Hyrule, 1917
Tears of the Kingdom's Twilight Real
Before The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, a weird lore recap:
Remember that the Hyrule depicted in Breath of the Wild was set in the wake of a “Great Calamity” that had occurred 100 years earlier, on Princess Zelda’s 17th birthday. This is the same Hyrule that features in the new game. Nintendo’s recent “backstory review” trailer goes into the Official Lore around this for 6 minutes, and a fan video does it for an hour, but naturally they stay grounded in fairyland— and so there’s an important dimension of this history that hasn’t been mentioned:
The fact that the Great Calamity occurs on Princess Zelda’s 17th birthday establishes an uncanny link between the game’s fantasy and our real world. There are two components of this:
Princess Zelda’s historical namesake, Zelda Fitzgerald, celebrated her own 17th birthday on July 24, 1917, almost exactly 100 years before Breath of the Wild was released on March 3, 2017.
In 1917 there was a real great calamity underway. At the time it even went by a similar name—The Great War—though we now call it World War I, framing it in retrospect as prelude to its even more calamitous sequel.
Through these coincidences, it’s as if a warp, a twilight portal, a fissure is opened between the game’s fantasy and our real world.
What’s really remarkable is that even that beyond these two connections, there’s a good deal more to discover. 1917 was an extremely eventful year. It was a crucial pivot not only in the war, but in the history of the century that would follow, and up to the present day. The year’s events influenced not only the shape of political geography, ideology, further conflict, etc, but also culture broadly, including—less significant overall, but wilder in this context—the history of Nintendo, the conditions in which The Legend of Zelda series was born, and the symbolic resonances which it continues to feed on.
The following essay wrangles up a collection of historical resonances that link back into the game’s fantasy from reality, creating a web of fissures connecting the two “planes”. If you want the Fantasy Lore of Zelda’s Great Calamity, you can refer to one of the above videos or Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity. Here, I’m attempting to shine some light on the Real Lore hiding in its shadows, lore that has leaked through these warps/portals/fissures into the Hyrule Fantasy. The essay is structured as a series of vignettes that each portray a “theater” of WWI, or a vertical slice of 1917, selected as to convey their dual significance for world history and for the prehistory of the Zelda series—a complex of “butterfly effects” without which the series as we know it could not exist in its current form, or maybe at all.
The American Theater
The USA entered World War I on April 4, 1917, one month and one day short of 100 years before Breath of the Wild’s release. A 21 year old F. Scott Fitzgerald (see Link, above) dropped out of Princeton University in order to enlist. He was hoping to be killed at the front, as he had just suffered a painful breakup and had written an early draft of This Side of Paradise which he thought was more likely to become well-known if published posthumously. He never did make it to the fight, but during his training, he was stationed in Montgomery, Alabama where he met 17 year old Zelda Sayre, and began courting her. Zelda wrote a fictionalized account of his courtship letters in her 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz, decorated with metaphoric imagery that seems to be drawn straight out of Hyrule’s fairyland:
“City of glittering hypotheses,” wrote [Scott] ecstatically, “chaff from a fairy mill, suspended in penetrating blue! Humanity clings to the streets like flies upon a treacle stream. The tops of the buildings shine like crowns of gold-leaf kings in conference—and oh, my dear, you are my princess and I’d like to keep you shut forever in an ivory tower for my private delectation.”
The third time he wrote that about the princess, [Zelda] asked him not to mention the tower again.”
Miyamoto describes the origin of the series’ title:
I knew I wanted it to be The Legend of something, but I had a hard time figuring out what that “something” was going to be. That’s when the PR planner said, “Why don’t you make a storybook for the game?” He suggested an illustrated story where Link rescues a princess who is a timeless beauty with classic appeal, and mentioned, “There’s a famous American author whose wife’s name is Zelda. How about giving that name to the eternal beauty?” I couldn’t really get behind the book idea, but I really liked the name Zelda. I asked him if I could use it, and he said that would be fine. And that’s where the title The Legend of Zelda was born.
Without Scott & Zelda’s meeting (without US entry into WWI), The Legend of Zelda series would almost certainly have been given a different name.
More broadly, the impact of US involvement in the war was crucial in turning the tides, and setting the stage for the hegemony of “The American Century” that followed, a “remaking of the global order” (Tooze). This period of US dominance began from financial advantage (its economy had not been wrecked by the war, unlike other major powers), and erupted culturally into global consciousness with the Jazz Age that Scott Fitzgerald named and Zelda exemplified. After the war, American President Woodrow Wilson led the peace treaty proceedings at Versailles, a symbolic enthronement of one the two Superpowers that would dominate the later 20th century in which The Legend of Zelda was born.
The Russian Theater
Another event in 1917 birthed the second Superpower. It was the year of the two Russian Revolutions, first the toppling of the Czar’s monarchy in February, then decisively, the Bolshevik Revolution of October leading to the creation of the Soviet Union. But the “February Revolution” is named for an older calendar, and in fact occurred from March 8-12, just 5 days short of exactly 100 years before Breath of the Wild’s release.
This must be considered the most significant event of 1917, and arguably of the entire century, given its downstream effects. As Eric Hobsbawm writes in The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991: “The world that went to pieces at the end of the 1980s was the world shaped by the impact of the Russian Revolution of 1917.” There are too many variables at play to imagine what the world would have been like without this revolution, but suffice to say that it inspired the fascist backlash of Mussolini and Hitler, it gave rise to the Red Army without which Europe would have almost certainly been conquered by the Nazis, it inspired Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution as well as a huge number of other smaller Communist states, it ironically inspired through its threat the conditions of ideological competition without which the Golden Age of tamed Capitalism and the social democratic welfare state (the New Deal Order) would likely not have had come into being.
And of course, it gave rise to the Cold War, with all of its abstract games of nuclear brinksmanship, which had such an impact on the history of computers and what “games” meant at the time that computer games were born. Zelda’s gameplay is of course very different from the calculating games of nuclear strategy, though it can be considered part of a shared lineage tracing its ancestry through CRPGs and D&D to tabletop wargaming. Compared to these, it is focused on tactical action and puzzles, sure, but more importantly—it invites a kind of free play. But is this the so-called “freedom” celebrated by the Capitalist bloc, or is it rather closer to that of Marx’s ambition to do away with the alienation of specialization and to enter an age of pastoral-social bliss?
“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
Marx sounds like a Breath of the Wild gamer in this passage! But of course the fish and cattle and criticism that he wants are real.
The Legend of Zelda was born in the twilight of the Cold War, dawn of the Neoliberal era. It was 1986, only three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, five years before Yeltsin dissolves the USSR, but these transformative changes were completely unanticipated. Even so, in 1985, Gorbachev instituted the glasnost policy of “openness”, and Communist China had recently implemented its own “open door policy” in 1978. These “openings” were part of the global turn towards a new global order which Karl Popper had described as “the Open Society” in 1945, and which is now commonly known as Neoliberalism. In 2013, around the time Breath of the Wild was in its early development, Shinzo Abe’s nationalist government unveiled a new policy countering Chinese power known variously as “The Bounty of the Open Seas” and “The Free and Open Indo-Pacific”.
In the context of Zelda, the ideology of openness is crucial. It is an avatar of the spirit of its times, arguably the first popular Open World game (the Grand Theft Auto developers described GTA early on as “Zelda meets Goodfellas”).
The fact that in 1991, at the “end of history”, Link’s Hylian shield debuts with a heraldic composition featuring both the Prussian blue color, and a red eagle much like the Brandenburg coat of arms, suggests along with the Nordic blonde hair, that Link’s spirit resides in Berlin, capital of old Prussia, heart of Brandenburg, split between Communist East and Capitalist West, symbolic locus of the Cold War’s conflict between two images of human freedom.
The Ottoman Theater
Of course, Link’s shield did not start out with that Prussian/Brandenburg imagery, which is admittedly subtextual, but rather a much more explicit reference to reality—a simple Christian cross. In other words, Link was a Christian “holy” warrior, a Crusader (lit. “one who wears a cross”). And though this term does hold Cold War resonance, for example in the Ronald Reagan-sponsored “Crusade for Freedom”, in the context of Zelda’s dusty brown landscapes and fantasy Medievalism, the association with the 11th-13th century Crusades is more pronounced; Link is symbolically embarking on the Christian conquest of the Holy Land of Jerusalem, attempting to take it from the hands of the Muslim Fatimid Caliphate.
In 1917, this Crusading project was renewed for the 20th century, as the Ottomans were defeated by the British. Most explicitly Neo-Crusading was the conquest of Jerusalem:
Gen. Allenby walked on foot to the Jaffa gate on Dec. 11, 1917. Illustrations published in Europe depicted Allenby as entering the city in the presence of angels. The fall of Jerusalem was likened to the Crusades in the British press, and Allenby to Godfrey of Bouillon who occupied Jerusalem during the first Crusade. Allenby completed the unfinished crusade of Richard the Lionheart, the English king who set out for crusade and failed centuries ago.
But even beyond this, it was an eventful year in the Ottoman theater with effects that would ripple out throughout the century and beyond.
One month before the fall of Jerusalem, the famous Balfour Declaration committed British support for the Zionist project of creating the state of Israel in the Ottomans’ Palestinian territory. The subsequent Israel-Palestine conflict had its own impact on Nintendo’s history when the 1973 Yom Kippur War led to the OPEC oil embargo, leading to a surge in oil—and thus, plastic—prices. Nintendo had by this time evolved from making just playing cards, to making all kinds of plastic toys, and the embargo wreaked havoc on their supply lines, allegedly playing a role in their (gradual) transition to a different regime of materiality—electronics, software, and wooden arcade cabinets.
And earlier, on March 10, the fall of Baghdad—7 days short of 100 years before BotW’s launch. This Ottoman defeat gave rise to the Skykes-Picot Agreement, made public on November 23, which split the Ottoman territory between the British and French Empires, giving rise to the present day borders of Iraq and Syria. This predictably invoked Arab anger, as it reneged on the McMahon-Hussen correspondence of 1915-16 that had promised Arab independence in the region in exchange for fighting alongside the British (as depicted in Lawrence of Arabia). As The Economist wrote in 2016, “The Sykes-Picot carve-up led to a century of turbulence”.
At the time of Zelda 1’s release, while The Cold War was fading out, conflicts in the Middle East were beginning to take center stage (incidentally, conflicts stoked in most cases by US x USSR ideological proxy wars), giving an unsettling timeliness to the series’ resuscitated blonde Crusaderism. When A Link to the Past was released, the US had just inaugurated a new crusading period, with the Persian Gulf War (see a book on the topic, Crusade). On September 16, 2001, President George W. Bush continued with this Crusading rhetoric: “This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while,” thus declaring a new period of even greater imperial atrocities.
The Japanese Theater
In 1917, Nintendo was 28 years old, its 58 year old president having been born in Japan’s feudal Edo period. The company was founded in 1889, the same year the Meiji constitution was ratified, the government document having been based on the Prussian constitutional model (more resonance for Link’s shield). This milestone itself occurred 21 years into the Meiji Restoration, which brought power back from the Tokugawa Shogun and to the Imperial throne in 1868. This was itself a downstream consequence of the United States’ arrival at the ports of Edo in 1854 with its fearsome “black ships”, bullying the Japanese into the global economy after nearly 250 years of isolation from world trade. Nintendo’s founder Fusajiro Yamauchi was born 5 years after the Americans arrived, in 1859, before Meiji, still technically a child of the feudal Edo Period, 17 years before the abolition of the samurai class in 1876.
In 1901, less than a year after Zelda’s birthday, the Emperor-to-be Hirohito was born. In November of 1916, he was named Crown Prince (very nearly a 1917 princess). He would become emperor in 1926 and remain on the throne through the second Great Calamity and through the release of the first two Zelda titles, dying in 1989 just before the Berlin Wall came down, ending the 63-year long Showa period which proceeded straight through WWII. And though any account of things would have to acknowledge that he had at least some responsibly for the murder of tens of millions of civilians throughout China, Indonesia, and the rest of Japan’s imperial East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as the Prussian-inspired Meiji constitution had declared “The Emperor has the supreme command of the army and navy” (Article 11), Hirohito was granted immunity, avoiding even a shake of the finger during the war crimes tribunals of 1948 in order to facilitate a smoother transition (and crucially, a stronger front against the USSR’s “domino effects”). Meanwhile that same year, in 1948, Zelda Fitzgerald (the emperor’s generational sister) was living in a hospital where she had been on and off institutionalized for dementia praecox since 1931. On March 10, she died in a hospital fire because her room’s door was locked from the outside. Scott had died a decade earlier, drinking himself to death on an alleged (but frankly unbelievable) 40 beers a day.
The following year, 1949, Hiroshi Yamauchi, Fusajiro’s great grandson, took over the reigns at Nintendo. He fired all of his family employees to avoid complications, busted an attempted union formation, and in general ruled in the imperial style. He made lots of money off of a Disney license, and from this windfall diversified Nintendo’s practices from playing cards to board games, toys, and finally video games. His tenure as Nintendo’s president lasted 53 years, close enough to Hirohito’s 63 year Showa era to draw another symbolic resonance between them. His personal approval was required for all projects in the early days of the company, and he was credited as Executive Producer on all Zelda games up though Majora’s Mask. He was born less than a year into the Showa era, thus the historical situation of his first 63 years may be understood very neatly by reference to that period. Shigeru Mizuki’s Showa manga series is a good place to dig into the times of Nintendo’s modernizer.
The first post-Showa Zelda (A Link to the Past) introduces its fixation on history-as-mechanic. Its manual seems to recall the first 63 years of Yamauchi’s life, complete with nationalist imagery, evoking both the Japanese Empire’s rising sun, and the blonde Master Race (here: Master Force) ideology of their German allies, both of whom were responsible for almost unimaginable atrocities during WWII. The symbolic backgrounds of these images represent for many the barbaric slaughter of millions, and yet in LttP’s manual, they are treated with storybook tweeness.
In 1917, Japan was fighting against Germany. For their help, they were awarded the colonial territories of German New Guinea, cultivating a taste for the South Pacific in the process.
And at the Versailles Peace Conference, as one of the victors, Japan proposed a “racial equality clause” for the League of Nations:
The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord as soon as possible to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.
The proposal had the support of 11 out of 17 countries (the other 6 abstained, without a single explicit No), but US President Woodrow Wilson was chairman and as a noted racist (born into the Confederacy, like Zelda Sayre’s family), he decided that the item was too radical and should require a unanimous vote, thus tossing it in the bin. This is widely considered one of the reasons Japan’s resentments began to brew so uncontrollably, creating conditions over the next decade or so for the popularity of its cruel military dictatorship, and its eventual allegiances with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. As the American philosopher John Dewey wrote after a 1921 visit to Japan:
Young men in Japan who are genuinely hostile to existing militarism say frankly that when it comes to discriminations against the Japanese simply because they are a yellow race, they will fight to the last, even if it means uniting themselves with a militaristic party which they abhor.
Tolkien’s Earth Theater
In 1916, a 25 year old J.R.R. Tolkien was fighting in trenches of the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front. He contracted trench fever and was sent back to England to recuperate. This was lucky, as nearly his entire batalion was subsequently killed in combat. During his recovery, in 1917, he began to write the stories that would eventually form the background lore of Middle Earth, some of which are still a part of his Silmarillion. Tolkien was not alone in laying the foundations for modern fantasy, but his influence on pop culture was profound, with the countercultural interest in Lord of the Rings giving rise to Dungeons & Dragons in 1973, and the computer RPG genre (Zelda’s immediate predecessor) following hot on the heels of the pen & paper variety. Takashi Tezuka, The Legend of Zelda’s co-designer, is a proud Tolkienite (Miyamoto is not), so we can trace the influence even more directly.
But perhaps Tolkien’s greatest influence was not so much on the fantastic elements that Zelda inherits, e.g. the orc becoming moblins, Arwen becoming Zelda, etc.—but rather in its groundedness and naturalism that allows the lure of combat to melt away in the face of the pleasures of simple wandering over the earth. In his letters, Tolkien again and again emphasizes that LotR’s “theater” is not a fantasy realm, but rather, weirdly, set on this earth:
"The Lord of the Rings may be a 'fairy-story', but it takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather." (Letters, p. 272)
"I am historically minded. Middle-earth is not an imaginary world. The name is the modern form (appearing in the 13th century) of midden-erd>middel-erd, an ancient name for the oikoumene, the abiding place of Men, the objectively real world, in use specifically opposed to imaginary worlds (as Fairyland) or unseen worlds (as Heaven or Hell). The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there (at any rate for inhabitants of N.W. Europe), so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by enchantment of distance in time.” (Letters, p. 239)
Tolkien is, in the terms I’ve been using, deeply aware of these warps, twilight portals, fissures, between Fantasy and Reality, earth and fairyland, and is committed to the project according to which which fascination with fantasy lore should never replace, but rather only temporarily displace, and thus re-enchant the ground, of real lore.
The Lord of the Rings had its genesis in Tolkien’s war experiences (see Tolkien and The Great War), and 1917 was the pivotal year of the beginning of his project. Without his surviving 1917, would the sword & sorcery of e.g. Conan the Barbarian have swept popular culture in the way that Middle Earth’s “real earth” fantasy did, creating a niche for Zelda?
Coda
This dredging up of history is all a bit like the “recovered memory” mechanic of Breath of the Wild itself, but with the aim of reaching back into reality through the fantasy, rather than stopping in fairyland and getting stuck there. Given the thinness of Breath of the Wild’s actual written narrative, I would assume that these connections to 1917 weren’t intentionally put in by the developers, but who knows! In any case, the meaning that results from a piece of creative work has only a little to do its authors’ conscious intent—as the game’s producer Eiji Aonuma recognizes in the latest interview for Tears of the Kingdom:
Things can’t help but resonate historically, but it’s not always clear exactly what’s resonating. For many players, there’s a temptation to stay “in the canon” of the games themselves, but I think the links from within the game’s diegetic space outward into its “extra-diegetic” realm (our real world) are the ones worth studying closely. And for canon-heads—leaving the diegetic world behind is, after all, the namesake of Link (a link between the diegetic software and the extra-diegetic player).
So I hope that anyone who has taken the time to read this will consider the historical and geographic resonances of Tears of the Kingdom as they play it, whether from the perspective of this 1917 thought experiment (1923 is the new 1917), or another. The traces of history literally live on and constitute the final form of all objects, in this case inhering in the patterns that make up the game. These resonances do not merely evoke a mish-mashed jumble of past periods, but rather weirdly coherent subsystems, historical crystals, reanimating specific slices of the past with all their interrelationships—this being just one example, Hyrule, 1917.
So, moving on… what’s another sort of game we can play with this history? Why not keep with this centennial tempo and jump back another 100 years? Very briefly, just to see what we find.. 1817…
— As of 1815, the Napoleonic Wars are over, their namesake bizarrely destined to later serve as Nintendo’s first mascot:
— And in 1817—100 years before The Great Calamity—Caspar David Friedrich is in Dresdren, working on this iconic painting that will publicly debut the following year:
— Add another 200 years, 100 years after the calamity…
Genius connections! 🕸️
One of the most fun posts I've read in a minute!