Mythopoeic Narrative in The Legend of Zelda

Anthony Cirilla, Vincent Rone, Anthony Cirilla, Vincent Rone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000042078
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythic Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Legend of Zelda series is one of the most popular and recognizable examples in videogames of what Tolkien referred to as mythopoeia, or myth-making. In his essay On Fairy Stories and a short poem entitled Mythopoeia, Tolkien makes the case that the fairy tale aesthetic is simply a more intimate version of the same principle underlying the great myths: the human desire to make meaning out of the world. By using mythopoeia as a touchstone concept, the essays in this volume explore how The Legend of Zelda series turns the avatar, through which the player interacts with the in-game world, into a player-character symbiote wherein the individual both enacts and observes the process of integrating worldbuilding with storytelling. Twelve essays explore Zelda 's mythmaking from the standpoints of literary criticism, videogame theory, musicology, ecocriticism, pedagogy, and more.

The Legend of Zelda

Entrance into Mythopoeic Structure

4 The Hero of Faёrie

The Triforce and Transformational Play in Link’s Mythopoeic Journey

Anthony G. Cirilla

Nintendo’s strategy guide to Ocarina of Time (OoT) states,

Much of Hylian lore has faded with the passing of years, but one story that still shines bright is The Legend of Zelda…. Link always seemed destined to be a hero…. his fate was bound to the fate of the Triforce.¹

This opening assertion interprets the player’s gameplay as Link in terms of the hero’s journey. Joseph Campbell argues that the heroic journey’s mythic sequence is required to join the audience’s psychology to the symbolic significance of any literary structure. OoT awakens the player’s imagination to Link’s version of the hero’s journey by communicating concepts of power, wisdom, and courage through fairy-tale worldbuilding, so that the player can experience transformational play when performing the hero’s journey of the avatar.

Barab, Gresalfi, and Ingram-Goble provide the paradigm deployed here for understanding how videogames “are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals.”² According to their model, videogames offer the opportunity for “transformational play,” where players adopt “the role of a protagonist who must employ conceptual understandings to transform a problem-based fictional context and transform the player as well.”³ Link and the player become united through the handheld controller’s interface; thus, character-avatar and player together constitute the “person with intentionality” of the game. This person of intentionality seeks to embody and protect the values encapsulated by the Triforce. The game thus has as well the third aspect of videogames that targets transformational play, a built in “content with legitimacy,” making necessary “the application of academic concepts” (power, wisdom, and courage in this case), in order for players to “resolve the game-world dilemmas.”⁴

Zelda’s status as a fairy-tale may seem to undermine its capacity to teach “content with legitimacy.” Tolkien’s On Fairy-Stories provides the framework for perceiving how the gameworld communicates concepts of power, wisdom, and courage to the player’s imagination through a journey of authentic transformation by means of the Faёrie atmosphere suffusing gameplay. As conceived by Tolkien, Faёrie is a literary experience constituting an epistemic posture toward the self’s relationship to the world. As I argue, in OoT the player-avatar dyad becomes incorporated into this Faёrie perspective, and so learns that to be a hero of Faёrie is to make oneself subject to the effects of sub-creative imagination. This process allows players to identify more deeply with Link’s Hyrulean value system, most tightly codified in the Triforce talisman.

To establish the Triforce as the game’s “content with legitimacy,” the first section of this chapter discusses the overall structure of OoT as it manifests Link’s in-world development of power, wisdom, and courage. The second section examines how OoT’s Faёrie aesthetic produces the game’s “context with consequentiality,” while the third gives a localized analysis of Link’s Deku Tree quest in terms of how the hero’s journey elements of the sequence integrate the player into the avatar’s intentionality. This tripartite analysis provides insight into how the player potentially transforms through gameplay into a participant in Link’s identity as a hero of Faёrie.

The Virtues of the Triforce and Ocarina of Time’s Structure

According to the transformational play theory, “content with legitimacy” involves “positioning the understanding and application of academic concepts as necessary if players are to resolve the game-world dilemmas successfully.”⁵ The Deku Tree defines the legitimating content of the Triforce to Link before sending him into the world:

Din, the goddess of power… Nayru, the goddess of wisdom… Farore, the goddess of courage… Din… With her strong flaming arms, she cultivated the land and created the red earth. Nayru… Poured her wisdom onto the earth and gave the spirit of law to the world. Farore… With her rich soul, produced all life forms who would uphold the law…. And golden sacred triangles remained at the point where the goddesses left the world. Since then, the sacred triangles have become the basis for our world’s providence.⁶

Wisdom, power, and courage are pinnacle concepts within a hierarchy of value concerning how to act in the world—in other words, they are virtues, a classically academic concept.⁷ The structure of the game models proper and improper manifestations of relations amongst the three virtues.⁸ Because the goddesses embed their virtues in the created order exemplified by the Triforce, the noetic value of each constituent “force” manifests itself in the structure of nature, society, and the individual’s interaction with these values in myriad ways. The fabric of the imagined gameworld thus deeply mediates interaction with wisdom, power, and courage, an interplay exhibited both in the relatively linear structure of the game and in cyclical encounters with talismans or archetypal figures that guide Link into the Triforce’s tripartite unity of virtues. The three acts of the game (child Link excavating three dungeons, adult Link cleansing five temples, and Link’s final confrontation with Ganondorf) progress in order thematically from courage, to wisdom, to power as the focus of Link’s transformational education in mastering the unified virtues of the Triforce. The balance among wisdom, courage, and power therefore becomes the implicit, transcendent value Link must learn, and so the player must learn those values through him.

Link navigates three elemental dungeons, sacred sites of their nearby tribes: the Deku Tree, sentient tree, and guardian of the Kokiri; Dodongo’s Cavern, from where the Gorons derive their source of food; and Lord Jabu Jabu, a giant fish venerated by the Zora people. Link obtains three spiritual stones from these locations, making accessible the sacred realm wherein the Triforce resides. As conduits to the Triforce, the spiritual stones serve as elemental embodiments of the Hyrulean virtues, a notion reinforced by their color scheme. Given that wisdom, power, and courage have higher-order manifestations in the form of the Triforce and lower-order manifestations in the form of the Spiritual stones, this means that hierarchy exists within the values themselves: Thus courage, for example, must regulate courage as much as it must regulate wisdom and power.

Courage

Link lays the foundation of courageous unity he brings to the Hyrulean virtues in the first act of the game. Farore, as the divinity of courage, produces the impulse of life itself; indeed, her power is at the core of the verdant plenitude somberly guarded by the Deku Tree. The Spiritual Stone of the Forest therefore stands as a talisman of courage. The Deku Tree gives “the green and shining stone” to him at the outset of his quest to find Zelda, an omen that he will eventually bear that same Triforce of Courage. Similarly, Link travels into the depths of Dodongo Cavern to defeat the King of the Dodongos, thereby receiving the Spiritual Stone of Fire from Darunia, king of the Gorons. Din’s element is fire and so her color is naturally red, and the Goron’s Ruby possesses the sympathetic magic of her virtue, power. Finally, Link receives the sapphire jewel of the Zoras, the spiritual stone of water; Nayru puts the softening color of blue into the sky and lays the groundwork for Farore’s gift of a green world.

Each of these preliminary trials emphasize the Hyrulean virtues: Link must bravely walk into the cavernous Deku Tree and fight spiders under the cover of subterranean shadows; he must become strong enough to lift heavy bombs to break open the rock blocking Dodongo Cavern; and he must discern that feeding Lord Jabu Jabu grants him access to the belly of the beast. The first act of the game concludes with Link using the three spiritual stones to open the Door of Time by means of the Ocarina of Time, which he receives from Zelda as she flees Ganon. This culmination of Link’s childhood adventure suggests that he has reached a pinnacle of the adventure: He has mastered the Triforce’s values to the degree that they are reflected ...