Birds have long spoken to people’s imaginations, whether through their ability to fly, their relatively alien faces lacking familiar mammalian expressions, or perhaps their pervasive sounds that have for a long time coloured people’s lives. It is only natural that birds are a common presence in folklore and mythology. In my previous research on the place of birds in traditional Scottish Gaelic storytelling I came across some of the many ways in which birds are associated with both change and magic.
This presentation explores these connections by examining the parallels to Tzeentch, the chaos god from Warhammer 40K, Age of Sigmar and Fantasy, whose followers often manifest birdlike features. Tzeentch is primarily the god of change, but his domain also includes sorcery, prophecy, knowledge, madness and scheming, which are all things that birds can be used to symbolise in British and Irish folklore. In the folklore of the Hebrides, for example, birds are often shapechangers, while British Traveller communities have long used raw eggs as a tool for predicting the future, and in Irish myth there are stories in which birds are connected to madness. Birds, which can go where no other animal may go, are imagined to fly between worlds, sometimes taking souls with them in a way that reminisces of the daemons of Warhammer.
By situating Tzeentch in these longstanding folkloric traditions, this presentation seeks to demonstrate how Warhammer draws on deep-rooted cultural history and identity to convey concepts that might otherwise feel abstract, revealing how traditional storytelling continues to shape the imaginations of the culture it belongs to.
Author bio
Elodie de Groot is a is an independent scholar who recently completed an undergraduate master’s degree in Gaelic Studies. Their research explores folklore, language, and their intersections with contemporary writing.
