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Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time.
—Margaret Atwood
Folk tales and myths, they've lasted for a reason. We tell them over and over because we keep finding truths in them, and we keep finding life in them.
—Patrick Ness
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
—Joseph Campbell |
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First, a clarification: when I use the word "myth" here, I'm not using it in the sense of "falsehood" (Ć la Mythbusters), but referring to ancient or even modern stories which, while fictional, discuss some deeper truth.
In the time before writing was a thing, a culture passed on stories through oral tradition.
We may not know everything about these practices (because they weren't written down, of course), but it's likely that the stories changed with each generation telling them. Perhaps one featured, say, a lion, but the culture moved (or the lions did), and people start growing up without much direct experience with the large felines. Or maybe a rival culture, one which features in a story, gets wiped out through disease, famine, warfare, or any of a number of calamities that can befall a tribe, and eventually, no one is left who knows what they were about.
Maybe ancient heroes, or villains, and their deeds become exaggerated, and the stories morph into myths about gods or demons. Whatever the reason, the point is that the stories probably changed in their details... until writing is invented or borrowed, at which point the tale is set in stone (often literally).
These stories, myth or folklore, become a window into an otherwise lost chamber of history. This has its advantages, especially for modern historians studying ancient cultures. But it also has at least one disadvantage: that the story becomes, over time, increasingly anachronistic, and therefore more difficult to relate to. Society changes, and its technology changes—now, faster than ever.
Stories change all the time, and it's part of a storyteller's job to keep things interesting.
Many old tales have been updated. When the Grimm brothers wrote down a bunch of folklore, they preserved it—but they also froze it in time, with talk of horse-drawn carriages and forgotten social practices. It's unlikely that all of those tales were written down in their original form. While they're certainly interesting in their own right, an updated story can keep them relevant. Swords in an old story might become guns, carriages replaced by SUVs, telegraphs supplanted by email. Romeo and Juliet becomes West Side Story. That sort of thing.
This is a legitimate thing to do, updating old stories for a modern audience. Movies do it all the time, remaking other movies from the past. Comic books have reinvented and rebooted their characters on a regular basis. This doesn't make the remake necessarily lesser (though don't get me started on the ones that are clearly inferior to the earlier versions).
So next time you're stuck for ideas, look at old myths for inspiration (and don't limit yourself to Western cultures). Could be you'll add to the world's library of folklore. |
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Last time, in "Place Names" , I talked about creating or using place names in fantasy writing.
BIG BAD WOLF is Howling  : All kinds of ways to make a name.
And sometimes we can use different ways in the same story.
tj-turkey-jobble-jobble-hard-J  : One town name I always found interesting is Interior, SD. I stumbled upon the little town while sightseeing.
Interior is the oldest Badlands town, dating back to the 1880s, and was originally located along the Big White River. So, why didn't they name it White River or something similar? When the railroad came, the town moved one mile north and is just outside the south gate of Badlands National Park.
It occurred to me after the newsletter came out that I should have mentioned one of the best-known odd place names in the US: Intercourse, PA (there's one in Alabama, too). It's an example of how word meanings change even within a single language. Originally, "intercourse" meant something like "communication," and had no other connotations. Later, as reluctance to discuss such things began to wane, they needed a polite term for a certain thing people sometimes do with each other, and came up with "sexual intercourse." This being too many syllables, combined with a continued reluctance to say "sex," people just started calling it "intercourse." Nowadays, sex is pretty much all the word means to most people.
Thus did the meaning of the place name change, while the place name itself did not. While great fodder for amateur comedians, jokes about it reflect an ignorance, willful or otherwise, of the word's original, perfectly innocent meaning of "communication."
Osirantinous  : I do love finding out the origins of place names but as yet I'm not bothered much to think about them when I'm naming places in my stories when I'm writing off-real. I spend a lot of time thinking about meanings for my characters' names so I should for places too. This reminds me that once long ago my brother and I were looking up all the odd place names in the US. Found one called Weed. Always thought of it as maybe a shortened version of tumbleweed but also more like the drug. But now I've wondered - like your John Wolf's embarrassing dive into the creak - if it's because someone wee'd there on a necessary pitstop and, boom, place name!
Weed is also a surname in the US, which might have been the origin of the place name. Once, someone named Weed was running for Congress in my district against someone named Goode. This resulted in a period of driving down a street and seeing alternating Vote signs: Goode, Weed, Goode, Weed, Goode, Weed.
So that's it for me for now. See you next time! Until then,
DREAM ON!!!
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Fantasy: May 31, 2023 Issue [#11993]
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