Throughout history, myth & folklore were never truly about explaining the world; in every culture, they were about making mortality liveable. Wasn’t death more bearable when there was a way to chart a path across dark rivers of fire to paradise? Weren’t heroes metabolising the idea of death, moulding it into a malleable concept shaped repeatedly until it went from unknown to known. The idea of Marrowsong sprung from that first seed, and indeed, we believe stories of old live in the small bones of the wrist, engraved onto the sternum like pages of a book opening to a beating heart filled with life. Bones outlast flesh, & act as oracles of the past, telling stories of how the dead once lived & what they once believed.

Myth is never actually discovered in books or scholarly explorations. It certainly lives there, but for humans, stories are etched into our bones & through our blood; it is the ichor that turns mortals into immortals through the power of legacy. We steep ourselves in myth, our ears filled with prayer and hope as we slip into this cavernous world, with stories of women turned monsters and gods who return from the dead to become kings. We inherit mythology, and we begin to use lore to shape our own cultural traditions, mutating into tangible practices: oral history, fables, and even fairy tales.

Across the world, people have carried stories far longer than any archive has existed, which are often lost: gathered by colonisers and empires as curiosities or superstition instead of sacred history. Print has a huge lacuna for many people and communities that don’t get the chance in traditional publishing to tell their sacred & ancient stories. Marrowsong turns toward that absence with the aim of filling it through a decolonial lens, asking who has been telling these stories, who was left out of the telling, & what changes when the people who inherited them tell them on their own terms.