The Fox and The Moon - Creating Fox
Hi! Welcome to our weekly Fred & Dan Newsletter Why Aren’t You Famous Yet? This is another behind the scenes look at our new script The Fox & The Moon. This post is all about our main character Fox written by Dan! Enjoy!
Today, I took a deep dive into Celtic history to write the lore behind our love interest Fox. While we might not go into this lore specifically in the script, it is the background of his character that will add depth and dimension as we write his scenes and dialogue.
This is all in service of research for Giovana and mine’s current script The Fox and The Moon, a witchy romance tale about prejudice, love, and worlds colliding. As lovers of romance novels, we are pumped to be creating our very own entry into the lexicon of “supernatural people fall in love and have crazy sex.”
Both of our main characters share the ancestral backgrounds of us, the writers - Indigenous Mexican American from Gio (Ix Chel) and Celtic from me (Fox). I have been wading through all the stories of Irish witches to find a place where Fox’s family could fit in and have it make… semi-sense without pissing anyone in the Celtic wicca community off… too much.
So first off, the number one main thing I love about Celtic witch lore, is that pretty much all of the known Celtic witches are women. There’s only one recorded man who was ever persecuted for witchcraft in Ireland and it was believed he was working at the whims of his wife and her sister, who were the real witches.
Second, unlike their sisters and brethren in America and other parts of Europe, Irish witches did not face much persecution. Ireland has a long history of magic, including a strong belief in fairies. If you’ve ever been to Ireland this is no surprise, the place itself is so beautiful it feels like there’s no way there wasn’t some kind of supernatural intervention to make the hills so green and the Guinness so delicious. When witch hunt hysteria took over many other parts of the world, the Irish were like “You know what? We’re going to mind our business. If there are witches then that is their business. That is not our business. Good day and goodbye.”
How does Fox, our Outlander-sexy wizard who also happens to be the black sheep of his family because of his humane views of other cultures, fit into Celtic lore? Let’s start with The Morrigan, the Celtic Goddess of Magick and Night, also known as the “Great Queen” or “phantom queen.”
There are many stories and tales about The Morrigan, how she isn’t actually one person but three sisters, how she herself fought on the battlefield and was heard chanting poetry, or how The Morrigan was connected to, or possibly even the same person as, the legend Morgan le Fay - the rumored magical sister of King Arthur.
The idea of Fox being related to King Arthur intrigued me greatly, and then I remembered a movie that came out within the past two years called The Green Knight about King Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain. The story is classified as a chivalric romance, perfect for drawing parallels to our romance movie love interest.
Not only that, but Sir Gawain has been titled the “Knight of Maidens” and is noted as having dalliances with multiple magical women, including the aforementioned Morgan le Fay. I love this story. In it Sir Gawain slays a giant serpent and it turns out to be Morgan and then they have a hot love affair. I imagine it mostly taking place under magical waterfalls.
Based on all of this, here is the lore I have developed for Fox and his family:
Fox’s family are descendants of Sir Gawain and The Morrigan, tying them both to Welsh and Irish history. They are an old, important family with hundreds of years of accumulated wealth and a tendency to birth boys. This union between Sir Gawain and The Morrigan started an acceleration of male Celtic witches, which was previously almost entirely made up of women. Fox’s family, particularly his father and brothers, are attached to their history as Arthurian descendants and believe this gives them some higher seat at the table (no pun intended), like they have a divine right to be authorities in the witch realm.
Family crest is a crow in a green tree - a combo of the symbol of Morrigan and a nod to The Green Knight.
One of the most interesting and fun parts of writing is the research part. Especially when writing something that ties to history, and my own ancestral country of Ireland.
Morgan Le Fay
Sir Gawain