What if everything in the Zelda timeline is just a story?

Last week, Polygon ran a definitive breakdown of The Legend of Zelda’s ridiculously byzantine timeline and where both The Wild BreathAnd the future Tears for the KingdomIt was a mistake. We also pointed it out. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild – Creating a Champion’s claim that “Hyrule’s recurring periods of prosperity and decline have made it impossible to tell which legends are historical fact and which are mere fairy tale.” It makes the chronology (or even reality) of all the previous games suspect.

Polygon has announced a Zeldathon for 2023. Follow us as we journey through The Legend of Zelda, starting with the 1986 original game and ending in The Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom.

With Tears of the Kingdom: Zelda’s Legend’s release fast approaching, let’s return to that question of where it fits in The Legend of Zelda series’ timeline. That’s what we know. Tears for the KingdomIt happens very soon after. The Wild BreathThe distant timeline ends with a time when.

After we thoroughly broke down Link’s adventures across all 20 mainline games from the series’ nearly 40-year run, it might sound weird to ask: But what if it doesn’t matter?

Maybe it doesn’t. Like, at all.

The Princess, the Champion and the Big Bad

Zelda’s earliest game is Skyward Sword, but Hyrule’s creation myth starts with a story from Ocarinas of Time.

Image: Nintendo

The Great Deku Tree tells us that it was the creation of the universe when the three Golden Goddesses Nayru and Din brought order and chaos to pre-creation. (If those names sound vaguely familiar, that’s because they’re echoed in The Wild Breath’s three dragons.)

Their work done after creating the world, the Golden Goddesses just kind of left, but not before creating the Triforce — the Triforce of Power was made by Din, the Triforce of Wisdom by Nayru, and the Triforce of Courage by Farore. Hylia, another non-Golden goddess who guarded the entire Triforce, continued to live in their world.

Image: Nintendo

Next, we have Fi. Fi is the spirit who lives within the Goddess Sword (and later the Master Sword). The Legend of Zelda: Skyward SwordFrom the manga The Legend of Zelda: Skyward SwordAkira Himekawa published the following article in Kotaku. Hyrule Historia.

Hylia, who was keeping the Triforce safe from harm, came across Demise the demon king with his army and sought to seize the Triforce. With the help of a Hylian hero named Link, Hylia gathered her people and sent them to live on a floating island in the sky — the island of Skyloft that we see in Skyward Sword. This is what it says about Zora’s opinions on Zora, the Mogmas and the Gorons. That topic will be covered another day.

Image: Akira Himekawa/Dark Horse Comics

Hylia the Goddess and Link the Hero (not Link From). Skyward SwordLink (but the manga Link much earlier) won against Demise in the final battle, but he died during the struggle. Hylia, a grieving Hylia, said to him (well actually told his corpse)

Your gentle and heroic spirit will continue to live forever. And I… I shall shed my divinity. When we next meet, I will be a human being and stand before you the next time. Whenever the land of Hylia is in danger… we shall be reborn.

Hylia was reborn after she shed her divinity. Skyward Sword’s (not-princess) Zelda a millennium or so later.

End of Skyward Sword, Demise (in his proto-Ganon form) has some dying words that echo Hylia’s promise:

Your standing as an example of humanity, your type, is not the end. My hatred does not die. In a never ending cycle, it is born again. You will rise again. This curse will always be with those like you who are bonded to the blood of the gods and the spirit the heroes. You will be trampled by my hate forever, and they’ll wander the bloody seas of darkness forever!

It’s a bit melodramatic, and has big monologuing-villain energy, but what he says rings true. There’s a Princess with the blood of the goddess Hylia, a Champion with the heroic spirit of the original Link, and a Big Bad incarnation of some sort of power-hungry evil (usually Ganon), and all three of them are locked in battle for eternity.

Image: Nintendo

While we are able to point out different Zelda versions and Link from history, their existence is not certain. RolesThey are the only thing that really matters. (There are words like “hero’s journey” and “archetype” that I’m purposefully avoiding here. The work of Joseph Campbell, despite his personal antisemitism and published misogyny, can be applied to Zelda’s storytelling, much like how it influenced stories like Star Wars. Carl Jung’s work, which was frequently racist and bigoted is also included. But all that — and its inherent problems — would take thousands more words to dig into here.)

What’s in a name?

After Skyward Sword, the people of Skyloft headed back to the surface world, where Zelda’s bloodline established a (seemingly permanent) monarchy that ruled over a kingdom they named Hyrule.

Image: Nintendo

Every daughter in the Hyrulean monarchy’s bloodline, dating back to that first Zelda, was (and will be) named Zelda. In Hyrule Historia, we learn that “Princesses were repeatedly given the name Zelda, a name that came from the historical legends.” The manual that came with Zelda 2 – The Adventure of Link adds that one prince of Hyrule “ordered that every female child born into the royal household shall be given the name Zelda.” While, in a practical sense, that seems like it could get super confusing in a hurry, in a poetic sense, it serves to tie every Zelda back to the Zelda of Skyward Swordand Hylia, the goddess

Whenever there is an existential threat to Hyrule, the current Zelda always has a champion by her side that’s named, by default, Link. Until The Wild BreathEvery Zelda game lets you pick your name, or choose the default. The hero’s name didn’t really matter — it could be Link or it could be (depending on your maturity level when you played) Fart — what mattered was that the hero embodied the heroic spiritJust like Hylia, the goddess Hylia said it would be.

Image: Nintendo

Every game has a version of a Princess Zelda and a Champion Link who are (re)incarnations of the goddess and her champion, and who show up when Evil gets too serious about taking over the world — two people playing the Rolesthe Princess and Champion to defeat each new evil incarnation. This takes place at a Read the entire story — a story from Create a champion’s “Era of Myth.”

The Era of Myth

Mythology, which includes creation myths, is a way that humans can assign meaning and answer existential questions through narrative. We can also assume that the Hylians of Zelda are the same. Foundational and creation myths are messy, inconsistent and often hand-wave-y. The characters in those stories — culture and folk heroes — have similarly pliable histories. You can think of Gilgamesh and Baba Yaga as well as Hercules/Heracles, Baba Yaga, Anansi, King Arthur, and the Monkey King.

Image: Nintendo

Acceptance The Wild Breath’s treatment of everything before it as myth, it explains those contradictions and multiple timelines from the official Zelda chronology. Every timeline could be true because all myths can tell the same story.

What story does all that myth tell Hyruleans? The myths say sometimes there is evil, but they have two options: a princess with the blood and strength of a goddess, who can embodied (the triforce of wisdom), or a hero with a brave spirit, who embodies(the triforce of courage). By Hyrulean law, that princess’s name will be Zelda and, depending on the game’s options, that hero’s name will probably be Link (or maybe Fart). They’ve done incredible things in the past — unbelievable things in undreamed-of places — and they’ll be here when we need them again.

Image: Nintendo

Our current Link and Zelda are fairly familiar right now. Many of us have spent over 1,000 hours exploring Hyrule in various Link versions. And there’s something a little more… certain about a Link whose name can OnlyBe Link. Calamity Ganon and we met him during The Wild Breath.

And we’ll learn even more about the timeless battle they’re playing out in Tears for the Kingdom.