An Update from Our Crack Team of Researchers

See all the books? We've totally been busy!

No, I kid. That's a picture from when I was writing my thesis, back in 2007. But the book in the center is my very marked up Klaeber (isn't it pretty?), so it's at least slightly topical to what I'm going to discuss in this post.

Fine. I put the picture there so that you'd have something to look at, because people like looking at pictures. Happy?

We now pause for a short message from our sponsors*: The Kindle Edition of Kingdom of Ruses is officially available! What are you waiting for? You totally know you've spent a dollar on more foolish things than that! (And now we return you to your previously scheduled blog post, already in progress.)

Today's post is, technically speaking, an onion-peeling post. (As an aside, the only picture I had of onions--that was legitimately mine, that is--was not as attractive as the above research picture, so I spared your pretty eyes the sight. You're welcome.) The topic: The Nifaran, from Kingdom of Ruses. I'm not going to tell you about them. Just their origin in my creative process.

I've long had a fascination with medieval bestiaries. It always intrigued me how the writers could juxtapose perfectly legitimate animals with perfectly... er, non-legitimate ones, and also how even the legitimate animals would have non-legitimate descriptions presented as truth. Did the writers actually believe what they were writing? Or were they trolling their audience with misinformation? And what if they had actually been right about all those mysterious (and not-so-mysterious) creatures? What sort of a world would that be?

When I first conceived the story for Kingdom or Ruses, the main character was a boy who worked for a group of government types that sat around making up creatures of rumor to promote their own purposes, as government types are wont to do. The boy, sick of the deception, was to unwittingly summon a sprite or elf of some sort, which then in turn would go around mischievously making all these fake and fantastical creatures appear. Mayhem was to ensue.

This is not the story I wrote. On further reflection I decided that I wanted a girl protagonist. The government types became her family. The mischievous sprite or elf became a mysterious stranger on a quest for knowledge. And thanks to that last development, I found myself needing to create a fantastical creature of my own.

A bit of etymology now: the word "elf" comes from Old English ælf and in OE denotes an elf, sprite, fairy, goblin, etc., a creature responsible for disease and nightmares. The modern word carries distinctive brands of its own, thanks in great part to Tolkien, numerous RPGs, and our favorite tree-dwelling cookie-makers. The OE creature was one of mystery and terror. The modern one... meh, not so much. I wanted that sense of mystery and strangeness in my creature, but labeling it an "elf" as originally conceived was right out. So I went in search of another Old English word. And I found one.

The term nifara means simply "stranger" or, more literally, "newcomer" (ni- fara, where, presumably, -fara would be the same root as modern "-farer," as in "seafarer"). It's a weak masculine noun (pl. nifaran). As best I can discover, it occurs but once in the Old English Corpus, in the Paris Psalter, 38/15 (which corresponds to KJV Psalm 39:12, by the way): "Forþam ic eom nifara hider on eorþan beforan ðe, and ælðeodig swa swa ealle mine fæderas wæran."

So basically, it's a legitimate term, not one I made up off the top of my head. I simply took and added my own meaning to it, for my own purposes, just like my scheming government types were meant to do, and just like the Moreland family does in Kingdom of Ruses. Haha. Life imitates art.

(Or is it the other way around? No matter. It's all meshed together around here.)

*I am my only sponsor. And I'm not a very good one at that.