Featured Essays The Legend of Zelda The Legend of Zelda Endures as a Piece of Modern Folklore In a culture obsessed with canon, The Legend of Zelda thrives on ambiguity and reinvention By Matthew Byrd | Published on February 20, 2026 Image: Nintendo Comment 0 Share New Share Image: Nintendo The Legend of Zelda turns 40 this month, but don’t let that fact trigger your anxiety over where the years have gone. It’s an ageless experience in many ways. It is a title that formed the basis for many modern games and kicked off a franchise that currently spans 21 mainline entries, a host of spin-off titles of wildly varying quality, and an upcoming movie that is sure to please everyone who has been dreaming of such a thing over the last few decades. Yet, The Legend of Zelda is not, chronologically, the first game in The Legend of Zelda franchise. At least it’s not according to a timeline that has come to define such an otherwise timeless series in recent years. First published in 2011 as part of the Hyrule Historia book, the official Zelda timeline was meant to address years of increasingly heated fan speculation regarding how The Legend of Zelda games were chronologically connected. That did not happen. Despite a note that mentioned the chart was based on a loose collection of internal documents and was only true based on information available at that time, it only fueled the fire. Some treat it as hard facts, and some believe it to be proof of how little Nintendo knows or cares about the series’ continuity. There is an almost religious fervor to the ways that people have interpreted this text and formed their own factions of belief based on its teachings. But the problem isn’t that Nintendo’s timeline is messy. The problem is the insistence that a living legend should be analyzed like a database. The Legend of Zelda franchise is better viewed as a modern folklore tradition built on repetition, variations, and retellings. And as a piece of modern folklore, The Legend of Zelda stands as a testament to the power of such stories in a world increasingly determined to suppress ambiguity, even as doing so robs us of so much joy. Granted, The Legend of Zelda is hardly a traditional piece of folklore. Its origins are well-documented, and it’s not exactly spread via word of mouth (at least not entirely) as so many folktales are. It is also, in fact, a series of video games, which is both an atypical medium for such stories and a fairly definitive piece of text. It’s hardly unusual for legends to be recorded and shared, though it’s rarely shared via something as rigid and definitive as cartridges and code. But we shouldn’t be so rigid when trying to define folklore. Especially not when the most substantial aspects of the storytelling tradition help us better understand Zelda as a franchise and a cultural phenomenon. By its very nature, folklore itself is messy. The historically informal nature of such stories makes them fragmented and often wildly inconsistent. The details of King Arthur’s birth and lineage vary from telling to telling. Robin Hood has been everything from an outlaw to an ousted former nobleman. Odysseus had the remarkable ability to be in many places at once. These irregularities sometimes arise from details buried in lost or incomplete text, but they are often also the result of the story changing slightly from telling to re-telling or even deliberately being altered to reflect broader societal and cultural shifts. For all their ambiguities and contradictions, such tales are also fundamentally fairly simple. Archetypal heroes battle snarling monsters for the love of fair maidens. Basic morals are spread across fragmented adventures that often follow deliberately repetitive formats. Seasonal cycles, recurring trials, and noble quests form plain but clear structures. Such stories rarely subvert the narrative expectations of their times, even if they are updated to reflect them. That is not necessarily a criticism. Folklore endures because of such qualities. Those missing pieces and recurrences afford fables a flexibility that not only allows for reinterpretations and reinventions but invites them. As long as certain pieces that are both core to the narratives and the reasons we are drawn to them remain in place, the rest of the board can be shifted remarkably easily. Perhaps an imperfect legend that lives on is better than a perfect story that dies. Consider The Lord of the Rings and the ways Tolkien struggled to maintain canonical consistency despite his meticulous nature. In a 1968 letter to a fan regarding the fate of Shadowfax, Tolkien confessed that he not only felt it was better to sometimes leave things unstated, but also argued that such tactics were more “realistic” to the ways we omit and forget details in various retellings. There’s wisdom to the idea of embracing imperfections when they barely interfere with grander ideas. Just ask the James Bond producers how much they would love to be able to ignore perfect continuity in favor of being able to simply tell a story. It’s in those ways that Zelda embraces folklore for the modern age. It is a fragmented story that jumps back, forward, and sideways between entries that are bound by loose logic, at best. An entire timeline containing the first four Legend of Zelda games seemingly only exists because the ending of Ocarina of Time created a paradox that had to be addressed via off-screen events. Major characters are reborn and revived when they are needed with little explanation as to why. We know Breath of the Wild takes place thousands of years after the other games, but we have no real idea how we actually got there. The power of vaguely referenced off-screen events keeps the whole thing from instantly falling apart, as does the wisdom of the occasional “Don’t worry about it” from the game’s developers. What few true constants exist in these games are often subject to fairly repetitive actions. A hero is awakened to gather the relics required to defeat a villain and restore balance to the world. You’re forgiven for failing to see the 40-year appeal of a series that features somewhat routine narratives spread across worlds that are sometimes just loosely connected enough to come across as frustratingly inconsistent. But The Legend of Zelda has remained consistently creative because of the ways it embraces the variations between folk tales told across (and for) wildly different generations. Each new title is often wildly different in terms of its style, setting, and other creative components with the more familiar elements being reserved for the structural components that keep the entries loosely bound together. As such, a new Zelda game often feels less like a sequel and more like a ritual. Those who have been with the series for years feel that they find comfort in returning to it, and those who hear the story for the first time get to share it with others while experiencing something that feels very much their own. Mention a phrase like “Water Temple” to a Legend of Zelda fan, and their minds will likely wander to one of several distinct versions of that same basic idea. Some are recalled fondly and others with malice. Tell them the order you progressed through A Link to the Past’s Dark World dungeons or which items you fused together to solve Tears of the Kingdom’s devious puzzles and prepare to be met with an alien stare that suggests you’re talking about wildly different things. There’s beauty in the confusion once you learn to embrace it. The fundamentals may be the same, but the ways we experience them, interpret them, and share them can be pleasantly different. Folklore is sometimes compared to a tapestry, and that is exactly what we weave when we experience these adventures and share our memories of them. It’s not the most cohesive form of collective storytelling, but it is among our most intimate and beautiful. It’s probably not a coincidence that Zelda games have used tapestries to convey the history of its complex world. This is, after all, a series inspired by the adventures of King Arthur with “legend” in its name. It is lineage, not linearity. Yet, we often fall victim to the temptation to characterize this series chronologically as so many other modern series often are. Why do we care so much? Perhaps it’s a symptom of growing “optimization” culture, which has left some paralyzed by the fear of wasting time on something “unofficial” (even if they enjoy it). Maybe it’s a response to the age of misinformation and the growing fear that we will be fooled even by something that is fundamentally trivial. It’s almost certainly part of the gatekeeping campaign waged by some fans who fundamentally oppose fan fiction, interpretations, re-imaginings, and other works that may, even for a moment, challenge the idea of “their” franchise. The sin is not found in discussing or even arguing about such interpretations. Folklore survives through discussions and reimaginings. Stories often cease to live when they cease to be debated and discussed. The real sin is in the insistence that such interpretations should be pushed aside in favor of one, indisputable canon. It’s easy to understand why such forms of storytelling have dissipated over the years. They’re illogical, chaotic, and run counter to the many ways we can separate the proven from the speculative. What’s more, our desire for inherent desire for such stories can be easily exploited. Look at how we so often turn to social media for communal narratives and information that harken back to public hubs, and look at how that desire can be easily exploited. But that desire remains a powerful force that is going nowhere and needs to be nurtured. And when it comes to our fables, folk heroes, and the stories we craft, romanticism has long been a better path to immortality than optimization. We only deny our passion for the fundamental art of storytelling when we try to put fantasies into neat little boxes. Things like a timeline can organize a franchise, but folklore keeps a legend alive. The Legend of Zelda endures because it embraces variations, inconsistencies, rituals, and communal retellings. It’s not orderly, but whoever said it had to be?[end-mark] The post The Legend of Zelda Endures as a Piece of Modern Folklore appeared first on Reactor.