Everyone knows autocorrect causes more problems than it fixes. One time, however, it ended up being a power source of inspiration. I was trying to type the word dynastic into my phone notes for some reason, but between my own mistypes and autocorrect, and up with something more along the lines of “duyrnaric.” I thought it was a cool name, but nothing came of it.
Fast forward… three years? For some reason, I was thinking about the 80s-90s trend of inter-generational sagas, and how we don’t really see stories that span that sort of time frame anymore. I myself don’t particularly enjoy the family sagas that were at their peak, although I do admire and enjoy Ken Follett’s work.
For all of fantasy’s love of great, sweeping epics, they’re usually not not very grand in scope in terms of time. The bulk of The Lord of the Rings (excluding the seventeen year time skip between Bilbo’s 111th birthday party and Frodo departing the Shire) takes place within a single year. A Song of Ice and Fire seems to cover… two or three years? Maybe more? It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of specifics on that (as opposed to Tolkien making sure the phases of the moon were in line with the time needed to travel).
After all that, I decided I wanted to try and do a fantasy version of the family saga, covering multiple generations as through decades as the world changes. I was trying to figure out what that might actually end up looking like.
Now, I’m sure many of you are yelling at me through your screen and throwing copies of Sagas of the Icelanders, Heimskringla, or the Sturlunga Saga at me. And you would be right to do so. It took me a few days before it hit me that the fantasy equivalent of the 90s family sagas would be something very similar to the Icelandic sagas. Not my brightest moment, forgetting that they existed.
But once I remembered that, the project took off in earnest. For inspiration, I went primarily to the Volsunga. The time frame has always fascinated me as does the presence of Attila, creating a synergy between heroic legend and historical memory that I’m leaning into. For the historical side, I’m pulling a lot of inspiration from the Migration Period, with some from the later Vendel period in Sweden and the Frankish Merovingian dynasty.
I wasn’t sure what setting I wanted to put it in, so I slotted it into a different time period and geographic area of Elyssaea, which is where Signet of the Sea King also takes place. Since I’ve not entirely figured out a map yet, I’m thinking it’s northwest from Aerlion—what would be the boundary between Western and Central Europe compared to Aerlion’s South Eastern Europe, essentially.
It does, of course, deal pretty heavily with migrations and exile, so people groups that the Duunaric Saga focuses on do end up moving quite a bit. I think, broadly speaking, they start in what would be relatively similar to Poland and the Baltic, before migrating west, bumping into the equivalent to the Roman Empire, settling there for a time, and then trying to hold together during the collapse of the empire.
That’s not a huge amount of movement, all things considered. Probably only several hundred miles over the course of generations. Right now, I’m looking at either four our five generations (again following the Volsunga), looking, essentially, at the two main branches of the original family, the children of Duunar (Duunarics) and the children of Koand (Koandics), twin sisters who are the daughters of the goddess Kerdís.
Another big influence on the shape of this project, especially this conflict between twins, is Poul Anderson’s novel The Broken Sword, although those two brothers were a human child raised by elves and his troll-born changeling replacement. Duunar and Koand aren’t as viciously hateful of each other as in Anderson’s book,and the conflict isn’t really between them, per se, except for personality clashes.
With a story of this scale, I’m really struggling with the narrative structure elements, as well as the sheer number of characters. Eventually, I’ll solidify my thoughts on the hero’s journey and why the fantasy/sci fi community needs to grow beyond it, but I’m not quite there yet (in the meantime, here’s an academic folklorist’s summary of what’s wrong with Campbell’s work, going back more than *twenty years* and another one from Mythcreants using a more writerly perspective).
I certainly wouldn’t say the monomyth fits the Volsunga or either the prose or verse Eddas. It certainly doesn’t work for the Duunaric Saga because the main characters are all women. Campbell doesn’t think women are capable of undergoing the Hero’s Journey, or even that they have one, because as he infamously said to his student, Maureen Murdock, “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological journey, the woman is there. All she has to do is realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to.”
Frankly, short of a PhD program, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to unpack all of that. Long story short, Campbell’s theories aren’t very good, either academically or creatively. They might be an interesting tool, but they simplify complex subjects to the point of irrelevance.
Where were we? Oh, right. Narrative structure and casts of characters. I’ve never been good at outlining stories, let alone ones of this scale, but it’s far too large to improvise. There’s also the challenge on the difference in structure between series as a whole and the structure of each individual book. It reminds me of Tolkien describing The Lord of the Rings as a single work published in three volumes, which is part of the reason the books are structured so radically different than every other book to exist.
This also touches on the differences between history, legend, and fantasy novels, all of which have radically different narrative structures. Not just structures, but also different purposes and modes. By mode, I only partially mean the common understanding as depicted in the Wikipedia article, while partly referring to Northrop Frye in his work Anatomy of Criticism (mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, ironic). This is another one where I’m still working on expressing.
The three are very different, despite attempts by some to say otherwise. Campbell’s monomyth idea, again to point out that it’s a terrible idea, simply doesn’t work for history and it doesn’t work for most legends. Certainly not even for most folk tales or myths. As a result, my questions look at what distinguishes a legend as a narrative unit? Is it possible to create an artificial legend? To use Tolkien’s term, is mythopoesis possible?
The Duunaric saga blurs the edges between the three and explores the tension between history as events, history turned into legend, and novels that pretend to be legends/history, or invented myth (aka Tolkien’s mythopoesis). People talk a lot about finding the “historical Arthur” or the “real” Robin Hood behind the legends, but I suppose what most interests me is how a person becomes a legend.
I have an outline mostly finished for this project (despite the structural questions) and have started some drafting for the beginning. But yeah, there’s a lot going into this one, so it’s hard to remember everything. But hopefully, as I get the details sorted out and the draft progressing, things will go more smoothly!
