Interview with DJ Butler, Author of Witchy War

 

Butler's Witchy War series presents a world unique and yet not unfamiliar to our own. Magic works in the majestic Appalachians, part of an empire controlled by electors.

What research did you do during your world-building? Any experience with Appalachian magic?

I do lots of spot research as I write; for instance, to try to make sure the street plans of my fictional Nashville and New Orleans at least somewhat track the street plans of the real-world cities or to make sure that I am including right real-world cultures in appropriate places.

I spend quite a bit more time doing background reading that feeds into and informs the stories over time. The basic idea of the series ultimately has roots in David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed and the stories of the Brothers Grimm, ultimately worked into ideas about the human experience with the divine that come from Egyptian mythology and some radical Old Testament scholars, e.g. Margaret Barker's Temple theology. Also, obviously, I read a fair amount of history: Colonial America, Jacksonian America, Early Modern Europe, and pre-Columbian America are prominent on my bookshelves.

Maybe less obviously, I've spent a lot of time with the languages of America. You cannot trust Google Translate to get any language right, which means that the Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Dutch, Catalan, Spanish, and Ojibwe in the books were all composed by me.

I've also done a lot of background reading in the weird elements of the books. Megafauna, cryptids, American giants, standing stones, and yes, magic. I have no personal experience with magic (though I have many friends who have shared with me their experiences and practices), but I include real-world traditions in the stories--braucherei, astrology, vodun, the midewiwin medicine societies, etc.--and I try hard to treat them respectfully and get them right.

Would you describe this world as a parallel with the difference of magic or something that stems from a singular point-of-departure? Either way, how does that change impact systems like government?

Some kinds of alternate history stories take a single historical moment and explore the imagined consequences if that moment had turned out differently. "What if the Greeks had lost the Battle of Salamis?" "What if the Texans had won at the Alamo?"

This is a different kind of story. It's more like a funhouse mirror held up to all of Earth's history and cultures and stories. If there is a point a departure from our Earth's trajectory, it's back in the Garden (one of the disputes that runs through the books and motivates some of the action is that there are two races descended from Adam: the Children of Adam include the Children of Eve and also the Children of Wisdom, or the Firstborn) or, if you prefer, the Stone Age (Doggerland is explicitly part of the backstory). This makes the Witchy War comparable with respect to how it uses history to something like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. 

That means that I'm not exploring the consequences of a single moment in history in the books. My mission is broader; I'm using the real-world elements that strike me as appropriate, in an epic fantasy vehicle, to explore human nature.

The governments in the Witchy War are not quite the governments we know from our experience. England remains a monarchy and has been since "Lucky" John Churchill defeated the Necromancer Oliver Cromwell (in the process converting England back to a synthetic neo-paganism in an act of defensive magic, to stop Cromwell from killing his soldiers with the baptismal registries of England's parish churches) and put himself on the throne. Napoleon rules from Paris as the Caliph of the Caliphate of the West.

And the New World is organized as an empire with an elective Emperor. Under the Philadelphia Compact of 1784 (one of the three, or possibly four, great feats of the Lightning Bishop, Benjamin Franklin), the various Powers of the New World (which include tribes, and cities, and bishoprics) send Electors to the Assembly in Philadelphia to decide a limited number of issues, including who shall be Emperor. The story begins with the Penn Landholder Thomas Penn on the throne, but some doubts about his legitimacy.

The dialogue in Witchy War is eye-catching and distinct. How does language play into world-building for a setting that is fictional but related to our own world?

Language is huge. Dialogue and accent are still big and visible in America today, even after many decades of national broadcasting (TV news, Hollywood films, etc.) to smooth them out. They were much bigger once. A major reason why we have regional English variations still today is because immigrants from different parts of England brought different versions of English with them in the first place.

Similarly, with language, it's easy to imagine that there are basically two languages spoken in the U.S. We still have some 150,000 speakers of Navajo and 40,000 speakers of Ojibwe, not to mention other Native American tongues, Cajun French, Pennsylvania Dutch, and the languages of every numerically significant immigrant group. As recently as the 1950s, there were entire church congregations in Payson, Utah, near where I live, that spoke Icelandic. Any true story that attempts to capture the spirit of America cannot be a story only told in English, by English-speakers. It certainly cannot be a story told in a single accent, with a single homogenized vocabulary.

Any favorite aspects of the history in this setting?

I love playing little games with history.

For instance, in the real world, John Churchill's father Winston published a book called Divi Britannici ("Illustrious Men of Britain"). It was a work of heraldry aiming to get himself a position at the Restoration court of Charles II. In the Witchy War backstory, Winston Churchill published a book called Dei Britannici ("British Gods"), which inspired his son to save Britain by returning it to paganism.

Here's another example. In real life, John Churchill (the Duke of Marlborough) was the great military foe of Louis XIV of France. For ten years, he kicked Louis's forces up and down the continent, all the while wrangling a factious alliance of smaller bourgeois nations to keep them in line. A false rumor of Churchill's death reached the French, generating a folk song. The song was translated into multiple languages and was so popular, despite not being true, that Goethe complained a century later that the whole continent seemed to have an earworm. (You may never have heard the song, by the way, but you have heard the melody, because it was appropriated for the song "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow").

In the Witchy War, there is a song about John Churchill, but we don't hear it. Instead, when the Bishop of New Orleans is leading the fight against the Chevalier in book three, becoming a folk hero in the process, people rewrite the song as a ballad about the bishop, which lyrics I wrote. Yes, they are in French.

L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre 

Mironton, mironton, mirontaine 

L’évêque s’en va-t-en guerre

Ne sait où dormira

Ne sait où dormira

Il dormira par terre

Mironton, mironton, mirontaine 

Il dormira par terre

Ou dans la Pontchartrain

Ou dans la Pontchartrain

Here's one more. The Franklin Seal is a sigil seen in the Witchy War setting, in architecture and in medallions, for instance, that consists of the three letters, T, C, and B, and a lightning bolt. 

They are said to represent the bishop's accomplishments: the Tarock he designed, the 1784 Compact, and the Bishopric, as well as his domestication of lightning by the apparatus of the Lightning Cathedral. The four letters/symbols also correspond to the four suits of the Tarock deck, and some say that the C covertly also stands for the Conventicle, the secret society Franklin is said to have founded.

And also, TCB with a lightning bolt meant "taking care of business in a flash" to Elvis Presley, who distributed jewelry in that shape to his men.

So, you know, you can't take me entirely seriously.