Frozen Fantasy Stories

 It is Christmas Eve and it is REALLY friggin’ cold outside, but I hoped to sit and write a Saturday Note so that you guys don’t feel as if you’re all alone on this Christmas weekend. Or, more likely, I feel bad if I go a week without doing a Saturday Note.

I didn’t know what to write about, but then I got hit by a blast of cold wind/inspiration and so here we are!

Frozen Fantasy Stories

In part because people have some kind of weird Norse fetish for reasons that escape me, we’re seeing more and more stories in settings where it’s really freaking cold. And not everybody thinks about what that would entail! There’s this weird idea you see sometimes that if you put the fantasy in a frozen wasteland, that it would be the same as epic medieval fantasy, just… really cold. And that’s not actually how that would work.

So! Some things to keep in mind if you’re writing fantasy set in a frozen area.

What Resources Are Available to Build/Craft Out Of?

When watching The Last Airbender, the live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, you’ll notice so many things wrong with it that the criticisms are practically cliches at this point. But one thing I noticed which I haven’t seen commented on is that the Northern Water Tribe, a group of people who live at the North Pole, have their army equipped with swords.

Where did they get swords? Where did they get the metal?

In the depiction of the Southern Water Tribe there are scenes around campfires or tent fires, and they’re fed by wood and sometimes have little wooden structures over them. The tents have some wood in them. Again, the question arises: where is the wood coming from? They’re in the tundra or polar ice caps, places famous for not having a lot of trees. 

Part of this is because the original series, which based the Water Tribes heavily on the Inuit, made a point, design-wise, to give them more suitable weapons. Knives, spears, clubs, boomerangs, and MAYBE a machete, and all of these are made from bone. Likewise, they don’t use a lot of wood in building their houses–they use leather and bone, if they’re not using ice and snow itself (having waterbenders helps with that, I guess).

Many fantasies assume that people fight with swords, but don’t bother to explain where those swords came from. If the setting is based on Northern Europe, it’s more excusable, but even then you have to ask where this metal is coming from that they’re using to craft, or wood that they’re using to build. Trade is an option, but keep in mind that not everyone in a society is wealthy enough for trade.

Consider magic too, if it’s fantasy. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the Others craft weapons out of ice. The waterbenders in Avatar are also happy to use ice and water as weapons. If magic exists in your story, it’s probably possible to make weapons with it in one way or another.

What Do They Eat?

The action of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla begins in Norway which is depicted in-game as a frozen, mountainous wasteland. I understand that this is partly an artistic decision to help differentiate game regions for players, but at the same time, it also means that there’s an entire country that appears to be made out of tundra and frozen mountains.

What the fudge are these people eating? Meat? That can only get you so far without catching scurvy. There are berries in the wilderness too, but you would expect that people would be cultivating that near their homes. One of the storylines in “Discovery Tour” has a lead character who is a farmer, but the place is apparently perpetually frozen–what is he harvesting?

Avatar: The Last Airbender has the subtle conflict between Sokka and Aang about diet, because Aang’s vegetarian and Sokka loves his meat. Which makes sense: the tundra is not a place you run into a lot of vegetables, so of course people of the Water Tribes prefer meat and seafood. It’s one of the easiest things you can get! Reading some Gary Paulsen, he also brings up indigenous people in Alaska having seals’ blood–which sounds gross to me, but for them is probably an important source of nutrition.

A random detail I love about Skyrim is how the giants are apparently shepherding mammoths? They are often seen around them, they carve things out of their tusks, and a staple of their diet is mammoth cheese. You’ll also see the humans have highland cattle around, and other animals and plants that they grow. Of course, those animals will also require large amounts of vegetation to keep them alive, so figure out what it is they’re eating too.

Figure out not just what animals live in the wilds of this fantasy setting, but what animals are domesticated, as well as what plants grow that can be eaten. And given it’s a fantasy setting, you’re free to make some up for yourself.

How Do These People Dress?

In a frozen wasteland, how do people dress? Think about it for a bit. Did you say, “Nothing but rough leathers and furs?” Well you’re wrong! Something that frustrates historians and historically-minded people in criticism, I’ve noticed, is the frustration to dress up Viking and other “barbarian” characters in nothing but rough leathers and furs. This works as a good visual language to what you’re meant to think of these peoples, but that’s not necessarily what people represented (directly in historical fiction or indirectly in fantasy counterparts) would have worn.

Where’s the color? Where are the designs? Where are the bits of jewelry and art that would have made this all brighter? A lot of these peoples would have worn colorful clothing–sometimes to denote status, yes, but for things like special occasions even low-status people in a society would want to wear something somewhat nice.

If you’ve already given this frozen society metalworking, they should have things like gold and silver jewelry to wear. That means piercings, or necklaces, arm bands, pendants, amulets, torcs, and crowns. If they’re in the tundra or polar ice caps: again, bone! You can totally make beads out of bone, and so you can see people making a bajillion beads out of the animals hunted.

As to colors: it wouldn’t be hard to think of ways to make dyes in a fantasy setting. There are ways to make dyes out of certain plants. Go back to the berries I mentioned above–could they also be used to make colors and paints for things? Especially if they aren’t edible, because not every fruit you find in the wild is going to be good for eating. If you can make colors out of those, you bet your bottom dollar that people are going to be making art out of it, and some of that art is going to be wearable.

Again, if you’re making up a fantasy setting, you can make up things for these people to use. Plants for dyes, or fantasy creatures that bleed funny colors, or some kind of weird fungus or something.

How Do They Interact With Others

Alright, so this fantasy culture is going to have to interact with other societies at some point. How do they do it? If you’ve ever played Horizon Zero Dawn (especially “The Frozen Wilds”) the Banuk tribe is from a place that’s very cold, and they’re not very open to outsiders. Which isn’t entirely meant to be hostility, it’s just that they have beliefs and culture different from the other tribes and are based heavily on survival in extreme conditions–which isn’t something they really care to explain to others that much. And considering how far outside of people’s comfort zones they live, it’s not like many have much reason to go talk to them.

They also do weird things like weave machine cables into their skin and that’s a bit freaky if you ask me.

It is entirely possible that the relationship IS hostility though. If it’s a Norse-based culture, remember that the Norse spent hundreds of years pillaging and enslaving the people around Europe. That’s not a precisely great way to build positive relationships, although they did find people to trade with, and eventually it became common enough for them to be hired out as mercenaries or guards after building a reputation as warriors.

The Water Tribes of Avatar are almost completely isolationist in the original series. Notice Sokka’s hesitation to accept Aang because he might bring trouble (though the warriors have mostly left to go fight in the war, after they’d been raided several times over). And notice that almost no one from the Northern Water Tribe has apparently left their capital to fight in the hundred-year-long war until after the Avatar appears and wrecks a Fire Nation fleet.

These cultures would have a lot to share with peoples who aren’t from their world or biome–meat, leather, carved objects, art, clothing, and so on and so forth. If they live in a place with not a lot of resources, it might encourage them to be very cooperative with other people to make sure the community survives. Or, those interactions could easily turn hostile–raiding people for their stuff, because there are only limited resources and they don’t think of sharing outside the immediate community.

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