I’ve been particularly fascinated by ghosts of late. They’ve always intrigued me to some extent—as an avid horror fan, I’ve enjoyed plenty a ghost story over my lifetime, though I haven’t played with hauntings in my fiction until the last few years. I mostly avoided them because of how widespread they already are. It’s just like dragons, vampires, or zombies—the world already has so many stories about them that they can quickly veer into tired cliches if a writer isn’t bringing something new to the trope.
One thing that sets ghosts apart from other fantastic creatures is that they’re one of the supernatural elements most likely to feature in literary fiction. From Hamlet’s father to Sethe’s daughter in Beloved, there are ample examples of hauntings across the literary canon. I see two potential reasons for this:
A lot of people don’t think of ghosts as speculative. In a 2021 survey, 41% of respondents said they believe ghosts exist, a similar percentage to those who believe in demons. That’s lower than the percentage who believe aliens exist (57%) but much higher than belief in bigfoot (13%), vampires (8%), or werewolves (9%).
Ghosts and haunting are easy ready-made metaphors for emotions like grief, regret, loss, and nostalgia. This is reflected in our euphemistic language for these feelings—you might say someone is “haunted by the past” or that a place is “a ghost of what it once was.” Ghosts are reminders of what used to be, unchanging intrusions of the past on the present.
Their ephemeral nature makes it easier to insert them into a narrative. The “suspension of disbelief” factor is lower with a ghost than something corporeal because the reader has less of an expectation that it would leave physical signs and evidence. This also allows for more play between what’s real and what’s imagined by the narrator, especially in first-person narratives.
A lot of the mythological and fantasy creatures that have endured in cultural awareness are European in origin—things like fairies, elves, dwarfs, mermaids, or ancient Greek mythological creatures like gorgons, sirens, harpies, or cyclopes.
Using these familiar creatures in your fiction has advantages. Your readers have likely already heard of them, in some form, so they come into the story with some background and details already in mind and you don’t have to provide as much description or explanation in the text.
That pre-knowledge can also be a kind of baggage, though, and could limit your creative freedom to use the beings the way that best suits the story. They can also run the danger of reading as cliché or referential.
And the truth is—these European-derived critters are just the tip of the iceberg. There are tons of other mythical and supernatural beings from all corners of the world and all eras of history.
In Game of Thrones they’re mounts and symbols of ancient power. In The Wheel of Time, it’s the title and symbol of the Chosen One. Then there’s Smaug from The Hobbit, the dragons of Pern, the various species encountered by Harry Potter—and so on.
It makes sense that dragons are one of the most popular mythical creatures in modern fiction because they’re just as common in folklore and myth. Just about every culture around the world has some kind of dragon in its ancient legends—and, interestingly, they’re often called a very similar thing. Drage in Danish, Drak in Czech, Ddraig in Welsh, Dreki in Icelandic, Draak in Afrikaans, Dragun in French, Drakon in Greek—you’re sensing a theme here. Then there’s the East Asian cluster, with names like Long (Chinese), Naga (Indonesia/India), and Rong (Vietnamese), which might not look as similar on the page but still bear the signs of a shared source.
Just about every culture has its share of monsters, and whether they’re slain by a hero or said to be still haunting the deepest, darkest, children-shouldn’t-go-there-iest parts of their landscape, these creatures can be excellent fodder for the storytelling imagination.
Part of my mission during my recent deep dive into world mythologies was to learn more about some of these lesser-known cryptids, critters, and beasties. Here are some of the ones that most tickled my fancy.
High fantasy has a long-standing tradition of borrowing from myth and religion, and anyone with even a surface knowledge of world mythology will see that right away reading Wheel of Time. I think I noticed some of this even when I read the books as a kid, but my current re-read coincides with a deep dive on world mythologies, making the familiar names and concepts stand out even more vividly than on my past reads through the series.
(Note: Thar be Wheel of Time book spoilers ahead—if you haven’t read the whole series and care about such things, probably best to stop reading now)
Mythology and folklore can be an excellent source of storytelling inspiration. In the past, it could be tricky to track down info on myths outside what I’ll call the Big 4 (Greek, Roman, Egyptian and Norse). Even for these well-known pantheons, a lot of the available info was over-simplified, or filtered through the view of writers who misconstrued (or sometimes straight-up rewrote) the original story.
Today, scholars, folklorists, and mythologists from around the world can share their knowledge without going through an academic gatekeeper. The result is a wealth of information about mythologies, pantheons, rituals, and folk tales, both ancient and active. While the internet is still shockingly incomplete in some areas, there are tons of resources available for writers seeking inspiration from myths and folk stories. Here are some of the sites I’ve found most useful for my own research.
I’ve been doing a lot of research into ancient mythologies lately. One of the most interesting books I’ve come across in this is Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman. It looks at the Goddess religions that were widespread in the ancient world, the cultures that worshipped these female supreme deities, and when and how they were replaced by the patriarchal cultures that eventually evolved into the religions of the present day.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff to unpack in this book, and I highly recommend it for anyone who’s interested in ancient mythology, specifically as a way to gain insight into the culture that developed it. One of the details that’s stuck with me the most is Stone’s breakdown of the Adam and Eve story as a kind of pre-Christian propoganda against the Goddess.
The Wheel of Time series was my introduction to epic fantasy as a child, and the first invented world I really sunk my teeth into when I decided to start building my own. Coming back to it as an adult always feels a bit like returning home.
Of course, re-reading it as an adult, I can also understand the common critiques about the series. Regardless of whether you enjoy the story or not, though, there is no arguing that Robert Jordan was a master worldbuilder, in my opinion on the same level as Tolkien. The bulk of this worldbuilding happens in the first half of the series (books 1-7), and if you’re thinking “how the hell can it take someone 7 books to build a world?”—well, that’s the scope of the lands and history that serve as the foundation for the story.
(Note: Thar be spoilers up ahead. If you haven’t read the first 7 books of Wheel of Time and care about such things, probably best to skip this post).
“Hero” is one of those words that packs a lot of punch (no pun intended). Everyone understands it to mean the same basic thing: someone who’s admired for their qualities or achievements. But different people can have very different ideas about what actions or people they’d consider heroic, and just what promotes a figure to hero status within a society tells you as much about that culture’s values and perspective as it does about the hero themselves.
Hero also has multiple meanings in a literary sense. It can mean, among other things:
A character, often in mythology or folklore, who has superhuman qualities or a semidivine origin, and whose exploits or adventures are the subject of legends, epics, or myths.
The primary male character in a narrative, typically one who is identified with good qualities in a good vs. evil conflict.
The primary character in a narrative with whom the reader is intended to sympathize; synonymous with protagonist.
