Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: When did fairy stories end? Worldbuilding is said to formally begin around the time of Tolkien for most. But what about those early tales of trolls, fairies, elves and curses? Let's talk about myth in fairy tale.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Worldcraft Club, a show for writers, storytellers, dungeon masters, and anybody else who wants to create rich, immersive settings for their audience to get lost in time and time again. I'm James, your host, and I'm joined today by usually producer Dave, who is now guest Dave, and last time you saw him was writer Dave. So Seth is playing producer for us today, and we are talking about myth and fairy stories. This is an interesting thing because we're talking a little bit about what would sort of amount to proto world building. Right. It's hard to find examples of world building that reach back way, way, way far. But all of us can think of things like, you know, I know the brother grim stories or old tales of trolls living under bridges. And theres something about those that caught peoples imaginations and made them think about things further afield. Though the process of worldbuilding itself didnt really take shape for some time after these stories, and thats putting it lightly. Worldbuilding is sort of a recent innovation, so to speak. This really struck up Daves imagination and got us both talking and thinking about the role that some of these early stories play in our current worldbuilding. And I think it's instructive to look at it. So, Dave, you've had some time to think about it. Heck, we've had a crack at this one before with AJ on my tablet. Like on a chair. The Lost episode. Yeah. May they never see the light of day. What are your thoughts on kind of this origin, proto World building of fairy stories and myth?
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Well, I think in a lot of ways we're just doing the same things now that people used to do before in terms of telling these kinds of stories. But I think there's a divide, and it seemed to happen right at when Lord of the Rings was written. Yeah, that's probably putting too fine a point on it, but at the same time, I think there's a lot of validity to that argument. So we were actually like, this came up through someone else on the server, Andy Zimba.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Who writes out Dalancore, right? Yes, yes.
[00:02:30] Speaker B: And he and I got into a conversation about a post he had written.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: Was it an allegory that he'd written?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: The original post was about Tolkien's impact on world building in the way that, like, he kind of ran into problems sometimes with people being like, well, your elves aren't very elvish. And what people were imagining was Tolkien's elves. That's not like, the only legitimate version of an elf. Right. That conversation just kind of. It went on and we worked out the math of how many elves there would be today.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: That was a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: And so, like, in the time that humanity went from 5 million to 8 billion elves would have gone from 5 million to about 7.5 is where the math came out. And that was based on some real sketchy data that I scrounged up.
[00:03:20] Speaker A: Yeah. They've got kind of the immortality, but they don't have the birth rate.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: Right.
[00:03:24] Speaker A: They're not elves. Out.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: But just now that we've set the table. So what he said in the two of us talking back and forth is that he sees a divide between stories that are allegory and stories that are world building. And so the way he puts this, and I don't want to put words into his mouth, jump on the server if you're not on it already and ask him yourself. Yeah, yeah.
[00:03:45] Speaker A: Dave, get this wrong. Yeah.
[00:03:47] Speaker B: And also, you can look at the. The record. It's all there.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: In black and white, or white and black, depending on your phone settings. So he sees a difference between allegory versus world building. Allegory is very simple. World building. There's a troll under a bridge, and it doesn't matter why the troll's there. It doesn't matter why the government hasn't done something to get rid of the troll. It just matters that there's a troll there, and it's an obstacle for our main character. So that's just an allegory. Like, the troll is just an obstacle presented as a mythical creature.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:16] Speaker B: And we talked about that some. He made some amount of caveat in his original statement about that. There's sort of a sliding scale there. But what he says on the other end is that the world building is a world that would also include, like, the world has a past and a present and a future. Whereas with allegory, you're really just interested. Like, you're only interested in building the world enough to tell that particular story, I think is a way to put it. I think, again, that's a fair way to put it. And steel stash, another server member jumped in there and he gave his two cent about it as well. And he kind of emphasized the sliding scale kind of point that, like, a world where there's a troll under a bridge is a very simple world, and it might not matter, so on and so forth, why people haven't done something about this troll before, etcetera. So I think that's. I don't know that I necessarily agree with that as, like, as it's particularly as a dichotomy, the whole allegory versus. Versus world building. But I do think it gives you an interesting point to start grappling with. And I think that it pointed out something to me, helped me kind of clarify a way. I've maybe always sort of thought about it somewhere in the back of my head, but I think part of why we world build today versus telling the myths and fairy tales of yor is that back then, people believed that if you went deep enough in the woods, you might find a troll. Yeah, we just don't believe that anymore. Most of us generally, you know, you might. Yeah, I think people that. Yeah.
[00:05:44] Speaker A: In the comments, like, we're, like, keen to find out. Yeah, yeah.
[00:05:47] Speaker B: But, yeah, I think that.
[00:05:48] Speaker A: That.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: I think that plays a role. I think also just the fact that, like, I think part of what Tolkien did that sort of broke things.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:56] Speaker B: In a sense, like, busted this all wide open is that he was really creating a mythology, but he wasn't. He was setting out in some ways to create a mythology for Britain because Britain didn't have its own, like, a mythology to call its own. He created this for that purpose. But in doing so, he created elves as, like, flesh and blood creatures. So we think of them as needing to have things like birth rates.
Whereas I think in a lot of your older fairy tales, and this is something that Tolkien talks about in his on fairy tales essay, these are creatures from another world. Like, there's one troll under the bridge because only one fell spirit, like, took the form of a troll to go sit under that bridge and taunt this town, maybe even this particular person. But we just don't buy that anymore. We're like, where's the rest of the trolls? Who is this troll's mom and who is this troll's dad? And, like, all these questions that it's like, it doesn't matter. It's a monster. Like, it's a demon that's taken. Yeah. And maybe this is just putting, like, explicitly christian overtones onto it. I don't think it is. It's something you see through a lot of religions and belief systems that, like, a creature could come from another dimension or something of that nature. A creature could come from another plane and not have to be so grounded in biology. And reality as to need things like birth rates and populations and a food source and all those kind of things.
[00:07:24] Speaker A: Well, Tolkien's elves sort of straddled that, you know what I mean? Like, they were mystical flesh and blood creatures in a way. You know what I mean? There was a little bit of a lack of clarity. I mean, Gandalf's a really good example of it. He's a physical manifestation in the form of an old man, of a mire. And so, like, it's. And as is Sauron and balrogs, and it's kind of like.
[00:07:48] Speaker B: And the elf, the Ents are tree spirits.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Like, they're more spiritual creatures than they are flesh and blood creatures, but they were also the entwives. Like, yeah. So, yeah, it definitely walked a line. Yeah.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: And I think it's an interesting thing. I think a lot of times, like, a lot of fantasy is a desire to sort of reclaim that lost wonder. And I think it's one of the reasons why, you know, we focus so heavily on this question of wonder and awe and mystery is that I think, really, that is a lot of the role of worldbuilding, because it used to be that, like, you know, if you look at locations of towns, there's, like, basically a five mile radius. You can draw around any given town, and you will find another town within that radius because that was the distance of a day's travel to trade for horse and cart. And this often occurs, like, in Pennsylvania. You can actually look around here if you go in Britain, certainly. Like, it'll be the case if your world is that small within that sort of five mile radius around town.
Really, anything could kind of be happening beyond the sort of fog of war around there. Like, if you're familiar with strategy games, you'll have that kind of fog of war scenario where when it gets dark, it's like you don't see what's going on over there. And I think there was a sense of wonder about the world that has been lost. But I think we sort of know that feeling is almost necessary, I think, to some extent, to the human soul. And so we've kind of created a synthetic mystery and wonder in the form of stories to kind of keep that going now. And we need these broader worlds to sort of feed that desire, not to get too metaphysical on this again.
[00:09:34] Speaker B: No, I think that's absolutely right. And I think the reality is the world is more wonderful and wacky than we often give it credit for being. There may not be trolls. You know, Sasquatch might not be out there. You know, I want to believe, you know. Yeah, I want him to be.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: I hope.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: But, like, I just actually had an article kind of come up on my phone, and I gave it a look. I forget the exact title and all the other pertinent details, but the thrust of the article was that we have all these ideas about how fast the universe is expanding, and it all came from the Hubble telescope. And we have all these.
You just taught things as if that's the black and white way it is.
But there's discrepancies in the data, and they're unsure about what caused it. The speed at which the universe is expanding is in a constant thing, as Hubble was measuring it. I think I'm getting this right enough for my purposes here, but the takeaway from the article is, like, the person they interviewed was like, you know, it's very exciting. It could just be that we have misunderstood the universe. And as someone that has more of a, I don't want to say, like, mystical outlook, but definitely a more spiritual outlook on the universe, I'm kind of like, yeah, you probably did. Like, I mean, we're just. We're all.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: We're.
[00:10:48] Speaker B: I think we are so much closer to understanding the universe now than we were a long time ago in a lot of different metrics, but at the same time, there really is still a lot of wonder out there. And there's a concept in science that's always just kind of, like, sort of made me chuckle. It's called, like, the half life of knowledge, where knowledge, just like, a radioactive element, decays over time.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:12] Speaker B: And, like, stuff like, there's going to come a certain point where it's, like, only half the information that was in our science book textbooks are still believed.
There might be this kernel that's still going to be in there, that's going to be consistent.
But we do live in a world that's full of wonder and mystery. And so I think that's why we like these stories and why we want to experience that. I think maybe we want, on some level, to believe that there's a troll in the woods.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's true. It's one of the things that Seth and I had done when we kind of started this off is, again, like, I've said this a thousand times on here, but, like, we kind of started this off desiring to complain about bad world building as we saw it. Right? Like, single biome, planets, all that kind of stuff. And, like, things that were just sort of annoying to us in world building. And the more that we thought about it, the more we kind of went back to this question of what is world building really supposed to do? And I think recapture that sense of wonder is like a pretty big portion of the goal and objective of solid world building within a given system. And so it's interesting to start with these fairy stories and these myths, because part of the excitement in them, to some degree, is they might be real.
This might actually happen to you. You need to be prepared in case you encounter a bridge troll.
I don't think a lot of, at.
[00:12:44] Speaker B: The very least, the woods are dangerous. Watch your back in there. Exactly.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: You don't know what you're going to encounter. And especially, I think, as people explore new lands or kind of pioneers in new places, you don't know if you're going to encounter a sapient, old timey bathing suit up in the himalayas or whatever. You don't know what you're going to get. And it's this idea that the world could just sort of throw a curveball at you. And I think over time, its worldbuilding is sort of a side effect of the onset of materialism and ennui, and it's this idea that, well, no, the troll does have to have come from somewhere. You know what I mean? The troll cannot have been spontaneously erupting from malign spirits in the area of nondescript origin. Like, it just has to have some lineage or history. I think increasingly, I'm seeing world building actually go the other way now. I think particularly with cosmic horror and other genres like that, where they're sort of being like, yeah, it's actually, you know, this stuff could sort of materialize, and we deal with it materializing. I think, like, adventure time kind of plays a bit of that sort of game where it's, does there need to be a reason for candy people? And then they're like, ah, cool. There's this thing called the mother gum that makes Princess Bubblegum, and it's real weird. And she has a brother who's, like a dragon who, like, fell and hurt his head and got really sad. Like, it's bizarre stuff, like, happens in that show, and they just gave up trying to explain it. I think there is a resurgence of that almost desire for the unexplained. It's going full myth into the way we're doing things. Do you think you see that a little bit?
[00:14:19] Speaker B: I'm not sure.
I think there's been an interesting kind of back and forth between his attention.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: And I don't know I feel I'm, like, grasping at what's been.
What I've seen recently.
How do I answer that question? What are some worlds that seem built and how do they.
[00:14:43] Speaker A: What are the dreams and things like that? It's hard to put a finger on it, but get a sense that we're approaching an era where there's a little bit of pushback to, I think, a purely materialist view of world building that you have to establish the birth rates or it's not realistic, or this idea of realistic in a world is, I think, being.
I don't know if I want to say it's being, like, abandoned, but, like, agitated against a little bit. I'm seeing that in some of the. It's fringier stuff. You know, I don't think adventure time's for everybody, but, like, it's definitely. I don't know, I just wonder if we're beginning to appeal to a desire for more mystery and myth just throwing curveballs at you. Right. Yeah, I'm just, like, hitting you with all of it.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: I don't know. I would be interested to see, then if Lewis's stock goes up a little bit. Yeah, I think that would be a good thing to watch because, honestly, Lewis is pretty bad world builder by most modern standards.
[00:15:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: And I think Lewis or Tolkien even called him out on.
[00:15:48] Speaker A: Especially talking about allegory. Right. Like, it's like flipping heck. Yes. But I just.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: I want to be a little bit. A little bit pedantic about allegory, though.
[00:15:57] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Because Pilgrim's progress is allegory.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Right.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: Now you actually have characters that are named for what they symbolize.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:10] Speaker B: Like, that's true. Allegory. And then I think you could move on the alignment. You move a lot further up the scale before you get to Lewis, who was definitely.
He was definitely writing with a heaviest obvious chaotic allegory. Yeah. Symbols and parallels. But the fact that the lion wasn't named Jesus maybe gives him just a tiny bit of leeway.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: There's this really good. It was a meme. Right. That they had. And it was Tolkien sitting there saying, does the ring represent sin?
Not really. I mean, I don't know. You could think about it, and it's a good long thing. And then it goes to Louis and he goes, I swear, if people don't realize Aslan is Jesus, I will light myself on fire.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Which you never would because he was a good augustinian. But I think Louis was not much of a world builder in this modern sense. And I think, again, I think that Tolkien's world, his approach is really what gave us world building. And Lewis was a contemporary and a friend, but either didn't get exactly what he was doing or just said, like, that's not what I'm trying to do.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Yeah. They had completely different approaches to fiction.
[00:17:25] Speaker B: And I think it was. I've been reading chronicles of Narnia to my kids, and I've read some other Lewis, both his, like, fiction and his nonfiction. And the man can write.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: His prose is beautiful and like the space trilogy, a little more aimed at adults. Some of my favorite books, but doesn't have the popularity of Narnia. A lot of people think of Lewis, they think of Narnia, and again, Narnia it's not. If you're going there looking for a world where you can understand an entire, like the family tree of the Seders and what are all these things doing here, then? It's not going to deliver on that. But it really is an extremely well written story.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: And I think where I'm kind of satisfied is because I am. I did not read nardium, and I have yet to read it. I have seen multiple adaptations of it, varying quality. I have not. The BBC one was amazing. This dude's dressed in, like, huge paper mache, furry thing. It's like it's a beaver, but anyway.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: And it's been many years since I saw that one, if that's the one I saw.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: I have strong recollections of it, but I always found, in a lot of ways, CS Lewis's world building. I think I fancied myself as almost too mature for it. I was like, I need more detail. I need more lineages. I need more written languages. I need to have more clarity on where these different characters come from. I can't accept that the queen just has a dwarf chill in there. And that dwarf appears to have no, no formal identity or culture except that he's curmudgeonly, you know, and it's like that for me, just always.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Plus, he's dressed like a gnome. He doesn't look like a dwarf at all.
[00:19:12] Speaker A: He's like a dwarf at all. He's supposed to protect gnome.
[00:19:15] Speaker B: You did dwarves wrong, Lewis.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: Yeah, just go back and protect your garden from witches, like gnomes are supposed to do. That was like, yeah, he did a terrible job protecting from witches.
[00:19:25] Speaker B: Yeah, he had really fallen down on corrupted gnome.
[00:19:28] Speaker A: That's what a dwarf is. But, yeah, it's that thing. I remember this one time I had this conversation with this guy and I was like, you know what? I was playing Warcraft, and their trolls are totally different. They're like these very long limbed, skinny, like critters, and they're supposed to be, like, more agile and quick. They're a little bit elf like in that way. Sort of the skill sets you would ascribe to an elf, you'd call tusks. Yeah. And they got tusks and everything in there. Like. And I was like, we really need some fantasy world standardization here. I need to know, like, what I'm looking at when you tell me you've got a trolley or an orc, and it's like, tolkien orcs are different from Warcraft orcs. And, like, a whole pile of these things are like, you know, it's hard to keep track of it. Right. But the thing about it is, it's. I looked at Louis, and I assumed he was childish in a lot. He is.
[00:20:10] Speaker B: That's, like, one of my favorite words to use to describe him.
[00:20:12] Speaker A: Childlike might be better.
[00:20:14] Speaker B: Beautifully childish. There's actually. There's an anecdote that now, these. Anybody that's written a book knows that there's not, like, one single source that your book came from.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: But it's a soup. Yes. And. But Lewis had what? Or Tolkien once said in an interview that the reason he wrote Lord of the rings was because he was creating a language and Louis wanted a story. Louis always wanted a story. And it's. That is just the coolest thing. Like, he was just. He was such a child at heart. Things were. Things didn't get old to him because he was young.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: Well, he got tired of his friend listing his Wikipedia page to him and was like, look, like, this is. This is actually really.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: This is.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: He got bullied into writing a story because he got so. Because his friends got so tired of him telling him about all the cool crap he was writing. He's like, well, I've written this language, and it's based loosely on Finnish and an amalgamation of Welsh. And, like, put it in a story. He's like, well, here's a poem. Five rings under the sky. It's like, oh, that's. That's cool. That's amazing.
[00:21:17] Speaker B: What if I took the weird, like, bedtime story that I told my kids and then turned it into, like, an epic?
[00:21:24] Speaker A: Why not?
[00:21:26] Speaker B: But I would like to. I wasn't planning on doing this, which is why I'm holding my phone to do it. So this is the dedication from the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe to Lucy Barfield.
My dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it, I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result. You are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound, you will be older still. But someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate godfather, Cs Lewis.
Yeah, and I think that's such a beautiful way of explaining, like, how Lewis saw fairy tales. And I just, I love that, that quote, and I love that concept. And I think Lewis said it more pithily elsewhere. That people grow out of fairy, or any book that is worth reading as a child is going to be worth reading again as an adult.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: That's 100% true. Boomerangs around. I don't having a, you have to, I'm a boy myself. I feel it.
[00:22:37] Speaker B: You have to almost go through, like, your awkward teenage years. And it doesn't have to literally be your teenage Years, but you have to go through.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: It does have to be awkward.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Yes, but you have to go through sort of this sophomoric phase of thinking, like, I am too smart to like that kind of thing.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: We call those the Reddit Years.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: You get pretty Reddit y about Reddit, dude.
[00:23:02] Speaker A: I get ready. Yeah, I get reddity about Reddit, Gary.
That's right on the percent. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: But I think a few, and I think we, we oftentimes in that period were mistaking cynicism for intelligence, and we're just, we're throwing babies out with Bath water. I hope our culture is coming back around to a place where we appreciate fairy tales. I think there's a, there's real value in it, not only in a moral teaching kind of thing, but also just in a sense of escapism. That is part of, that is part of, like, in, on fairy tales, what Tolkien says in defense of them is that they're both a way to grapple with the real and escape from it for a little bit at the same time.
[00:23:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a little bit of both. There are things you can learn through a fairy story.
[00:23:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: You can let the fairy story pay your dumb tax to some extent. Let them make the mistakes in the story so you can learn.
I love that. So there it is, worldbuilding. Before worldbuilding, myths and fairy stories talk about a world which, to their listeners may have been somewhat descriptive or at least informative of the world they were living in. Over time, there's been a cynicism in stories that seems to require there to be a material explanation for every element of a setting, but Dave and I are seeing a patchy resurgence that rejects this idea in favor of defense. Fantastical. What I would say is don't reject wonder and childlike joy as you found your settings allow mystery. You don't have to determine the birth rate of your elvish population for them to feel grounded in the setting, and certainly not at the cost of wonder. If you had some strong feelings about this episode and you want to come and yell at us about it, go ahead and join the discord server linked in the show notes. We'd love to have you in there mixing it up with us and giving your own opinion on fairy stories, myth, allegory, and world building for Dave I'm James and this has been the Worldcraft Club podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
It's all dwarf it all.
[00:25:13] Speaker B: You did dwarves wrong, Lewis.
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Yeah, just go back and protect your garden from witches like gnomes are supposed to do.
