I’m re-reading Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. It is a sort of poetic anthropology book. Graves was trying to find commonalities in mythology (as known at the time), using linguistics, some archaeology, literature, and other sources to find the roots of (archetypes) of pre-Christian religion in Europe. He was strongly influenced by Frazier’s The Golden Bough and other “grand theory of religion” thinkers. As a work of cultural anthropology, so to speak, it has not aged well, although I remain very impressed by his research and how he tried to use language and comparative religion to get down to the roots of faith.
As a study in world building? It is fantastic. Graves found commonalities, or at least thought he found commonalities in a number of religions and traditions, compared them with what archaeology had been done up to that point, and developed a then-plausible world that was pretty coherent and made sense of disparate traditions and beliefs. He translated some things himself, to be certain that he understood the material properly, and considered possible other scenarios. The world he created worked, mostly. If it had been a fiction novel, we’d probably go back to it as a study in craft and writing skill, a bit like some do with Tolkien.
It also shows the weakness in using cutting-edge data for world building. That’s also happened in sci-fi, where some hard sci-fi no longer works as built, because we know so much more about exoplanets, or how stars form, or biochemistry and biophysics, and planetary chemistry. A few other novels likewise, when the plot depended on a theory that has since been disproven. It doesn’t mean the books are no longer fun or entertaining, or thought-provoking, just that readers who know about the updated science have to suspend a lot of disbelief.
That’s where I have to stop and take a break with The White Goddess. I’m current on the archaeology, linguistics, and so on, more or less, and keep trying to argue with the author. That’s not fair to Graves, or to the book.
Since Graves showed his work, we writers can note how he used his sources, finding apparent commonalities between this idea and that poem, this religious practice and that word use in a different but possibly related language. From that he built a world. How can we do something similar, drawing from a variety of ideas and references? Start with commonalities, especially things on the surface, and ask “Why?” Then build your world, or have your characters build their world. I’ve done that by having characters relay their mythology (or what outsiders would call mythology) and/or Just-So Stories. Where did I get those tales? They were created by stitching together bits and pieces of a lot of real-world mythology, commonalities in beliefs ( like a Flood Myth – seems like everyone’s got one, almost).
If you are one who stitches together archaeology, mythology, and things to make a world, what is an example of your source material? How do you keep the seams from showing, if you do?
Mad Genius Club 
9 responses to “The White Goddess and World Building”
Probably the funniest world building incident i ever had was when I was brainstorming Undead Flight and thought “gee, it would be funny if the hero and and villain had a jousting match on the airship. But this is the secondary world’s version of the late victorian era…they wouldn’t actually have been into that, would they?” Then I found out about the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 and surrounding events. Comfortably 50-55 years before the real world equivalent to my setting and the 70-yr-old hero of Gothic Dunedain stock would have been a young hot head in his twenties dealing with the death of his parents in a terrorist attack. Of course he’d dabble in jousting when that was in fashion.
It’s funny (in both senses of the word) how bits and pieces can tuck themselves into stories and world building.
I used to be a bit of an archaeology nut and had switched my major to it after dropping out of civil engineering (calculus was rough, and diffyEQ blew my mind). Trying to keep up after college is a losing proposition, there’s just too much new stuff coming out in too many fields that I find of interest. But I still enjoy reading the articles now and then. Sometimes going back and reading the older pieces is hilarious as there’s been so many new discoveries that show Theory X and competing Theory Y are both bunk 40 or 50 years later.
Sometimes the theories and evidence are incredibly intriguing though. One I remember was a pre-Columbian trade involving some American Pacific coast communities and IIRC Japanese islands since both had similar pottery styles, and words for various items, that seemed to develop around the same time. I haven’t gone back to look at any new evidence though.
Another one I found fascinating was from a Soil Science class I took in the early ’90s that talked about the highlands of New Guinea having some of the oldest known agricultural sites in the world, dating only a couple of hundred years younger than those found in China and the middle east. I haven’t looked into it any further, but I know there were recent discoveries of cave artwork in the Indonesia that appear to be older than those found in Europe. Maybe the cradle of civilization wasn’t Mesopotamia, India, nor China, but what are now the islands of Southeast Asia that used to be Sundaland or Sahul.
Wow I had not heard about the agricultural site sites in New Guinea!
It might have been _Out of the Earth_ or something like that. The title sounds right to me though. And it was just a couple of paragraphs with a picture IIRC.
Or, we have parallel but unconnected development, like certain types of agriculture.
Either way, there are a lot of fascinating bits and pieces all over the place. I’d never thought about cloth as a major prehistoric trade item, but apparently it was, because non-local styles were new, different, and “cool.” That they didn’t last long enough for archaeologists to find them didn’t diminish their value to the people “back then.”
There’s a definite bias that archeologists have in favor of ancient civilizations that built things that lasted long enough for people to dig them up. I remember reading about a particularly old South American society that was dismissed by the Powers that Be because they didn’t have any pots. Well, no, they didn’t, but some rebel anthropologists eventually figured out that these guys could make baskets like nobody’s business.
Remember, any trade has to be such that it does not care disease. Otherwise, the Americas would have been through a few culls of the weak immune systems before Columbus arrived.
My favorite SciFi oopsie! is the Galactic Library with high-speed card sorting machines in Kimbal Kinneson’s day. I _think_ it was in the Second Stage Lensman book. It may be the one before that.