A recipe from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has accidentally appeared in a historical fiction novel, most likely due to a Google search from the book’s author.
The Traveller At The Gates of Wisdom is the latest novel from Irish author John Boyne, who you may know from his most famous work, The Boy In the Striped Pyjamas, which was adapted into a movie in 2008.
A picture of a page from the novel surfaced on Reddit over the weekend, and the story was turned into a Twitter thread by writer Dana Schwartz.
OKAY. This is a thread, but it’s worth it I promise.
On Reddit today, user u/NoNoNo_OhOhOh posted a page from acclaimed Irish novelist John Boyne’s latest book, ‘The Traveller At the Gates of Wisdom.
Note the ingredients. pic.twitter.com/4RTgZxtUT7
— Dana Schwartz (@DanaSchwartzzz) August 3, 2020
As you can see in the embedded tweet above, as Boyne writes about dyes used in dressmaking, he mentions ingredients such as Octorok Eyeball, Keese Wing, “the tail of the red lizalfos and four Hylian shrooms.” Now where have we heard that before…
As pointed out by Schwartz, it appears that Boyne has googled “ingredients red dye clothes” and stumbled upon Polygon‘s “How to dye your clothes and armor in Breath of the Wild” guide. If you replicate this yourself, you can see that the first ingredients mentioned for this Google search relate to in-game recipes from Breath of the Wild, which is where Boyne appears to have sourced his information from.
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Boyne responded to Schwartz’s thread in jest, noting that he will be “telling this anecdote on stage for many years to come.” Boyne later replied to Schwartz noting that he won’t be editing it in future revisions of the novel. “I don’t remember but I must have just googled it,” Boyne added. “Hey, sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say “yup! My bad!”
Boyne might be able to source a few new recipes when The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild 2 arrives – although we still don’t know when that will be.
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Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.
Source: IGN.com New Historical Fiction Novel Accidentally Includes Zelda: Breath of the Wild Recipes