Old Roots, New Worlds: Folklore Traditions Shaping Modern Fantasy Series

Fantasy as a genre has long drawn on myth and folklore — Tolkien's debt to Norse and Old English sources is foundational to the entire tradition. What distinguishes the past decade of television fantasy is an increasing turn away from the Anglo-Nordic inheritance that dominated the genre toward folklore traditions that have been historically underrepresented in English-language popular media. Slavic mythology, Russian literary tradition, and the vast inheritance of world oral narrative have all found recent screen expression, with varying degrees of fidelity and craft.

The Witcher and the Slavic Underpinning

Andrzej Sapkowski's Witcher saga, originally published in Polish between 1990 and 1999, draws explicitly and extensively on Slavic mythology. The series' monsters — the striga, the kikimora, the rusalka — are drawn from Central and Eastern European folk tradition, carrying the specific cultural freight of those traditions: they are not merely dangerous but morally complicated, often the products of human wrongdoing that has been transformed into supernatural form.

The Netflix adaptation, which premiered in December 2019 and ran to three seasons, brought this tradition to a global audience estimated at 76 million households for the first season. The show's relationship to its source material's folklore roots has been inconsistent — early seasons hewed closer to Sapkowski's monster taxonomy and the specific texture of his world-building, while later seasons moved toward more generic fantasy tropes. Sapkowski himself has been publicly critical of the adaptations at various points, though he sold the rights in the 1990s for a reported sum he has described as insufficient.

Shadow and Bone and the Grishaverse

Leigh Bardugo's Grishaverse novels, adapted by Netflix as Shadow and Bone (2021–2023), draw on Russian folklore and Imperial Russian aesthetics for their world-building. The landscape, architecture, military culture, and naming conventions of the fictional nation of Ravka are recognizably derived from 19th-century Russia, and the central magical conflict — a darkness threatening to consume the world — carries the weight of the specific Russian literary tradition of catastrophe and endurance.

Bardugo has spoken extensively about her research into Russian folklore and history during the composition of the original novels. The screen adaptation, produced by Eric Heisserer, maintained the visual and cultural grammar of the source material reasonably faithfully. The show was cancelled after two seasons, but the novels continue to sell and the Grishaverse remains one of the more coherent uses of non-Anglophone folklore in contemporary fantasy publishing.

American Gods and Gaiman's Mythological Pluralism

Neil Gaiman's American Gods (novel 2001, Starz series 2017–2021) operates on the premise that immigrant communities brought their gods to America, and those gods have been weakened by displacement and the rise of new deities representing technology, media, and capital. The novel and series draw on Norse, West African, Egyptian, Slavic, and numerous other mythological traditions, treating them with a consistent anthropological seriousness that distinguishes Gaiman's approach from fantasy that uses mythology as mere decoration.

The Starz series, executive produced initially by Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, brought a visual opulence to the mythological sequences that was widely praised in its first season. Behind-the-scenes turbulence led to Fuller and Green's departure after season one, and the show's subsequent seasons were critically received with considerably more ambivalence. The show ended after three seasons without completing Gaiman's narrative arc.

The Wheel of Time and the Constructed Mythology

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series (1990–2013, completed posthumously by Brandon Sanderson) draws on a deliberately syncretistic mythology — the Aes Sedai, the ta'veren, the cyclical cosmology — that combines elements from multiple world traditions rather than deriving from a single source. The Amazon Prime adaptation, which premiered in November 2021, has reached a reported 30 million viewers and attempts to maintain the scope of a 14-novel series within television's constraints.

The show has been notable for expanding the diversity of its cast beyond what Jordan's novels described, a choice that generated both praise and controversy among the series' fanbase. The use of constructed mythology rather than specific folk tradition gives the adaptation different problems from shows working with inherited material — questions of fidelity are to a single author's vision rather than to a living cultural tradition.

The Ethics of Adaptation

Shows working with specific folk traditions face questions that pure fantasy invention does not. When a streaming giant adapts Slavic mythology for a global audience, which version of those traditions is being codified, and who has the authority to make that determination? These questions have been raised by scholars of folklore and by communities whose traditions are being adapted, and they do not have simple answers. The most defensible position appears to be that taken by writers like Bardugo, who acknowledge their sources clearly and distinguish between inspiration and authority.

Sources & Further Reading