Writing THE BARD’S GIFT
was a different experience for me. I write fantasy. Usually, I just get to make things up (as long as it makes sense, anyway). That’s why they call it world building. But THE BARD’S GIFT is historical fantasy, so I couldn’t just make up anything I wanted. I had to do research to find out what kind of houses my characters would live in and what kind of clothes they’d wear and a bunch of other things. Sometimes, interesting things turned up in this research. Some made it into the story, some didn’t.
Now, since my Norse characters go to set up a new colony in North America (in what the Greenlanders would have called Markland, around the Saint Lawrence River) I also included some things specific to North America–especially the thunderbird.
Many North American Indian tribes had stories about Thunderbird. For some, it was a singular, somewhat irascible, creature and a sometimes guardian. In the Pacific Northwest, there were said to be many thunderbirds, who could remove their feathers like a cloak and tilt their beaks up like a mask and so take human form. Those things made it into the story.
What didn’t get in was the real-life (prehistoric) birds that might have been inspiration for the Thunderbird. These teratorns, something like a cross between a condor and an eagle, actually once flew over the skies of North (and South) America.
Merriam’s Teratorn is well known from the Rancho La Brea Tar Pits. It would have weighed about 30 pounds and had a wingspan of about 10 to 11 feet. That’s a big bird.
But it’s nothing compared with it’s cousin Aiolornis Incredibilis, which weighed in at 50 pounds and had a wingspan of 16 to 18 feet. Yikes! How’d you like to see one of these fly overhead?
And both of these birds would have been in the skies when people first arrived in the New World.
The biggest of all is only known from South America. Argentavis Magnificens was the largest known flight-capable bird (though it probably soared much more than it flew). It had a 25-foot wingspan and would have weighed about 170 pounds! One of its flight feathers would have been 59 inches long (that’s almost six feet!). (Sorry, five feet, not six. I shouldn’t try to do arithmetic in my head before breakfast.) Now that’s a Thunderbird.
I’m not making this up. Just take a look at the first chart on this site.
More fun and interesting things to come as we lead up to the launch of THE BARD’S GIFT on January 30th.
[…] And that’s not even getting to Thunderbird. See my post about that, here. […]
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