Author’s note #1: This is first and foremost a worldbuilding and conlanging project, and is intended to be enjoyed primarily by individuals with something of a background in classic literature, literary criticism, linguistics, cultural anthropology, archaeology, palaeontology, and evolutionary biology. This is not some YA fantasy series intended for light bedside reading. This is written at an adult level. This is something you probably will not enjoy unless you’ve had some higher education in at least some of the fields mentioned, are decently self-educated, or perhaps are just an intellectually tenacious youth willing to put some work in. This particular project is an indulgence; it is not intended necessarily for “the public” to enjoy, it is intended for people like me to enjoy.
Author’ note #2: The Palæoboreanica and palæoboreanic mythology features prominently in The Nocturnals, and the Palæoboreanica therefore serves as a companion piece to those stories.
Author’s note #3: Many of these stories are re-purposed from more of a playful romp I began writing in my late teens. The original world they took place in was a D&D-esque pseudo-medieval future world. Then I realized that had already been done before. I was just going to scrap the project altogether. Then I decided instead to create a fictional hominid species in the ancient past to serve as human-surrogates, and have them co-inhabit the Earth with other hominid species. Dwarves and Ogres could be small and large Neanderthals. Conspiracy theorists might speculate that Elves are proof that Nordic aliens were visiting Earth in ancient times. Then I spent the next several years worldbuilding and conlanging. But, more about that at the main page. The point is, what I’ve uploaded here represents many layers of revision and re-worldbuilding, and still includes stuff from the very earliest phases; that playful romp I began writing as a teenager; a lot of (I think intentionally?) cringey stuff (as was popularly considered humorous in the late 90s) written by late-teenage me.
Author’s note #4: Now that I’ve contracted such a bad case of worldbuilder’s syndrome that I’ve decided to make this primarily a worldbuilding and conlanging project, I’ve decided to do alternate versions of many of the chapters; I set about writing versions in plain, simple language intended to have been translated from later Palæoboreanic languages and dialects, and some versions of certain stories in far more ornate, flowery, archaic prose, reminiscing dialects ranging from Jacobean to Victorian, representing translation from more ancient Palæoboreanic languages and dialects in my conlang-family. In addition, I wanted to write both more serious versions of, and also continue and/or finish, the older, more playful versions of the stuff I began as a teenager, but pull it more in-line with more recent versions of my worldbuilding (basically just tweak the setting and delete/change some characters). Much of that work is still ahead of me, however. I have also written some new stuff in the newer version of the worldbuild. Even way back in the early phases I began writing as a teenager, I had planned to do an epistolary-novel sort of thing, having different stories written as if by characters in the story, with simple or ornate prose appropriate to how that character might be expected to write, and possibly even replicate the effect of many different individuals’ grammatical/syntax patterns/choices (I kind of wanted to do this to push myself as a linguist).
