I think perhaps every child is raised on folklore. Whether grand mythologies full of heroes and gods or small superstitions and daily rituals, we are fed a legacy of magic from infancy onward. I was told stories of monsters and how to trick them, fools and the traps they caught themselves in, forests and the gods they held. Being a ghoulish child, I liked the bloodier stories, and if as an adult I am a little more squeamish, I know what drew me – what draws every child – to these stories that meld the real world with another a little offset, and a little more magical.
Folklore is a language of belonging. It is a framing of our relationship with place, with the natural world, and with each other. It tells us how to navigate the things that frighten us, and how to understand the scales of justice and fairness and power. Even now, when we here in the global north are so severed from our ecosystems, these superstitions, rituals and childhood tales linger in our lives as memories of our own rootedness. When we weave corn dollies for the harvest festival, the act carries echoes of gratitude and placation to the harvest spirits. When we crown our fisher queens, we are still giving thanks to the sea for letting our fishers come safely home. When we switch on our Christmas lights, we are saying, ‘the darkness will end, because we have each other.’ It is a tracery into our own pasts and the many worlds which grew us.
As a writer I have always been fascinated by how our own internal wellspring of folklores shapes each of us. How two characters might approach a wolf, a storm, or a harvest can tell us so much about their heritage and their understanding of the world. It reveals, if you like, the path they have travelled. Increasingly though, faced with global and local crises from climate change, xenophobia and the corrosive greed of capitalism, I have been thinking about the power of folklore to shape where we go from here.
Because folklore is an organic thing – it evolves as we do, it travels with us and blends and grows where-ever we land. It bursts forth uninvited in new buildings and mutates in abandoned ones. And everywhere it speaks to how we see ourselves in connection with the world. So what will it become in the future? Through climate collapse, technological innovation and societal upheaval, what stories will our children’s children tell their babies to rock them to sleep. How will they be taught to approach a wolf, a storm, or a harvest?
While folklore has never been anyone’s to control, people have still wielded it deliberately. Storytellers adapted their sagas to appeal to village children or temperamental kings, priests shaped mythologies to tighten their control on communities, filmmakers diluted darkness to appease conservative tastes, and so on. So how about authors like myself take up this tool and weave our own folklores for the futures we wish to see?
I cannot do much to unpick what is being done to our world for the sake of enriching a handful of men. But I can tell stories that speak to new (or old, made new) ways of seeing ourselves in the world, new superstitions for treading lightly, new rituals for restoring balance. Speculative fiction’s greatest power is in envisioning change, I think, mapping futures that can act either as warnings or beacons of hope. But folklore in particular is what will root us in those hopeful futures. It is the childhood tales, harvest festivals and mid-winter rituals that will make those futures something we can belong in, not just dream of.
Folklore tells us who we are beneath the skin of our civilisation, which is why we always come back to it when we read to our children, or why our appetite for retold myths never seems to fade. I think it can tell us who we will be too, by granting us a means of belonging to better worlds than today’s.
A conservation scientist and third culture Scot, Lorraine lives by the sea writing stories influenced by folklore and the wilderness. She has a PhD from the University of St. Andrews and is the author of several books, most recently the connected science fantasies We Are All Ghosts In The Forest and The Salt Oracle. Winner of two British Fantasy Awards and the Society of Authors ADCI Literary Prize, her books have also been finalists for the BSFA, BFA, Kavya and Saltire Awards. Lorraine has been stalked by wolves, caught the bubonic plague, and befriended pythons, but she now sticks to herding cats.