From: Raymond E. Feist
Date: 25 August 1996
Faerie Tale was the result of three odd ideas that came together unexpectely. 1) who were the Magi? 2) what if fairy lore wasn't myth, but an oral history of stuff that really happened and a guild for how to deal with faries? 3) if 2, then what happened to them?
I did a little research, but found I could pretty much pick and choose whatever aspect of myth I needed, because there was so much and much of it was contradictory.
The Fool, for example, only appeared in one source, as a minor cite, and I turned him into the most powerful and important character in the book.
Best, R.E.F.
From: Raymond Feist
Date: 15 August 2007
Faerie Tale was the result of two things. The first was to see if I could stretch myself outside heroic fantasy.
The second was a combination of odd thoughts over a period of months. The first came when I was considering some science that had come about that was arguing the exact duration of mankind's existence, a half-million years or a million. The thought struck me that with civilization being around only roughly six thousand years ago. So 494 thousand or 994 thousand, that's a lot of years to be hunting and gathering. I thought about all those wonderful stories of lost civilizations, Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, and the fiction that has risen around that notion, say for example Robert E. Howard's Kull and Conan stuff. And I thought "what if there were ancient civilizations that faded without a trace?" And there's some evidence that the Egyptians sort of leaped upon the world stage technologically, and gradually went downhill from there over centuries.
The second thought was about fables and their basis in truth, i.e. many Irish legends for example are cautionary tales. An idle thought: what if fables were real?
Lastly, one day a kid asked me "what's a magi?" because he was having an argument vis-a-vis D&D. I realized that other than 'one of the three guys who came to Bethlehem," I didn't have a clue, so I hit the encyclopedia (big book thingie we used to use before the Internet). Read about them, and how the Romans beat them up and the Shi'a Islamics obliterated them, save for a small sect of Parise in India.
Then one day it all came together: of course there were ancient civilizations, but the fareies kept obliterating them until the Magi rose up and defeated them!
Then all I needed was a story to go with the idea and the notion of the treaty breaking down and a family being next door to the faerie reservation hit me and that's how the novel came to be.
Best, R.E.F.
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