Statement of Purpose
I did not begin this book as a writer, but as a reader. This is the book I would have liked to read five years ago, but couldn’t find.
I had just read Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic anthology. Some episodes were riveting, others less so. What held my interest, more than anything else, was the attention Gaiman paid to the formality of Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming and title character, in his dealings with other beings of myth. He painstakingly acknowledges every debt and obligation, and speaks with the care of someone negotiating a legal contract. He even warns Lucifer of his intent to challenge the prince of hell, because seeking the advantage of surprise simply wouldn’t be proper.
A circuit closed in my brain after I set Sandman down. I remembered “Riddles in the Dark,” the famous chapter of The Hobbit wherein Bilbo engages Gollum in a ritual riddle contest. Tolkien takes a moment aside to tell the reader that the riddle game had sacred rules, ancient even in the hobbit’s day, which even evil creatures feared to break. I remembered Larry Niven’s “The Wishing Game,” a tale of the wizard Clubfoot challenging a djinn to give him three wishes. Niven describes the djinn pausing to remember the ancient rules of the game. I was dimly aware of other ritual contests: the shape-changing duel, the impossible task, combat between champions. But although writers would mention the ancient and sacred rules to these contests, nobody really wanted to say what the rules actually were.
So I went out to find the book that would tell me, and came back empty-handed. There were a few near misses, but nothing that really catalogued the ancient rules. That’s the book I set out to write.
The first thing to do, of course, was research. I started reading every book of folktales I could lay my hands on, with a heavy leavening of modern fantasy. Two problems soon surfaced.
One: while there were a few stories of game-like contests – like the shape-changing duel – there weren’t all that many. Trying to discern a comprehensive list of rules from them would be like trying to divine the rules of baseball after watching a dozen games. Two: the stories didn’t always agree in their details. Some riddle contests, like Bilbo’s, involved a continuing exchange. Others, like the Sphinx, ended after the first question. Sometimes the challenger asked the question; other times he answered. Riddles meant different things to Vikings than to Zen monks. Now felt like I was trying to divine the rules of professional baseball by watching a dozen casual sandlot games. I could only resolve these problems by looking for broader, more over-arching similarities.
The longer I sought consistent rules, the broader the generalizations became, until I was no longer looking at the rules for ritual contests, but the foundations of natural and contract law in the magical realms of fairy tales. And that’s what I wrote down. An oath is binding. Warnings are to be heeded. There is power in names. No trespassing. And twenty-eight others.
Fairyland: a Survivor’s Guide, encapsulates the rules you’ll need to know before undertaking to deal with a man-eating troll, a cunning leprechaun, or even the devil himself. Even if you don’t intend to go exploring fairy rings, sacred mountains, and the deep, dark woods, it’s always possible for the creatures of Fairyland to come to you. For every hero who slays the dragon, there are a hundred also-rans who didn’t know the rules, and wound up as the dragon’s lunch.
Can you afford not to be prepared?