(Jimbo's is proud to feature Cedar Sanderson once again. This time, she's here to tell us all about the fun she had doing research for her latest book, The East Witch. A review is forthcoming.)
I’ve been blending up fairytales into my fantasy work almost since the beginning. I’m not saying that lightly - I’ll sometimes say of my first novel, Vulcan’s Kittens, that I threw the world myths into a blender and pressed pulse a couple of times. With that series, I wanted to create an overarching explanation that linked gods and legends from all around the world... from Mount Olympus to the Mayan jaguar god I referred to in the book as Steve.
When it comes to the books I’m calling the Underhill stories, I approached it a little differently. In this world, where I set Pixie Noir and that trilogy, there are myths and legends that inhabit the earth we know and love and live on, and there are beings who are Under the Hill, which I’ve written as a sort of parallel universe that can have gateways to our world. Only sometimes things don’t line up quite right, and then there are shifts in relative time between the worlds. Also, there are more than two worlds. I explored one of those pocket universes in the Pixie trilogy. I visit another in The East Witch, my latest novel, which is set Underhill, and has some cameo appearances for readers of the trilogy. Plus Raven, or at least a fragment of that Trickster spirit.
With all of my fiction, though, whichever world, I start out by reading fairy tales and folklore and mythology, to use as jumping-off points. Since I prefer to use the older versions, and avoid the modern wussified stories, this has the handy side effect of being public domain, and my favorite research material price: free. I highly recommend all the color fairy books by Andrew Lang, to begin with. They range around the world and have some tales you will never have heard of before. For my purposes, though, I wanted something a little more specific.
Which, it turned out, wasn’t easy to find. I wanted folklore and mythology of the native Siberian tribes. See, I was writing The East Witch about Baba Yaga. I grew up reading Russian Fairy Tales, and a beautifully illustrated collection of those was the first book I ever owned, a Christmas gift when I was only a few months old. I’ve wanted to weave the old witch into a story for many years. With the main character in the book being based loosely on one of my cousins - well, ok, more than one - who lives in Alaska, I decided the middle ground was Siberia. Setting the location of my tale there was a momentous decision that is part of why it took me three years to finish this book.
You see, there is very little known about the tribes who used to occupy all the habitable regions of Siberia, before the Rus came, and then the genocides. It’s fascinating, if you look at ethnology, comparing cultures to see who collected folklore, recorded the stories of the peoples, and who did not. Victorian British? Loved to hear stories and write them down. Russian incursions into a land rich with furs, precious stones, and much more? Not so interested in anything other than forcing the people they encountered to conform to their customs, or else. Languages were lost. Stories vanished into the mists of time, the grandmother’s voices silenced.
I did what I could, to find their remnants. And I wrote the ones I found into my own story of an independent land which did not want Baba Yaga’s iron clutches to fall on it. The way the Siberians of the distant past did not want the Rus. But in my story... well. You’ll have to read it and see for yourself!
As for the books I did find and use as resources, some were very much Russian-based. Like Arthur Ransome’s Old Peter’s Russian Tales or William Ralston’s Russian Fairy Tales. Much more helpful to me were books like Tales of Yukaghir, Lamut, and Russianized Natives of Eastern Siberia, by Waldemar Bogoras and Uno Holmberg’s Mythology of All Races (Vol 4: Siberian and Finno-Ugric). I’d also highly recommend The Shaman’s Coat by Anna Reid. This book isn’t specifically folklore, but it is a history and a recounting of a modern journey to Siberia and a firsthand account of that which remains of the tribes. Finally, George Keenan’s Tent Life in Siberia was a useful resource for setting, as a hundred years ago, Siberia had a different aspect than Anna Reid found.
Fantasy, as a genre, sets up worlds very unlike our own. Worlds where magic is real, but folklore also brings magic to life, in our world. Different times, where the explanations were much less scientific, and more likely to involve spirited exchanges between gods, conflicts between demigods and mere men, or tricksters who played their little jokes with cosmic repercussions. Is it any wonder I like to bring those old, old threads and weave them into my new stories for added depth and dimension?
