James Tallett: An Inspiration Explanation
With no further ado, I had my blog over to the more than capable hands of Mr James Tallett, creator and guardian of The Four Part Land.
First off, I'd like to thank Alex for giving me this opportunity to guest post on his blog, it's much appreciated. Now, today I'll be delving a little into the background of The Four Part Land, and where it all came from, including the processes I used to build it.
The world of The Four Part Land grew out of a single sheet of paper with names on it that was produced on a shining summer's day, some eight years ago. It was a collaborative effort between myself and my Mum, and we'd made up most of the names by getting out an atlas of Scotland, and then picking and choosing towns and cities that sounded like they fit. We jumbled the names up a little, so they weren't actual places in Scotland, but they're fairly close, and those place names are still the ones dotted around the map today. They've never changed.
A couple generations of the map came and went, and with it was built up a small encyclopedia of animals, primarily from my hand, but there were contributions from three other family members that have survived to the final stage. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm sitting less than a foot from the stack of original notepads that contains all of that first summer's notes, and the very first hints of what would become the story Tarranau.
You see, I always knew what name I'd use for the main character. Tarranau was the online username of a friend of mine, and when I first started this novel project so many years ago, I pencilled in the main character as "Tarranau" and never looked back. Even the plot hasn't changed much, although way back then the whole plot I had consists of a little less than the first chapter today.
The name of Tarranau pushed me in another direction as well – I chose to name all of the creatures and secondary characters in Welsh. Tarranau is the Welsh word for "Thunder", and almost all of the other characters in the book have names that can be translated back into English. It even gave rise to the name of the continent the story takes place on. It's Bedwar Barthu Dirio, which is "The Four Part Land", in Welsh, of course. And yes, it means all those godawful tongue-twisters that show up are actual words spoken by living, breathing
humans.
The third story of The Four Part Land, which is the one I'm writing now, goes in another direction – it uses Anglo-Saxon as the primary language and naming convention. It has a different culture, a different people, and a different setting, and I wanted to distinguish it from the primary location of the stories quite distinctively. The fact that Anglo-Saxon uses several letters that aren't found in the standard Latin alphabet helps do that quite well, I think.
You might wonder why I chose to use existing, real world languages rather than making up my own, as so many fantasy authors do. The reasoning behind this had several points – I wanted the language and the names to hold together as a single unified whole, I wanted to tie the work back to Great Britain and places I'm from, and I wanted to give the story slight Celtic overtones.
(Warning, historical diversion). England has no unique culture, as such. The first written story in English is Beowulf, which is a Germanic tale that takes place in lands far distant to where it appeared. Indeed, the Angles and Saxons that named both the country and the culture are Germanic tribes that originated from Scandinavia, and are in fact invaders to the lovely British Isles they now call home.
The earlier inhabitants of Britain, the Celts, the Picts, and those others that we primarily know only through Roman writings and scattered notes, clearly had a strongly developed culture and religion. After all, the tales of the mysterious druids come from the Celts. But all their myths, legends, and most of their religion disappeared under the onslaught of Romans and Germanic tribesmen, and today we have almost none of it, no history that is uniquely English in nature.
That is why I wanted to tie my stories back to place in England, and to the languages that have their home there. So the mountains around Tri-Hauwcerton, where so much of Tarranau and Chloddio take place, are modelled on the Lake District and Snowdonia, while Bohortha Eilan, seen at the beginning of Tarranau, has a distinct resemblance to Cornwall.
The four primary cultures that dot the surface of Bedwar Barthu Dirio also have been assembled from history, although in many cases much more widely. Bhreac Veryan, for instance, is a slightly Arabic desert culture, except that it uses Roman military tactics, and is undergoing a Fascist revolution. Tregonethra is a Dutch/English hybrid, mixing together various times and places in those cultures' history to create the slightly feudal yet very mercantile version that appears in the books.
I don't technically 'research' these aspects of politics and geography that I use in my stories, but that's only because I spent my college years slogging through political science and history, and I still read a great deal of it for pleasure. Indeed, if you are a fantasy writer (or science fiction), I would highly recommend reading through history books. Good ones are a fascinating example of the breadth of human interaction, and they provide a wonderful bounty of ideas for new stories.
Many of the more interesting interactions I've read are inspiration for stories, or aspects of stories, in The Four Part Land. The success of the Greek phalanx plays an important role in the 3rd tale, while the north German forests cover part of the landscape. Yet, despite all that I love drawing from history, there are always areas that just have to be drawn directly from the imagination. After all, fantasy encompasses worlds that cannot be real, as well as taking inspiration from those that are.
Monsters, legends, magic, and myths are all created to populate these stories, and I have had a wonderful time dredging through my imagination to put them down to paper. But in some ways, the most fun of all happens when I, as an author, can hand these stories over to another person, a reader, and see them take as much joy in the reading as I did in the creation.
And with that, I bequeath to you the reader a tantalizing sample of Tarranau, and my hopes that you find a world that delights your imagination.
