![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
A friend of mine asked for good retellings of fairy stories for a D&D campaign she's working on this week, and I dove headlong with great glee into T. Kingfisher's short stories. (Well, and her novels, but the short stories are easier to link, and I like people to buy her books if they get a taste from the stories.) Which got me thinking about witches in stories, both hers and Terry Pratchett's which are clearly influenced. My character in the campaign I'm in with my friend is an older woman in service to Death, and she's a little sillier than the archetype of those witches, but not so far unlike them.
Except that she doesn't have a settled, single place she lives. I wrote her as a traveler, someone who gets itchy if she's still too long, partly to explain why she was happy living on the road with an adventuring party, and partly...
...well. Partly because I don't get to set down roots. I've lived in Austin seven years, and I lived in northern Virginia for eight, and aside from that I've never been in a city for more than three or four at a stretch. And I'm set to be moving again in a year or two, because that's how this job goes. My dad was a military brat, and his feet got itchy, I think; but more than that, in the world I live in and the world I grew up in in North America, you move to go where the jobs are. I remember starting a in high school history course and my teacher asked how many of us were born in Georgia, and perhaps two people in a twenty-odd person class raised their hands. (I'd lived in Georgia two years then.)
I think some of the magical realism from those characterizations of witches and witchcraft comes from being part of the earth of a specific place, of being born somewhere and knowing it in your bones and so forth, and drawing the kind of power that comes from knowing many people for a very, very long time, being a known quantity in your community. But, well. Migration patterns across hundreds of miles have been common in many families for a long time in North America. Immigrant narratives are a huge part of our national mythos--if I recall rightly, about half of white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1850--and even if you only look at patterns of movement within North America, well, my ancestors are Irish Catholics; if you look at Irish-American history, there's an awful lot of movement across the northern borders, and there's an awful lot of moving around the continent to move to... well... where the jobs are. Military jobs, construction jobs, labor jobs. If you broaden your sights from white people history, you see things like the Great Migration out of the South for African-American families towards the West and North. Of course you do see the centuries-old pattern of migration from rural centers to the cities, or (again in America) the westward migration of Anglo settlers, and those have worked their ways into stories. But migration patterns from areas of similar population density? Don't see that, much.
I don't know; I'm just thinking about roots and where people come from. And it strikes me that I don't see much in the way of that archetype of older women in any other context. (I mean, they're not precisely thick on the ground. But.)
I think the only place I've seen those migratory patterns commented on within fantasy is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and then only in passing. Funny, that.
Except that she doesn't have a settled, single place she lives. I wrote her as a traveler, someone who gets itchy if she's still too long, partly to explain why she was happy living on the road with an adventuring party, and partly...
...well. Partly because I don't get to set down roots. I've lived in Austin seven years, and I lived in northern Virginia for eight, and aside from that I've never been in a city for more than three or four at a stretch. And I'm set to be moving again in a year or two, because that's how this job goes. My dad was a military brat, and his feet got itchy, I think; but more than that, in the world I live in and the world I grew up in in North America, you move to go where the jobs are. I remember starting a in high school history course and my teacher asked how many of us were born in Georgia, and perhaps two people in a twenty-odd person class raised their hands. (I'd lived in Georgia two years then.)
I think some of the magical realism from those characterizations of witches and witchcraft comes from being part of the earth of a specific place, of being born somewhere and knowing it in your bones and so forth, and drawing the kind of power that comes from knowing many people for a very, very long time, being a known quantity in your community. But, well. Migration patterns across hundreds of miles have been common in many families for a long time in North America. Immigrant narratives are a huge part of our national mythos--if I recall rightly, about half of white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1850--and even if you only look at patterns of movement within North America, well, my ancestors are Irish Catholics; if you look at Irish-American history, there's an awful lot of movement across the northern borders, and there's an awful lot of moving around the continent to move to... well... where the jobs are. Military jobs, construction jobs, labor jobs. If you broaden your sights from white people history, you see things like the Great Migration out of the South for African-American families towards the West and North. Of course you do see the centuries-old pattern of migration from rural centers to the cities, or (again in America) the westward migration of Anglo settlers, and those have worked their ways into stories. But migration patterns from areas of similar population density? Don't see that, much.
I don't know; I'm just thinking about roots and where people come from. And it strikes me that I don't see much in the way of that archetype of older women in any other context. (I mean, they're not precisely thick on the ground. But.)
I think the only place I've seen those migratory patterns commented on within fantasy is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and then only in passing. Funny, that.
