The Legend of Zelda – Literary/Cultural Examinations: The Gerudo

Welcome to the first in a new series of articles that seeks to examine the Zelda series from two separate lenses – one which is purely a look at the various uses of real-life cultural aspects in the series, and the other is actually a higher-level literary examination of how those cultural ideas are utilized in an experiential manner. The updates to this series will be infrequent and, honestly, fairly random. They are not meant to be read in any specific order, and are thus less of a “series” and more of an ongoing type of article. Enjoy.

The Zelda universe is one rich with interesting concepts and rife with ideas. It seems impossible to enter a new region in any given game without running into some matter of person, place or thing with its own identifying attributes – things that make it its own. These various pieces go a great way in making up the game, as it is the myriad experiences – the interesting encounters with the new and exciting – that make up the total experience. Every Zelda fan has encountered many intriguing aspects of a game in the series, and many of these fans have gone even further as to write about them, and a smaller group of fans have spent a large amount of time dedicated to discussing them. Whatever your personal way of going about playing and thinking about the series – ranging from simply no more than a fun game experience to a full-on fan sort of deal – I believe it’s time we examine the series from a new sort of viewpoint, a viewpoint that seeks to understand the full experience by summing up its parts.

If we can take an in-depth look at each of the considerably important facets of the series from two separate but uniquely important viewpoints, we can come to a better understanding of the experience Zelda seeks to provide, whether intentional or otherwise. What better place to arbitrarily start from than with the traditional “enemy race” of the series, the illusive Gerudo?

First we will more simply examine the veritable plethora of cultural concepts that went into designing the Gerudo. The Zelda series, like all fantasy tales, draws from a wide well of ideas to form its universe. These ideas range from directly taking parts of real-life cultures, to basing ideas around old myths and legends, to drawing inspiration from other established fantasy fictions. It is these three sources that are used time and time again in all fantasy-themed fiction stories – as the saying goes, nothing is ever truly “new”, it is simply the way it is used that can be original. The Gerudo, like any other part of Zelda, boast a sizable amount of “outside material” that went into their creation.

The Gerudo themselves are modeled after the Amazons, an all-female warrior race that existed in the old legends of Greece. This legend grew into the time of the middle ages, where it became a sort of “enticing” myth. Being Europe in this period, and following the cultural standards of old Europe, the idea of an exclusively female military branch was met with a combination of fear (death by battle) and sexuality (the undue sexualizing of anything remotely woman-related at the time) – a potent mixture that represented something dangerous and exciting. There were even searches for the lands believed to be occupied by the Amazons as late as the Renaissance.

While the Gerudo may be portrayed as an Amazon people, their trappings are not. The fierce women warriors of the Gerudo tribe wear stereotypical Arabian dancer costumes – skimpy outfits covered with a thin masking veil. In addition to the Arabian nature of the costumes, their focus on horses is unmatched by any other group in the Zelda universe, and (as you probably already know) horses were introduced to Europe from the Middle East – Arabian horses were considered the best of them all. The clothing choice and strong use of horses is coupled with the thief status of the tribe (mirroring tales about the legendary Forty Thieves) to add an important Middle Eastern layer to the painting. The lands of the Middle East were viewed by Europe as full of mystery, and again, danger.

The architectural style of the Gerudo also comes to play in this examination. The Gerudo Fortress is a foreboding structure in Ocarina of Time, one armed to the gills with powerful warriors and guards. Past the obvious military purpose of the building and simply focusing on its design, the Gerudo Fortress appears to be very similar to a city-dwelling of one of the North American Anasazi (or Pueblo) peoples. The complicated form of the complex, its sandblasted bricks and its location under a cliff illustrate the fortress as being an Anasazi structure.

The Spirit Temple is the great religious place of the Gerudo, and marks yet another two possible candidates for cultural influence. The style of the temple itself is clearly meant to be Egyptian, using booby traps in an ancient temple and having hieroglyphs adorn the walls (and going so far as to name one enemy “Anubis”). While the temple may be Egyptian in style, the Goddess of the Sands – the deity of the Gerudo people – employs Hindu imagery. She holds sacred items such as a torch, and she is half-serpent. We are never given the name of this mysterious goddess, but she served her purpose to create more mystery. Both the Egyptian and Hindu religious beliefs, while incredibly different, were viewed the same from a European perspective – foreign, exotic, and with a potential magical touch. They were both mysterious and were continued to be viewed as possessing a forbidden sort of knowledge well into the twentieth century (especially the Egyptians).

The last more obvious cultural allusion is one that pertains to the dueling nature of the Gerudo and the Hylian peoples. In Ocarina of Time, the two civilizations are locked in a sort of warfare with each other – staunch enemies. It could be very easily argued that Hyrule is an amalgamation of the civilizations of Medieval Northwestern Europe, but what would that then make the Gerudo? Being a mysterious, fierce “savage” enemy people from an arid land southwest of their imperial castle-dwelling rivals, it would make sense to paint the Hylian-Gerudo conflict as a parallel to that between the English and the Muslim-dominated Spanish kingdoms. The Gerudo’s musical theme is flamenco and they are separated from the Hylians by a strait of water. On top of this, the Gerudo culture was actually edited before Ocarina of Time saw release outside of Japan – their chief symbol was originally the iconic crescent moon of Islam.

With this information at hand, we can deduce that the ongoing cultural struggle between the Gerudo and Hylians mirrors that of the Spanish and English, and further to that between people of the Muslim and Christian faiths. But what of all of this? With all of these cultural inspirations to draw from, what is the literary purpose of the Gerudo? The answer is one that lies within the concept of orientalism, an old hybrid of stereotype and awe in regards to the mysterious peoples of “The East” that was popularized by Edward Said in the late seventies.

Whether it be Egypt, Arabia, etc., all of the cultures that went into making the Gerudo were focused upon their stereotyped versions used in Western media throughout the ages. In this article, I made a point of looking at the cultural inspirations not from an unbiased viewpoint, but from the view of classic Western literature/media. The Gerudo essentially act as a melange of “exotic” bits and pieces of non-Western European cultures generalized as “The East” in order to attain a sense of forbidden mystery. Orientalism has a negative connotation in the sense that it boils down multi-faceted and complex cultures into nothing more than exotic pieces of intriguing trivia, and that there is a certain fear that goes along with it, one that is innately written into the text (see Shakespeare’s classic Othello for an example of this in action). But it is not direct orientalism that is in play in The Legend of Zelda – rather, it is almost a modern parody of orientalism, as is commonly seen in many modern pieces of story-based media.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the people of Egypt were presented through the view of orientalism in an homage to the orientalist lens that dominated the genre of film in older days. Orientalism is employed in many works of fantasy solely because it’s a trope of the style – not an offensive lack of understanding (and subsequent mysticizing) of other cultures, but an innocent and pervasive plot thread used because it’s part of the fantasy canon. The Gerudo take on orientalist aspects in order to be modeled after the famed exotic peoples in classic orientalist stories of old. The meaning behind orientalism has made a shift in modern media – a shift to being self-referential. The Gerudo are but one example among many instances of this.

The final mystery is of course knowing if this was intentional or not. The Legend of Zelda is a Japanese game series, so yet another interesting piece is added to this ever-growing puzzle. The orientalist nature of the Gerudo probably finds its origin not in a purposeful employing of story, but in emulation of Western tales. The Zelda series, although not so much in more modern games, was once focused on presenting its stories in a typical Western fashion, maintaining all of the tropes and common plot pieces from Western fantasy.

In conclusion, the Gerudo are a quadruple-layered literary device that comes full circle – an attempt to emulate Western fantasy by writers from an Eastern culture, that uses the common fantasy trope of “Eastern” themes being used as exotic, that initially came from an actual misunderstanding and forbidden/exciting fear of non-European cultures, which was derived from a series of non-European cultures. It’s a bit of a head-spinning affair, and certainly an odd introspective look at one’s own culture from how another person views it. By studying the literary and cultural themes employed be Zelda such as the Gerudo, we can come to a better understanding of our own and other ways of thinking.