Influences on Story
On Sunday 20 I wrote about winter solstice and Matariki, the Maori name for the Pleaides and also for the Maori New Year: the rising of the Pleaides into southern hemisphere skies was the traditional signal used to judge when to plant many of the next year’s crops. And as I wrote Sunday, the celebration of Matariki could be “anywhere from immediately, to the rising of the next full moon, or at the next new moon after Matariki first rose.”
Yesterday, the section of The Gathering of the Lost (The Wall of Night Series, Book Two) that I was working on centered around a festival called Summer’s Eve, which is “always held on the first new moon of summer.” Which got me thinking about influences on our writing, especially where the author is trying to create a world that feels “real” and resonates with the reader (yes, even when writing “Fantasy”). For example, influences such as Matariki being celebrated, by certain Maori tribes (hapu or iwi), on the first new moon after the Pleiades constellation rose.
Other, perhaps clearer (given Matariki is nearer midwinter), influences for a festival of Summer’s Eve would be the northern hemisphere’s May Day, with its tradition of mumming (acting out folk stories), crowning the May Queen and (in England, anyway) dancing around a Maypole. But when I lived in Sweden, the festival of Valborgsmassafton, which is also celebrated in Germany as Walpurgis Night, seemed almost as important as the May Day that followed. The nights are definitely shortening by 30 April, and Valborgsmassafton is celebrated by lighting bonfires in the long clear evenings and dancing and partying through the night and into May Day itself. You can argue that bonfires are a traditional celebration in many circumstances, but I am sure it is not accident that one way in which “Summer’s Eve” is celebrated in my story is by lighting “fires for Imuln.”