Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

 While I currently have about 80,000 words writen of the epic poem component of this project - what is in effect 'The Gyldland Saga' itself (though still a working title) - and most of the writing still to be done is linking material (followed by extensive editing), I'm certainly open to introducing new ideas, scenes, or themes if they are relevant and worthy. One such is the structure and nature of the Rockcats' divine lineage - the feline people from whom the heroine of the whole work originates. The idea was to create a heroic figure who had none of the qualities of traditional epic heroism - while wise with words and healing-craft, she is not strong, is middle-aged, overweight, non-human and non-male. She grows slowly and reluctantly into her destiny, as unlikely as it is. Her very name, 'Womba' - derived from the OE word for 'womb' - is, as various characters remind her, a misnomer, as she is past child-bearing age (which in certain systems of patri

  As depicted above - this afternoon's exercise in trying to pin down the family tree and inter-familial relationship of the gods and the various progenitors. Some progress from my initial sketches of last year but still a fair few gaps remain: where does Ullek, the Rockcats' father (in truth, parent - since, according to Womba, Ullek can be 'both man and wife', much like Hretha) fit in? Nithmund, the rat-god, is still very vague (as perhaps such a grim character ought to be) and I have wondered if his role as guardian of decay, plague-bringer, gallows-friend and general king of corruption is not partly served also by Smorian, his step-daughter, who is queen of the dead and the underworld. But then, the roles of, say, Hekate and Hades are quite distinct and separate in Greek mythology and it occurs to me that Nithmund's function is one still rooted in the living world, with an effect upon those he touches: Smorian, on the other hand, is simply a harvester of souls,

What's this all about? Basically, the documentation of my 2021 final project for my MFAAH Master's degree. “Myth is a type of speech” (R. Barthes, 'Myth Today' in Mythologies ). If my work has a narrative, then it is one of narrative itself – sometimes multiple narratives, sometimes competing, unreliable, questioning, contradictory, and ambiguous. At times, meta-narratives; stories within stories, inside re-tellings of tales perhaps familiar or else new. And one of my most cherished kinds of ambiguous narrative is myth. Myth, as an oral body of knowledge initially, is therefore speech. And in written form, embedded, it is capable of being analysed, quoted, paraphrased, interpreted, mis-interpreted, bastardized and corrupted. The language I use to disclose my myth-makings are related, though separate; at once distant and unknowable, yet simultaneously tangible and everyday: English, and its antecedent, Old English – in which copious amounts of our modern English (and Sco