#r.r. virdi

[rrcraft-and-lore]

Coming soon.

Idk the date myself, I wrote a new Vincent Graves short story for this a while back, but anthologies take time to release, this is finally gearing up.

<3 Love the urban fantasy world of writers and the fandom.

[bookcoversonly]

Title: The Doors of Midnight | Author: R.R. Virdi | Publisher: Tor (2024)

[torpublishinggroup]

Which Fantasy Class Are You? (and what you should read next)

having trouble deciding what your next fantasy ttrpg class is? hmm? trouble deciding your next read?

while seemingly disparate, these two fantastical phenomena are inextricably linked, and we're going to prove it with This Quiz.

so click some answers, tell us what you got, read a book or something, and go ruin a hapless town with your table of ttrpg gamers. it's what's best in life

[gollancz]

COVER REAL: The Doors of Midnight - R.R. Virdi

HELLO COME SEE THE PRETTY

Loooooook at this beautiful, gorgeous beast of a book. It's out in August, and honestly seeing it next to the cover for book one generates incoherent joy.

[readcommendations]

[rrcraft-and-lore]

❤️

[rrcraft-and-lore]

Photo courtesy of the lovely @EssaHansen of The Graven trilogy (which you should check out). Tis a blessing to be featured for AAPI month on this shelf with such brilliant and wonderful authors.

If you haven't checked out Jade City, The Broken Binding is doing special editions of the whole Green Bone Saga now! For those asking if The Doors of Midnight will have a special edition, yes. I've gotten the question a bunch now and will happily clarify any time. :) I'm excited too!

[rrcraft-and-lore]

Fairy Tale - short story usually that is part of folklore/folktales . But did you know the most famous take of them, the German tales we've all come to hear & love, aren't exactly fairy tales? But really, they're considered "Wonder tales" or, tales of wonder.

Among the oldest that we can trace are some that come from South Asia and the Middle East, the exact origin/time frame is unknown as they have a history of existing first as oral tales in verse/poetic form that were later written down, then translated again into prose.

But the point of these folk tales were to elicit a sense of wonder - that they did!

The Panchatantra is an ancient collection of interrelated animal fables written in Sanskrit. It varies from story to story in prose format as well as verse all within a frame story.

The earliest known translation of it in a Non Indian language dates to 550 CE and is translated into Middle Persian.

Many of the fables within also share and discuss life lessons, morality, and things to contemplate beyond the wondrous stories themselves.

There are lessons to take away, as well as, for those interested in shared/comparative mythology/storytelling, beats and similar tropes/takes of tales you might recognize 🤔

Some examples can be the snake and the mongoose story, which later likely served as inspiration for Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

And while considering the history and travel/trade of stories and their evolution (something Tales of Tremaine is about), here's something to consider:

"Sanskrit literature is very rich in fables and stories; no other literature can vie with it in that respect; nay, it is extremely likely that fables, in particular animal fables, had their principal source in India." — Max Muller, On the Migration of Fables

Now, something ELSE you MUST take into account in this is how stories travel and originate. Most are for a mix of reasons, and you can't take out PIE (proto indo european) influences, then the silk road/trade migration, as well as storytelling structures once taught take on their own lives. Every culture has animals, so the motifs, tropes, beats, are going to be taken and then reapplied to a local culture.

Many scholars have noted and commented on the strong similarity between some of the stories in the Panchatantra and Aesop's Fables. And so the Panchatantra has come to be held by many as the source or most prominent source of many of the fairy/wonder tales content/structure/shape we've come to know today.

Vijay Bedekar in the History of the Migration of the Panchatantra has noted that origin of several of the stories in Arabian Nights, Sinbad, and 30-50% of western nursery rhymes and ballads have their origins in the Panchatantra as well as the Jataka tales (another collection of folk stories, about Buddha and many lives/forms/incarnations.

Many Jatakas are told with a common threefold plot schema which contains a “narrative in the present” | paccupannavatthu |, with the Buddha and other figures, a “narrative in the past” |atītavatthu|, a story from a past life of the Buddha, a "link" |samodhāna| in which there is an “identification of the past protagonists with the present ones.

If that seems familiar, it's because you'll see this sort of played out as well in Tales of Tremaine through items/characters - timeline.

But, how did this come to travel so far and wide? Wheeeeellllllllllllllll. Do you remember Nalanda, and how far it drew students from as the oldest residential university, catering to students interested from afar most especially in Buddhism?

Whaaaaale. That's how. The records we have indicate that Buddhist monks traveling along brought copies of the texts, along with other Sanskrit texts to: Tibet, China, Mongolia, and all throughout South East Asia where Buddhism can be found.

One of the earliest stories of panaceas and life saving magical herbs spread from South Asian stories. One early record of this which has now become a trope is found in the 10 century in where a Persian physician read about an herb that could restore a dead man to life and wished to find it with his king's blessing.

Narrator: He did not find the herb.

Anyways, after spreading to the Middle East, the Arabic translation of this collection was later translated to Greek then Spanish - old Castilian, and then into Hebrew by Rabbi Joel in the 12th century. Then Latin.

Anyways, Forest Gump voice: that's all i have to say about that (not really but for now).