The Use of Underrepresented Mythologies in Modern Fantasy

Written by: Sebastián Bruno

Despite the inherent boundless imagination and infinite possibilities that characterize it and defines its appeal to the masses, fantasy seems to be one of the genres with the most limited conception in the public consciousness. If you were to go up to the average person, maybe even the average reader, and ask them to describe the fantasy genre to you, chances are high that their response will include several of the following keywords: Sorcerers, dragons, swords, elves, magic gemstones, heroes chosen by fate, dark, forbidden forests, and so on, all elements drawn from medieval European folklore and mythology. Indeed, European mythos and fantasy have become one in many people's minds! It’s not often we get the chance to read about creatures other than wyverns, fairies/ fae, phoenixes, trolls, and the many variations that have spawned over the years. Even including the increasing popularity of Greek mythology with novels like Song of Achilles and Circe by Madeline Miller and the renewed interest in the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan, fantasy is primarily Western-European centered. And even though fire-breathing dragons and spellcasting are inherently cool things to play around with, the truth is that fantasy authors pass up on so much potential by limiting themselves to these frankly overused concepts. In this post, I’d like to share a few notable examples of underrepresented mythologies from around the world being us

ed in modern fantasy!

 If there’s one place on Earth that has been completely overlooked by the fantasy genre, it’s the entire continent of Africa. Save for the choice uses of Ancient Egyptian mythology here and there, you’d be surprised to find inspiration taken from traditions from any African country at all. However, the young adult fantasy novel Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi became a huge success doing just that. Its use of more familiar YA fantasy tropes let its unique Yoruba-inspired setting Örisha and magic system attract popularity to its lesser-known inspirations as well as empower the author’s Nigerian heritage. The novel and its consequent sequels prominently feature Yoruba deities such as Oya, Sàngó, and Ochumare as active forces in the story and the source of the characters’ magical abilities as well as the living spirits of ancestors as tangible agents, driving home a powerful message about tradition, culture, and oppression. 

Moving into the immense and daunting world of epic fantasy, Brandon Sanderson’s massive series The Stormlight Archive features a very peculiar and distinctive setting—a world where every land creature resembles either a crustacean or a coral reef and where grass has learned to run and hide to survive the terrifying hurricanes that periodically sweep the continent. However, perhaps an even more notable element of this world is the fact that everything possesses a soul.

Sanderson’s interest in Eastern folklore, which was sparked by a missionary trip to Korea in his youth, led him to populate his world with a plethora of spirits he named Spren. Spren represent anything and everything in the world of Roshar, from forces of nature like wind, fire, life, and gravity, emotions and sensations like hunger, pain, fear, and joy, and even more abstract concepts like logic, honor, lies, and creation, and can take the form of anything from flowing ribbons, to floating flakes, to hands crawling out of the ground. Spren take clear inspiration from the kami of Japanese folklore, divinities that can represent any aspect of reality, from the physical to the intangible to the purely conceptual, just like The Stormlight Archive’s spren.

 A more classic example of uncommon mythologies used in fantasy can be found in Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novel American Gods, which follows a large cast of deities from numerous different pantheons that have taken the form of regular American citizens in their battle against modern technology for humanity’s devotion. Though the novel features well-known gods such as Odin, Horus, and Ganesha, it also brings attention to more obscure gods like Anansi, Czernobog, and Wisakedjak from Ghanaian, Slavic, and Algonquian mythology respectively, granting many of these figures their only depiction in mainstream media, but certainly also an intense itch to research their respective traditions to make up for the fact that some of the representations in this novel haven’t aged particularly well and could’ve been handled in a much more respectful manner today. 

These examples, but luckily also an increasing number of fantasy novels being written today, show what is possible when authors expand their horizons and break out from their cultural bubbles. There are so many interesting ideas and concepts to be found around the world—you just have to be willing to look for them. I don’t know about you, but I would love to read about a fantasy world inspired by the sea-based legends of the Polynesian archipelago, or the vibrant myths of Aztec mythology, or the bizarrely dark stories of Slavic folklore. As an aspiring fantasy writer myself, I wish to contribute to this wider appreciation of human cultures, but for now, I’ll leave it to authors far more talented than me to build beautiful worlds untethered to the Western-European prison that the fantasy genre tends to find itself in, but hopefully, not for long.