Fantasy writers often pay lip service to the difficulties readers can encounter when entering a new mythology (our own), but it’s easy to forget just how opaque an unfamiliar genre can be. In my own work, I count on familiarity with the academy to carry non-fantasy readers through, and on familiarity with fantasy to carry non-academic readers through; but it’s just as likely that the fantastic elements will baffle academic readers and the academic elements will baffle fantasy readers, just the way romance elements bump me out of so many modern fantasies.
Anyway, it has to be good for a fantasy writer to encounter a new mythology and experience again that kind of first immersion, so I pick up books on new mythologies I encounter. Here’s a little from my most recent purchase; what can you tell about the culture from this excerpt?
“At _________ town, someone was thinking of ritual bathing, they say.
Things, they say, were going on within him.He lived in a house with his eight younger brothers.
So did his mother.
After a time, his younger brothers disappeared.Nobody knew where they’d gone.
When daylight came, their mother wept.
When daylight came again, she wept again.Later, when her crying stopped, she said,
“If the eldest of my sons were also gone,
my heart would ache a little less
when day is breaking.”After she’d been saying this in front of him awhile,
he couldn’t bear to hear it anymore.Then he said to his sister,
“Sister, get one of the stone boxes
that my mother owns
and fill it with water so I can get in.”So she tied on her belt.
She set her mother’s stone chest beside the door
and filled it up with water.Her brother crawled to where it was.
He was just barely able to climb in.When he’d been floating there awhile,
his butt was sticking up
like something someone tosses in the air.
His sister pushed it down
with a poker that was lying near the fire.When she had held it down awhile
she took the stick away.
His butt stayed just beneath the water.She took a stick and pushed it down again,
and when she took the stick away,
it stayed way down beneath the water.
Then he broke the box wide open with his knees.Then he called his sister again.
“Sister, get another one from mother
and fill it up with water.”She filled another one with water.
He got in that one too
and pressed his knees against it.
He shattered that one also with his knees.Then he called his sister again.
“Sister, fill another one with water.”
Then he broke that also with his knees.He did the same thing again.
He broke four boxes with his knees.”
So, what’s going on here?
