http://avalinahsbooks.space/the-bear-and-the-nightingale/ There're whole heaps of praise out there on the internet for Katherine Arden's debut: The Bear and the Nightingale, a fairy tale-esque coming-of-age story taking place in medieval Russia. I'm not going down that praising path, though I did enjoy the book over Christmas break (absolutely a winter read). Rather, I'm going down the magic-system path. And when it comes to fairy tales, pinning down a magic system is about as difficult as making waterfalls flow backwards.
As this quote from Morozko, the winter king, tells the main character:Nothing changes, Vasya. Things are, or they are not. Magic is forgetting that something ever was other than as you willed it.Huh?So, in a book full of upyrs (vampires), house spirits, angry bear gods, and an epic battle involving seemingly all of Russia's fairy tale creatures (there are hundreds apparently; there are spirits for everything from the household oven (heater) to the horse barn to controlling the onset of winter), what sort of magic system could be said to even possibly exist? Can it even be called a system? This book is like a prosed fairy tale, lengthened to include novel-worthy characters and plot, but the magic still has its roots in Russian fairy tales and folklore (even if it's pitted both as a complement and as a threat to Orthodox Christianity; though whether folkloric magic is ultimately a complement or a threat to religion is never resolved).
So, what can we call the system here?If we refer back to Morozko's quote, we find that Arden's overall understanding of magic is not systematical at all. It's not mechanical. It's not based on elementalism or magery or some other crux of action or understanding, like in Le Guin's Earthsea novels where Ged must speak the true name of thing in order to work magic on it. Whole websites, like the subreddit r/magicbuilding are dedicated to fleshing out logical magic systems that are as indepth as the rules of gameplay in Dungeons & Dragons or Pokémon, or as the magical lineages of Harry Potter.But what magical laws (lineages or otherwise) are there in fairy tales and folklore? Things as they are and as they are not rubs a contradiction right in the face of logic!When speaking of folklore, we're reaching back to the origins of civilization. To what makes us human. The Epic of Gilgamesh might be said to be a fairy tale of sorts. The Bible and The Quran and the story of the Buddha are rife with miracles and sorcery and of what happens when you turn your back on that whatever-it-is spiritual force which so seems to shape and fulfill our everyday existences and make coincidences not coincidences and make of faith something tangible and powerful and real.I'm going to quote Blas Uberuaga, off of his blog, buber.net:Magic is looking beyond the possibilities the world imposes on us, whether expectations of what things or of what people are. Either can become more than what they were originally intended if you can look beyond that original purpose.We're getting to the heart of it.Fairy tale magic supersedes boundaries. Original purposes are repurposed. Names changed. The ugly become beautiful. The poor rich. The powerless powerful. Systematized magic, on the other hand, like science, is actually defined by its limits. By its definitions and categorizations. By who can hold what kind of power at a certain time with such-and-such specified resources.They're opposites! One might be said to speak to the heart, the soul, and the other might be said to speak to the mind and brain. Who knew that magic could get so complicated?So, when writing your next fantasy, it's probably a good idea to decide beforehand just what kind of magic you're going to have. Though, the best magic probably encompasses a bit of both.
