This essay revives the great female figures of Asturian and Basque mythology: goddesses, healers, guardians of nature whom the centuries have relegated to oblivion or transformed into threats. A hybrid and singular exploration that moves between ethnography and storytelling, like listening to an ancient legend.
In this making of Javier Solís and Verónica García-Peña explain how they wrote Guardians of the Northern Lands (Uve).
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Writing Guardians of the Northern Lands was no easy task. It took us more than two years and demanded many hours of reading, research, and writing. It also forced us to make a few decisions that, at times, proved far more difficult than we had imagined.
We both love mythology, and, due to our origins, it was common for us to talk about myths and legends from the Basque Country and Asturias. Over time we realized that we knew many stories with elements in common, even though each belonged to different traditions. One day, without warning, as good ideas tend to arrive, the question appeared:
“What if we write a book about all this?”
That was the beginning; only the beginning. Then came the work of deciding which myths should be part of the book, and here we discovered something that may seem odd. It is harder to remove myths than to include them. We had to establish a criterion and we decided that it would be them, the women of the myths, whether real or legend, who would occupy the center. The forgotten ones.
Thus appeared lamias, mermaids, witches, were-women, the goddess Mari, the Vieya, and other female figures from Basque and Asturian mythology. We wanted to approach them from their own stories, but also to ask what lay behind those characters and why so many of these women had arrived to us reduced only to their usual condition of supernatural beings, either almost always very good or very bad. Why had their grays been forgotten?
They then became the thread that would run through a book that we did not want to be a conventional mythology essay. That is why we decided to combine the expository part with fictional tales dedicated to some of the characters appearing in the different blocks of the book.
This part was especially labor-intensive because the tales had to wait until the research was finished. Each new story had to start from what we had studied, then reinvent it and transplant it to a more recent era, trying to bring these characters closer to today’s reader as well.
There it is, perhaps, one of the most interesting features of the project. We did not want to limit ourselves to compiling myths and retelling them. We wanted to discover what could happen to them if we removed them from the places and times in which they were born.
The process, however, did not end with writing. What seemed simple at first, like finding a title, was not at all simple, because Guardians of the Northern Lands did not have that name from the start. In fact, it appeared when almost the text was finished and only a few final tales remained to be written. It arrived just as it was most needed.
We were looking for a name for a book featuring women who, in one way or another, had guarded for centuries stories of lives and deaths, mysteries, rites, fears, and knowledge of the northern lands of Spain. We wanted the title to speak of them, but also of the territory and that transmission of stories. Then the words Guardians, lands and north appeared.
After more than two years of work, after many readings, conversations, rejections, and pages written and rewritten, the book finally had a name. And those women who had accompanied us for so long could begin to leave our drafting tables to embark on their own paths.
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Authors: Javier Solís and Verónica García-Peña. Title: Guardians of the Northern Lands. Publisher: Uve Books. Sales: Todos tus libros.