Bones, DNA, seed, hair, ova—the myths and legends of long ago, they fester, linger, like in a graveyard or ossuary, in every work of fantasy.

Fantasy-fiction aficionados should find that what they read, the tales of the fantastical, of the escapist, echo concentric and onward (cantillating, inscribing, transcribing) a mimetic ritual rune, which banquets and bestrews the copycat artifacts of old languages, lost cultures, forgotten history, ambiguous folkways, sinister fabrications, and haunting mysteries of yore.

Ancient legends and half-remembered memories of repeated folktales pass through every fantasy tale. Battlefield detritus floating down a bloody river. The new stories continue to tell the same primeval stories, transformed, evermore by future iterations.

Words are enchanted with deep power in a fantasy story (the fantasy genre has its own habitual, natural codes and languages chosen to pass on olden meanings and esoteric, ancestral, arcane ideas), and they subliminally possess and connect readers to facsimile remnants of the dead. Forgotten things but imitated.

Fantasy and horror do this more than any other genres. Apparitions seizing morsels from the text and the reader, leaving behind impressions of what they take onward into the future, the next host.

Did our ancestors know more than we do about the power of words, of songs? Symbols?

A story, a supposedly old story, that deals with the power of a beautiful song, of the past, of memory, of legacies, is “The Witch Thorbjörg,” which I found in this collection: Scandinavian Ghost Stories and Other Tales of the Supernatural (1995), edited by Joanne Asala, and published by Penfield Press.

In “The Witch Thorbjörg,” there is a yearning to return to the past, to get compliance from otherworldly forces (spirits), the invisible and omniscient ones that, when connected to, when appeased, give the living (the present) knowledge of the future. These unearthly forces offer insight when they hear a sacred, beautiful song.

Emblematic of natural, cosmic, organic destiny, the spirits also interrelate with the story and its parts as binary constructs: partially agents of the mundane nature of the world and partway forces of the ultramundane mysteries of the world which surround humankind and links environment with the infinite, the abstract, the numinous (Think Odinism, Druidism, shamanism, animism, and Shintoism).

Somehow, nature is both crude and real yet part of our imagination and superstition; and the spirits are at the same time the Apollo-like avatars and daemons of the dogma of nature, aether and space around us enchanted only by our personification-illusions. Similar to the art of necromancy, the natural world (apollonian air and ether) can tap into knowledge of fate. Humankind wishes for the world to not be lifeless, for the natural world to validate mortal existence, wishes for the world to be aware of them and to see themselves in the natural world.

Almost Romantic, even transcendentalist in some respects: the spirits are a unity of airwaves, fortune, nature; add to that list an Aesir or Vanir (divine) will?

Art is the answer to bending nature. The artist, the singer, the community, men and women, all come together. Art reveals hidden truth. The artist appears to have the power over anguish, death, and nature. The magic song allows humans to gain knowledge of the future. The spirits are appeased and become willing to give enlightenment and nothing more. Fortunate for the characters, the spirits, through the witch, say that better times are coming.

In the story, the search for a “Vardlokkur” speaks to humanity’s search for meaning through tradition and beauty, which embrace in an act of artistic creation. Ritualized acceptance of the inherited charms and arts of a pre-Christian past offers enlightenment (and perhaps retroactive salvation through a recontextualizing) during a brutal and decadent time. Ancestors have passed down the art, the power of a beautiful song, which must be remembered and given validation and a voice.

Folktales like this one, we are told, are what modern fantasy and sword-and-sorcery stories are born from, built up from, as seen even with the similar kinds of language and techniques used.

This story has delicate and charming descriptions of clothing, which call to mind the sorts of rich descriptions one could find in a sword-and-sorcery tale. Sword-and-sorcery carries on the legacy of myths and folktales by passionately borrowing this habit of making characters and their belongings caress us with ornate sartorial imageries.

Deprivation haunts the lands in this abrupt folktale. Its main character, a spaewife (“spæwife,” as written in the tale) has lost all her sisters to the many starvations. Yet still she continues to, not mourning, go around to eat and act as an aloof socialite, where she is desired for her soothsaying. A delicious resonance of the Decadent is ringing. The tale underscores that it was a multitude of men who called upon her, to be near to her. Provocative implications may whisper.

All anyone wants to do is either eat or know when the famine will end.

The witch does not don the modern Western garments of grieving (all black). She manifests as an exotic royal. Blue. Brass. Black and white. Skin and fur. Stones. Glass. If the colors and materials have any funerary significance or wider symbolism, their figurativeness, the meanings were obscured or lost. The afterimages are dim synesthetic fragments of dead sound, just as the witch’s knife is broken. Folktales, tools of ingesting (consuming knowledge), are fragmented. Only the regality of the spæwife’s vesture is highlighted, possibly joined with characteristics of wisdom; no obvious connection to bereavement or grief. Perhaps only the erudite scholars or folklorists of Scandinavian culture can tell us, can guess, what was meant by her clothing and the colors.

This woman, “Thorbjörg,” acts rather indifferently towards the problems of others, and she is in no hurry to learn the truth, no hurry to seek answers. Is she contented? Is she resigned to fate? She dines and hobnobs with those who can afford to hold an intemperate feast as others starve or disappear.

When the story ends, readers are not shown the bountiful future being promised. Readers are left in a time of woe, hoping, imagining, that the witch’s words will one day become true. Assuming into existence another ending or epilogue.

Folktales and legends come with a kind of lacuna of presumption, a void pulling in the listeners’ and readers’ beliefs and assumptions to complete the story.

“The Witch Thorbjörg” is a tale that does not explain, describe, or clarify what magic is or what the spirits are. It is conceivable that the “spirits” could be material creatures or perchance invisible, eldritch things beyond the understanding of those primitive mortals.

Could the people of that lost time truly have believed in the supernatural so much that their stories wasted no time nor space of page for explanations? Could they have sincerely believed that art conveys a power that overwhelms nature?

Mayhap nothing supernatural happens. What if Thorbjörg is lying about what she heard?

Does this story not start by saying that the events of this tale happened during a time of weirdness?

Folktales and ancient stories have ingrained a kind of implication that those who created and those who first spread these tales might have actually believed the contents within to be true, believing in magic, believing the superstitions and in the supernatural. This aids the separation between folktale and modern fantasy.

Was the ending crafted as some meta kind of way to comfort the readers, the people of that bygone age—that all would be improved for them?

Their olden twilight is only a memory not our own.

Hark! Bring on the festivities! Light the candles! Sing beautiful songs! Seat the dead at our table! Let us make a toast to them and to the olden times, to their stories, to their alleged belief in the power of song, of art, which is capable of moving mysterious principles or elementals!

Overwhelm nature and destiny with wonder and beauty in this decaying world!

Matthew Pungitore graduated with a Bachelor of Science in English from Fitchburg State University. He volunteers with the Hingham Historical Society. The town of Hingham, Massachusetts is where he was brought up, and he has lived there for many years. Matthew is the author of The Report of Mr. Charles Aalmers and other stories, Fiendilkfjeld Castle, and Midnight's Eternal Prisoner: Waiting For The Summer.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read here, check out some of Matthew Pungitore’s writings at his BookBaby author-page.

Contact him at: matthewpungitore_writer@outlook.com