, a realistic person so to say, even though we can not be sure he ever existed. Soon after he first appeared he became a legend as the king who defended his lands from the invading Anglo-Saxons and killed single-handedly more men than technically possible. Exaggerations are part of the legend. Truth is secondary, if a contemporary wants to record history in favour of a hero. He might as well write big history instead of accurate reports, as praise or as a warning to any future enemy. The ancient Greeks were particularly fond of this kind of advertising and many heroes were treated as such before they had even shown their powers. Big stories, as opposed to history, are suitable for oral tradition and the passing on through culture rather than education.

The Legend becomes a Saga, it is not a historical record anymore, it is now “what is being told” with a certain intention, it serves a purpose. The gaps in the stories are filled with moral teachings, miracles and religious undertones, depending on the current fashion. They make the legend a little bit more implausible, but at the same time even more popular. King Arthur is now bigger than life, a rewarding upgrade for his outstanding deeds. Open the Bible at any random page and you will look at Saga, which is the express method used by the authors, a “this is what we want you to know” instead of a “this is what happened.” We could fight a war over this argument, but the gaps in the tale speak volumes.

Now comes the Myth. King Arthur has accumulated such an overwhelming reputation that people begin to wonder whether he was favoured by a god. Maybe he had spirits to guide him or a weapon of such power that he could slay his enemies by the hundreds, thousands even. A crazy bard becomes a wizard that enables Arthur’s extravagant adventures. A sword is now a magic wand, that serves only the worthy. Just like Hamlet’s ghost, a prophecy creeps into the – until then – relatively reasonable story, turning fact into fantasy. Did you ever wonder why it is often so hard to remember the names of particular Greek heroes? Because with the exception of their defining task, their history is very similar. They become the compounded figure of a stereotypical hero.

What was once a historical account has alchemically merged with imagination, it has become harder to uncover the true core than to compose a new version of the story. Nature, the writer of the fictitious world, is vividly creating ghosts and creatures to feed new offshoots of the tale. Arthur is quickly becoming the fairy tale king that will be the protagonist of innumerable stories. Scandalous rumours about his father, his wife, his knights and his enemies spring up in every conceivable way.

People have long lost cautiousness in dealing with the person they write about. Even though some still hold firm on to the belief that Arthur really existed, there is no respect left for the dead king. Everything goes. Tales are spun of fights against fairy tale creatures, dragons, giants and evil spirits. There is incest, rape and romantic rivalry among the knights spurned on by the fair maidens at court. There is a quest for gold and the Holy Grail, treason and murder. Before you know the obscure ancient king has been turned into a Disney character.

A little inspiration goes a long way as you can see. With age the different variations of the tale fan out in all directions, gaining more distance between them and the original legend, and more importantly between each other. This is not about nostalgia or truthfulness. You simply want to distinguish your work from the others that derived from the same legend. As a writer who is gathering inspiration from old tales it is absolutely worth going back to the roots, divert into unknown territory by changing the genre and the setting and take the less trodden path to a completely new experience.

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