The Legend of Zelda: Cyclical Time in Myth and History

So. Let’s start with a review of the Zelda timeline. The timeline first made its official debut in the Hyrule Historia, and its been pretty controversial ever sense. The chronology starts with Skyward Sword, and splits at Ocarina of Time into three other timelines, where all the games have become situated. With the release of Breath of the Wild, fan discussions of the timeline started back up again – where does it fall on the timeline? And with that came the dissenting voices of those who hate the timeline and think it makes no sense. And those who want to tweak the timeline. I think almost all discussions about Zelda would almost always need to either start with the timeline, or be considerate of the timeline.

I’ve had my own thoughts on the timeline, which I’ve summed up in a brief discussion in a blog post. I’ll mention the blog post more a little later on, but if you’re interested in reading more I’ll link it here. But I think there’s something really interesting in the timeline, and something we can dig into in this video. What’s really interesting in this timeline is the sheer fact that the time line is a linear chronology of cyclical conceptions and experiences.

Mythologies, as well as other forms of storytelling around the world, frequently have the combination of cyclical time told in the comfortable linear format. Probably the most prominent version of this would be Hindu mythology. Hindu conceptions of the world is broken up into different world eons, with the last being the ultimate destruction of the world. Once the world is destroyed, it is reborn and the cycle of the world begins again. Time remains cyclical, in a constant rhythm of destruction and rebirth, while the stories themselves are still constructed in some type of linear fashion – each event thought to be one after the other. But that these events can be re-experienced, leading to the death of the world once again.

For Zelda, the interweaving nature of myth, time and history is made really apparent in the Historia’s timeline. But this isn’t apparent in the timeline itself – it’s apparent in one of the paragraphs preceding the timeline under the title “Weaving History”.

“This chronical merely collects information that is believed to be true at this time, and there are many obscured and unanswered secrets that still lie within the tale. As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history. Hyrule’s history is a continuously woven tapestry of events. Changes that seem inconsequential, disregarded without even a shrug, could evolve at some point to hatch new legends and, perhaps, change this tapestry of history itself.”

This paragraph reveals a lot about how the makers of Zelda, especially those who put together the Historia and its timeline, view the intersections between history and mythology, which isn’t all that different from other understandings in the physical non-video game world, as well.

Our first point on this we’ll pick up on is the line “As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history.” This may seem a bit strange, especially to some. But history is a story, as much of one as any other. There are multiple versions of history – different tales that, while all about the same event may seem drastically different from one another. Sometimes, these stories are structured around artefacts or documents that we find, but ultimately these stories are interpretations and interpretations are subjective.

One of my favourite illustrations of his point is an article by Horace Miner called Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. The article mimics archaeology and anthropological studies based on artefacts and aspects of a culture that we find by looking at every day life in the United States, but framing it in slightly off ways. It’s always a great teaching article for introduction to anthropology type courses, mostly because it helps to illustrate how even the big names of scholars we’re studying might not always get things right, or may have their own subjective understanding that doesn’t necessarily match up to the students’ understandings or even those of the people we’re talking about.

History is a story, one that changes when we hear new stories and new perspectives. This is something that hit quite strongly in 2020 and 2021, though had been building prior to that for quite some time. Suddenly, the voices of those whose versions of the story had been pushed to the side and marginalised became more apparent and more widely told. And white society had a sudden change of history – which some accepted and are actively working to rewire in their own conceptions, and which some are rejecting and hiding from. But either way, the stories have changed history.

In my blog post on the Legend of Zelda as legend, I talked about how the different versions of Link could potentially be different versions of the same story, told at different times and by different people. This is why so many elements of the story are the same through each telling, but with differences that are telling for not only location but time and other elements of history such as wars. If we are to understand the Legend of Zelda from this perspective, rather than a structured timeline, then we understand the shifting nature of myth and legend through the experience of history. History impacts mythology, and mythology and storytelling impacts history.

The connections between myth and history is very common and present throughout most to all understandings of mythology and history and storytelling. In fact, in some early conceptions of mythology, they believed that people told myths as a form of their own understanding of history. This is often found in ideas like creation myths: how the world was created and when, as well as the history of the particular peoples telling the myths. Many scholars will talk about how myth can function as history in these particular ways and in more complex ways, such as Mircea Eliade and Max Muller, for example. But what is important to remember is how the reverse is also true: not only is myth able to function as history, but history can function as mythology. And this intermingling really helps to demonstrate how entirely enmeshed the whole thing is: myth and history are not two separate things that occasionally get mixed up by well-meaning but incorrect groups in the jungle – it’s an intricate dance that is played out between two incredibly similar aspects that only at times differentiate when the culture deems it necessary to differentiate.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but… this is why the timeline is actually kinda cool. Not because of the Zelda timeline making any kind of practical sense at all, but because it points out this intermingling of the two aspects in a really clear and beautiful way that impacts the story-experience of a series of games. It also helps to give the development team an easy out when they craft a game that doesn’t really seem to fit. It’s not that development team made a mistake by not following their own canon – this new myth and story has simply changed the history and the way we understand the history.

Bringing it back to cyclical history specifically, we see the connections between cyclical time and mythology in the construction of the basis of the games. In every game, it is a reincarnation of Link, Zelda and Ganon that is being played out – the same soul of the characters being reborn over and over, and therefore replayed over and over in each iteration of the game.

But it is not just the characters who are reincarnated in cyclical forms. Bringing us back to the conception of cyclical time in the manifestation of world eras, as we talked about in Hindu mythology, there are similar cycles of world creation and destruction in Hyrule. Windwaker, for example, shows a Hyrule that was drowned in a flood (destruction) and then renewed in a version of Hyrule that is on islands (rebirth). We see a destruction of Hyrule in the past flashbacks of Breath of the Wild, and though the land the is not destroyed as it was in Windwaker, the kingdom was destroyed and then reborn through the actions taken in the game.

Even though each game is technically showing a linear aspect of time, the placement of the games in their relationship to one another automatically sees Hylian history on a cycle of death and destruction, to rebirth – in all its aspects of time.

Hylian myth is also quite cyclical, and inherently tied to the history of Hyrule. The myth of world creation, for example, is built into the physical history of the world through the presence of goddess statues and even the idea of the Triforce as being a present force in the world. The world is constantly marked by its mythic history – with the goddesses who flooded the world before Windwaker, to the Twilight scarred world in Twilight Princess.

The characters are also tied to the world’s history and myths. Most of the games start with a reminder of the way things work: the story of the legendary hero who came to save the world from the darkness, whether they were successful or not, is often mentioned. And then the story is re-lived through the story of the game.

But the words in the Hyrule Historia is important to remember: “As the stories and storytellers of Hyrule change, so, too, does its history.” The stories being crafted are from the developers, and as such aspects of the history can change over time. The introduction of the goddess Hylia into the world’s history and mythology is an important change that started around the introduction of Skyward Sword and seemed to be the prevailing mythology in Breath of the Wild. But there’s another aspect to the stories and storytellers that is more than just the developer.

The greatest storyteller is the player. As the player engages in the world, and crafts their own stories and experiences in Hyrule, the history of the world changes. The player has agency in the world, and the experiences of Hyrule’s history and mythology is therefore changed as well.

So… the Zelda timeline. I think it’s clear I’m not the happiest with it, but that’s because my experience of the games – the stories I’ve told and the stories I’ve written into the landscape of Hyrule – don’t line up with that history. My stories have changed the history and the landscape of the world. Your stories do the same. Maybe your history of Hyrule is different than mine. But that’s how history and mythology work – they change as our stories change. Because not only do we have agency in the worlds we live in – whether they are the physical worlds outside your house, the virtual worlds of Hyrule – but ultimately, our stories change the world because our stories have power. And I’d love to see your history and your mythology and see how it changes.