Several years ago I began researching historical themes and I had some ideas around a novel. I was curious about the transition in Germany to Christianity leading up to the witch trials. My concept was surrounding a gathering from across Europe at the end of April, and I thought about creating the conflict between two women. That concept was how women judge one another and would turn on each other with the societal pressure from the church.
For at least four years I have done significant research, and it has produced a series of stories about German indigenous mythology. This has helped and connected me to people with repositories of the old German practices being passed down by oral traditions. This was the kind of repositories Jacob Grimm wanted to write down. They may be known to the rest of the world as folk or fairy tales, but they are the oral tradition of a culture which was being erased.
I was talking to a Cherokee friend about this, and she said she had a complicated relationship with their culture which was not a good one for women, but that they had made concerted efforts to write down and record their culture and beliefs. This was 1000 years after Germanic indigenous culture was being erased by the church, however. I doubt very much that publishing calls would tell writers to give them a new version of indigenous tales the way the German stories are appropriated.
Through connecting with these people keeping these repositories of stories and oral traditions of our cultural beliefs and practices, I have been able to lay out a novel around the event I intended, and it has left me in a quandary. When I follow the historic truth, the conflict is much more complicated than I had originally intended, and the world becomes a very different world than those I have written an in my other stories.
My other stories recreated a German tribal lifestyle before Roman, let alone Christian, interference. One that could recreate the beliefs and practices and ritual celebrations in that place and time, which could make those elements the sole focus. While researching this big spring celebration, I have wanted to recreate it as well. However, it is not possible to do that with the novel I laid out or in a way to explore the time of transition. That novel would create a completely different world, where numbers were dwindling, and the celebration would be 10% the size, filled with tribes experiencing different pressures from Christians depending on their region. This makes it more difficult for me to start.
I have always known to write about this event would require a novel, and could not be accompany in a short story. But now how, or whether, I can write that novel I have planned and researched for years, is the bigger question. The big problem is that I appear to have two totally different books competing for the same space.
Ultimately I may have to write two companion novels just so I can have one that is pure beauty to offset the sadness of tension over the cultural erasure.
Here is how Disney presented the colonized version of the event I am writing about:
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