6. Chapter Three

Legends, Myths and Folktales: The Key Components of a Body of Folklore

When considering the origins of Video games as a storytelling medium, you would be forgiven in thinking that it’s a fairly modern invention. And while that is partly true (the digital game believed to have its origins in 1972 with Atari’s Pong), non-linear interactive storytelling has a rich and ancient history through folklore, myth, legend, and perhaps most interestingly - divination texts.

Ancient storytelling was incredibly interactive. As cavemen, we sat around campfires sharing tales with one another about the outside world. This is of course, how story was first born. It was a way of conveying instructions for survival in a dangerous world when our ancestors had to go out to retrieve food, resources, and (unfortunately) slaves. While hiding up a tree or in the back of a cave, the storyteller would lead his tribe in an almost trance-like ritual of explanation, in which others might chime in and completely change the direction of the tale being told. In this way, storytelling was birthed through conversation. Arguably, storytelling only came under “authorial control” with the invention of the written word. Cultures without writing, instead conversed with one another so as to remember and keep their traditions alive. If we take a moment to understand the nature of these kinds of non-linear conversational narratives, then we can use this understanding to help us in building authentic story worlds. But first, we need to rediscover those modes of story.

SEMANTIC CHANGE

Over time, the meaning of words change. The word “Awful” once meant “filled with awe” and was used to describe religious fervour. For us today, that word now means something which is horrible or bad. In linguistics, this is called semantic change – when a word evolves over time to the point in which the modern meaning is radically removed from its original usage. In the world of Pop Culture storytelling, we’ve allowed semantic change to confuse our understanding of legends, myths and folktales. These are not originally interchangeable terms, though we often use them as such. And a quick disclaimer here: Because semantic change has so muddled these terms, we are using the word “Folklore” as an umbrella term which sits above all others. It’s important to clarify that while folktales and folk practices are a kind of folklore, they are not the only kind. So, let’s take a moment to explore these separate narrative phenomena’s and rediscover their meanings.

LEGENDS

I began this book with a quote from perhaps two of the earliest folklorists in the western tradition – Jacob and Ludwig Grimm. In their 1818 book, Deutsche Sagen or German Legends in English, Jacob Grimm writes:

“Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historische.”¹

Roughly translated, Grimm’s quote is as follows:

“The tale is poetic, the legend, historical.”

Although they may contain elements of the supernatural or the miraculous (such as monsters, ghosts, or divine intervention), legends are typically considered to be truthful in some way. Their claims may be hard or even impossible to verify, but more often than not, they are considered in some way to be of historical origins. Legends are often based on real figures, places, and events. Interestingly, this historical core becomes distorted and exaggerated over time due to the legend being passed down from generation to generation and essentially interacted with and changed. With all these sub-genres of folklore, the listener becomes the next storyteller, and with each new storyteller, the legend is edited and added to, so that its narrative might become “better” in the eyes of the teller. This unreliability, this elasticity, allows the tales being told to be perceived and explored in new and different ways with every generation it endures. Legends tend to take on cultural and sometimes spiritual significance. Stories like King Arthur and his Knights, Robin Hood, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, or even Homer’s Illiad, fit the bill when we talk about stories that may have some basis in historical fact.

In his essay “It happened Not Too Far From Here…”: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization, folklorist, Timothy Tangherlini takes us through a summary of definitions for legends, all the way from Grimm in the 1800s to modern folklorists of the 60s, 70s, 80s and early 90s. Although he was unable to find a definition that fits perfectly, he managed to distil the important bits into the following quote:

“Legend, typically, is a short (mono-) episodic, traditional, highly ecotypified, historicized narrative performed in a conversational mode, reflecting on a psychological level a symbolic representation of folk belief and collective experiences and serving a reaffirmation of commonly held values of the group to whose tradition it belongs.”²

Now that’s a whole bunch of big academic words, but breaking it down into layman’s terms, Tangherlini is basically saying: legends are short, episodic, traditional stories that are specifically located in terms of their real-world settings. They are shared through oral tradition, and are an example of how beliefs, superstitions and collective experiences confirm the values and morals of the people to whom the legend belongs.

Understanding this definition of legends allows us to incorporate a deeper level of context to our standard video game quest narratives. Quest narratives are defined as in-game activities..

“in which players must overcome challenges in order to reach a goal. When players successfully surmount the challenges of a quest ad achieve its goal, the players actions bring about a series of events that may comprise a narrative in the process.”³

When we understand a quest in terms of legend, we can ground activities in our games even deeper into the world building. Consider how most fantasy RPG games include at some stage an optional side-quest to track down the strongest weapon or armour in the game. Often times these side-quests are comprised of collecting several items that will unlock a hidden chamber in an ancient temple or ask the player to kill a series of high-level enemies, each holding a clue to the weapon/armour’s location.

Contextualizing these kinds of side-quests as being derived from legend integrates both the journey and its reward smoothly into the world, making it feel less gamey and more authentic to the immersive qualities of your story - We are seeking the lost sword of Galahad who was said to have existed during the Diluvian era of our game-world’s past and according to some, found in his final resting place, deep within a nameless mountain in the north-eastern region of the map. Now, instead of the player purely looking for a weapon to make them unstoppable, they are engaging in a legend passed down through the centuries. Likewise, the gameplay involved in this quest can now become more diverse – yes, perhaps we still need to collect seven keys, or kill all twenty mercenaries patrolling the map, but we can also include things like red herrings (perhaps there are several conflicting versions of the legend floating around that have regional differences), exploration and navigation, research, investigation and other such tasks that focus the player’s attention on the story, rather than on features of play like collecting points or items, killing or beating game AI, escorting NPCS, etc. By shifting the focus, we turn gameplay into the underlying skeleton or architecture, allowing players to simply immerse themselves in the world instead.

MYTHS

What is a myth then? We’ll cover this one pretty quickly. The Oxford University Press’ A Dictionary of English Folklore by Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud defines myth simply as:

“Stories about divine beings, generally arranged in a coherent system; they are revered as true and sacred; they are endorsed by rulers and priests, and closely linked to religion.”⁴

We can immediately see some big differences here between Myths and Legends. Legends are based (supposedly) off of historical events, people, and places. They focus on humans, although those humans’ abilities can become exaggerated over time through the game of telephone played by storytellers. Myths on the other hand, focus themselves on the divine and play out on a larger, more cosmic stage. Myths can be deeply symbolic. They are not giving an account of an actual event, rather their focus is more on conveying an important truth to those who listen to their telling. Myths explain the unexplainable – creation, long forgotten migrations, the weather, what happens when we die, etcetera, etcetera.

We see here that the primary purpose of a myth is to teach a spiritual truth to the listener through allegory and mysticism. And once again, like all the subgenres within folklore, myths are passed down often through oral tradition, mutating as they move from one generation to the next. If we consider myths as being closely related to religion and mysticism, then we find ourselves with a rather handy framework to, just like we did with legends, shift gameplay mechanics beneath the surface and allow for greater immersion into the story world. For example, let’s consider magic systems in games – all too often, magic in games feels at best, a little uninspired – you’ve got your fire spells, your water spells, your earth spells, and your wind spells. Magic most regularly features as a series of elemental powers in games. Occasionally, we might up the ante by include light and dark spells on top of those initial four, but rarely do games move past these categories. And yet, in the real-world, when we look at the history of occultism – whether it’s the astral magic of the middle eastern Picatrix, the ceremonial practices of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the more down-to-earth magic of the European Cunning Women and Le Petit Albert, or the trance-based experiences of Shamanism, magic is a far more diverse and interesting discipline than just air, earth, water and fire. By connecting our magic systems to the religious mythologies of our fictional worlds, we open ourselves up to a more creative interpretation of how spellcasting might look for our players.

FOLKTALES

“Das Märchen ist poetischer, die Sage, historische.”

“The tale is poetic. The legend, historical.”

The word Märchen is defined as meaning:

“A narrative passed down in the people, in which supernatural powers and forms intervene in the lives of men…”⁵

As such, we can confidently say that Märchen, which translates to “fairy tale” in English, is a good place to start when defining the concept of a folktale. Following Grimm’s premise here, we can also assume that the folktale is more “poetic” in nature – which unfortunately doesn’t give us too much to go on.

But what do you think of when you hear the term “folktale”?

For me, my mind casts up images of leprechauns and changelings. Doppelgängers and Elves. I think of old superstitions – placing iron above your door to keep out the fae, or a pair of scissors beneath your pillow to protect against witches. Perhaps your mind goes somewhere a bit more modern – stories like Bloody Mary, The Hook Man or The Missing Hitchhiker. Perhaps you think of the countless Creepypastas that now exist online – Slenderman, No-End House, Anansi’s Goatman, the list goes on…

It’s interesting that such a term casts up so many variations in our heads. Unlike Legends and Myths, the folktale is much more personal in nature. It’s not about gods or goddesses, demons, or vast cosmic powers. It’s not about great wars, mighty heroes, or exaggerated outlaws (although these things can all sometimes make an appearance.) Rather, folktales are about us. They’re about our fears, our superstitions. They’re about the little things we don’t know or can’t understand in our world. That definition of a Myth I mentioned earlier from Oxford? It goes on to state that:

“…Once the link is broken and the actors in the story are not regarded as gods but as human heroes, giants or fairies, it is no longer a myth but a folktale.”⁶

And so, we come to something of a definition for this unusual sub-genre. Like legends and myths, folktales are popular stories that move from generation to generation, person to person, via word of mouth. Also, like legends and myths, folktales are often so old, the original author has been forgotten. However, folktales have an incredibly unique point of difference in the way they are told. It is almost as if they are less sacred than the previous two.

Why is this?

Well, perhaps it is because folktales enjoy the ability to shapeshift like the creatures they are often about. Often, you will find there are many different versions of the same folktale going at once. They can be slightly or vastly different, come from competing sources and even be contradictory in nature. Think for example, of the urban myth Bloody Mary. Who is Mary? Is she a corpse as some versions of the story suggest? Is she a witch, as posited by others? Or a ghost – as is the case in the version I first heard as a child? And never mind who she is, what about what she does when you summon her? Is she a friend or a foe? Covered in blood or not covered in blood? Does she scream at you, do your bidding, curse you, reveal the way you will die, strangle you, drink your blood or scratch your eyes out?

The answer is, of course, that she is all of these things and more – depending on what version of the folktale you hear and/or identify with. As Game Designers we can use this fluid-nature of the folktale to surprise and excite players as they explore our worlds. Imagine hearing the folktale of a particularly nasty monster dwelling in a nearby forest. You gain what knowledge you can from the story, prepare your weapons and potions, then head out to find the creature. You encounter it, only to discover there are several surprising aspects of the creature that you didn’t previously know about.

Perhaps you’re being chased by a mob of vicious fairies, and you remember hearing from an NPC earlier something about them not being able to stand the touch of iron. You hunt through an abandoned building, sneaking around, trying not to draw the little monster’s attention, and upon discovering an iron bar on the floor, set about taking the fight to them. What if you’re being pursued by a vampire and remembering one of the old stories you’ve heard through the course of the game, you drop from your inventory all the bags of grain you’ve picked up while exploring random barrels and boxes around the world. The vampire, upon seeing you drop these items immediately stops and starts to count them all, giving your more time to escape or find a means of killing it. These are just some of the ways folktales can manifest in gameplay, and again, they bring narrative context to mechanics, so that immersion is all the easier for the player.

FOLK PRACTICES

While we now have three clear definitions on the different kinds of folklore, we also need to explore the tools or vocabulary in which these sub-genres are expressed throughout history and cultures. This vocabulary is termed by anthropologists as folk practices and are intern divided into five more sub-sub-genres. These are:

1. Verbal tradition

2. Material culture

3. Customs

4. Childlore, and…

5. Folk History.

Verbal Tradition

Verbal tradition relates to both the written and spoken word, songs, chants, poems, etc. It is important to note that Verbal lore is repetitive. A simple conversation will not suffice, rather verbal lore is defined by those words and phrases that conform to some kind of traditional pattern known to the speaker and the audience. For example, the phrase “Why did the chicken cross the road?” tags for us that this is a joke and the next sentence to be uttered shall be the punchline. “Once upon a time…” signals to us that this is a story, and quite probably a fairy tale. Verbal tradition can be used to convey chants, prayers, curses, songs, fables, fairy tales, poetry, ghost stories, greetings, jokes, oaths, limericks, myths, legends, proverbs, tongue-twisters, urban legends and many others.

MATERIAL CULTURE

Material culture is all about physical artifacts of folk belief. These are things that you can touch, hold, live in or eat. These physical objects can be produced by artisans and be unique (such as idols, carvings, or shrines). They can also be massed produced (think Tiki Cups or fridge magnets). Material culture can convey folk beliefs through things like paintings, embroidery, costume, holistic medicines, food and recipes, toys, decorations, pottery, sculptures and carvings, architecture, and many others.

CUSTOMS

Customs are defined as remembered enactment or re-enactment. These are often closely related with socially appropriate movements or acts and can cross over with other genres. Customs convey folk beliefs through things like handshakes, special events (birthday parties for example), games, manners, hand signals, and many others.

CHILDLORE

If there were such thing as a sub-sub-sub-genre, then childlore would be it. With childlore, we are looking at all the other folk practices, filtered through the understanding of children. As such, childlore has historical been difficult to record, since children often tend to be more secretive about their world. Childlore might include things like nursery rhymes, hopscotch, jokes, urban legends and playground songs, amongst others.

FOLK HISTORY

Lastly, we have folk history, which is essentially the act of recording folk traditions – something that in many places has become a tradition in and of itself.

MAGIC

We touched on magic in games a little earlier, but let’s go slightly further here and make a few notes about the traditions of magic in the real-world for the sake of covering these sub-genres accurately. Although there are hundreds of versions of magic out there, for the sake of simplicity, we can categorize them into two groups – High Magic and Low Magic, otherwise known as Ceremonial Magic and Folk Magic or Shamanism.

Ceremonial magic is likely what you, the reader, are most familiar with. You will have seen it your entire life in films, books, and games, though chances are, the authors of those texts have spiced the concept up a bit for the sake of drama. Simply put, Ceremonial Magic is a religious or spiritual practice in which the magician or practitioner performs complex rituals with the purpose of achieving various forms of enlightenment. Ceremonial magic relies on ritualism, book-learning, reliance on the positioning of celestial bodies, the worship of gods and the pondering of various esoteric philosophies. As with all things, there is also an element of classism involved with magic. Ceremonial magic is typified as a form of occultism belonging to the upper-class, the educated and the priestly – those who are special initiates to secret gnosis (knowledge).

Folk Magic or Shamanism, on the other hand, is to my mind, much more interesting. While folk magic also involves rituals and chants, it is also inclusive of herbalism, palmistry, lucky charms, talismans, divination, astral projection and the manipulation of spirits and other supernatural entities. Folk Magic is often the magic of the people. The lower-class, the uneducated, the cunning women, grannies, shaman, and hoodoo practitioners. Folk magic is more grounded, more earthy, and while it often maintains a connection to religious beliefs around gods, goddesses, sin, and salvation, it tends to make use of complex (and often contradictory) matrixes of folktales, myths and legends to define its cosmology, rather than simply relying on orthodoxy. To give an example, Hoodoo magic derives from various traditional African religious practices and indigenous botanical knowledge. Yet, it also incorporates elements of folklore from the United States, as well as Tarot and elements of Christian (Catholic) mysticism.

Exploring unique magic systems in further detail is beyond the scope of this book, but if this concept has sparked interest in you, I would highly recommend that you track down and devour the book Game Magic: A Designer’s Guide to Magic Systems in Theory and Practice by Jeff Howard, as he presents an absolutely stunning exploration of this topic for both scholars and practitioners of game design alike.

CTHULHU RULES THE WORLD

Okay, phewph! That was a lot to get through, right? Well, we’re not done yet! Now that we have a working definition of what folklore is exactly, it’s time to explore how folklore spreads so that we can understand the ways in which we can artificially develop it within our own work. And to do this, we’re actually going to move away from history and religion for a moment to instead, plunge ourselves headfirst into one of my favourite nerd-culture subjects – The Cthulhu Mythos.

You’ve heard of that right?

The giant octopus headed alien god invented by that horribly racist writer H P Lovecraft, and popularized by Tabletop Roleplaying Games, Comic books, Video games, and more recently Film and TV, like HBO’s Lovecraft Country (2020) or SpectreVision’s The Color out of Space (2019).

Talk about a sharp left-hand turn, right? Well, the truth is, Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos have a lot to do with what we’ve been discussing so far.

But before I get started, I want to give credit where credit is due - to the wonderful YouTube channel, Tales Foundry. The case study we are about to pursue is not of my own making, rather it is explored in their video “Are H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos Actual Myth?” [sic]⁷

In it, Tales Foundry argue that the Cthulhu Mythos is not just the product of clever world building but is instead an example of how an actual body of folklore can be artificially developed in the modern era.

When you consider Lovecraft’s canon and the canon of those who carried on the Lovecraftian tradition after his death, you see that the Cthulhu Mythos bears a strong resemblance to a body of folklore which explores the concerns of post-modern existentialism. It does this through dark philosophies, studious humans, incomprehensible monsters, and alien gods. But the true point of difference between Lovecraft’s mythos and the mythos of say… JRR Tolkein or JK Rowling, for example, is that the Cthulhu Mythos exhibits something known as Mimetic Circulation.

We’ve been talking about mimetic circulation for a while now, though I’ve not named it as such. Mimetic circulation is when a story is told, then altered, then told then altered, then told then altered again, ad infinitum, until it becomes so changed by this continual exchange that it reflects something about those who tell it. The actual content of the folklore becomes unimportant at this stage. In these instances, the content, and indeed, the very vocabulary being used, become more akin to props on a theatrical stage. Props that are used primarily out of habit to project the ideas, feelings and fears of the cultures and people who appropriated those stories.

Somehow, HP Lovecraft, a down-on-his-luck ultra-racist, pulp-horror writer managed to do this. If you’ve read any of his work, you’ll have noticed this, even if you weren’t aware what it was called. Throughout his collection of short stories and novellas, Lovecraft often makes throw-away references to books, artefacts, gods, monsters and other such “props.” These random references then appear again in later stories with greater detail, effectively tying his work together with an underlying framework. The town of Arkham, for example, was just a reference, originally appearing in Lovecraft’s story The Picture in the House, before becoming a hub for the supernatural in later works. Dagon began as the title of a short story completely independent from the great and terrible God that would one day be worshipped by evil cultists in one of his greatest works, The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

On top of his seemingly flippant approach to world building, Lovecraft also encouraged his writer friends to develop their own stories using his fictional creations. They would adopt his props into their work, and in return he would adopt theirs into his. This broadened the mythos greatly. The writer Clark Ashton Smith created the toad-like entity Tsathoggua in his story The Tale of Satampra Zeiros. Lovecraft later used the same creature in The Whisperer in Darkness. Frank Belknap wrote of a version of Lovecraft’s Necronomicon (an ancient evil grimoire) as being translated by the real-world scholar, Dr John Dee. Afterwards, Lovecraft began referencing the “John Dee translation” of the Necronomicon in his own work.

As a result of all this swapping and connecting of ideas, a larger body of literature began to grow around a pantheon of gods, monsters and their human victims. After his death, as the number of authors contributing to this pantheon grew (Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman and Laird Barron to name just a few), the lore of this fantastical world became a cacophony of stories – some were badly written, and many were often contradictory. But it started something. A spark was lit, and from it, Lovecraftian horror as a genre was born.

The Cthulhu Mythos became more than just worldbuilding. And now, with the original works of Lovecraft all existing in the public domain, his mythos has opened up to anyone who wants to contribute, and just like real folklore, it has become alive, interactive and to date, more than a hundred years after his death – ever growing.

Footnotes:

1. Grimm. Deutsche Sagen. Berlin: In der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1816.

2. Tangherlini, Timothy. "It happened Not Too Far From Here…”: A Survey of Legend Theory and Characterization." Western Folklore 49, no. 4 (October 1990)

3. 371-390. 27 Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley: A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008.

4. Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

5. “Marchen Etymology” – Google Search

6. Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud. A Dictionary of English Folklore. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

7. Tales Foundry. "Are H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos Actual Myth? — H.P. Lovecraft Series." YouTube. 1. December 10, 2017.