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”) poetry he penned. Though Theocritus and his bucolic form first celebrated the simple joys of pastoral life, this theme was most notably explored in the work of those he inspired. Roman poets Virgil and Cattullus, and much later the English Alfred Lord Tennyson produced paeans to the notion of the Idyll or Golden Age, a mythical time and place where man was in harmony with the natural world. The early twentieth-century historian Martha Hale Shackford best articulates the source of this blissful union: “An idyll is a picture of life as the human spirit wishes it to be, a presentation of the chosen moments of earthly content.” 64

Much of The Legend of Zelda series has this whiff of the Golden Age about it. The environment of the first game is almost completely untouched by the manmade, instead being a world of forest, river and mountain. All subsequent instalments have instances of civilization in the shape of Hyrule town and its satellites, and, as has been noted, this is important. It’s equally important that a large portion of this natural world—Miyamoto’s ever-blossoming garden—remains. While it’s most immediately obvious in the lush grass and dancing pollen of Ocarina of Time, the natural world is just as abundant in the lands of The Minish Cap. Even though the town is of a perfect size to function effectively, it is the natural landscape that dominates. There are isolated instances of civilization dotted throughout: Master Smith’s shop, Lon Lon Ranch, and Percy the Poet’s cottage. However, of the seventeen areas in this particular overworld, only two, Hyrule Town and Hyrule Castle Garden, bear significant marks of the manmade. Even then, the constructs are in keeping with the landscape in which they sit: not here the scars of modern architecture that show so little regard for context. Here it can be believed that everything is locally sourced—that the wood and stone that form the foundations of Hyrule town and Castle come direct from Mount Crenel and The Western Wood, an instance of the natural world reaching out to shelter its children. The rest of Hyrule county is a pastoral landscape of creamy pastel shades, a vista of meadow and woodland. It’s perfectly possible to imagine finding Comatas—a character from one of Theocritus’s untitled idylls—leaning against a tree in The Trilby Highlands, extolling the virtues of his surroundings: “Here be oak trees, and here be the galingale, and sweetly here hum the bees about the hives. There are two wells of chill water and on the tree the birds are warbling …” (Theocritus, quoted in Shackford, p. 587)

Even these place-names are important in evoking a sense of romantic solitude. Who can help but wonder about the origins of these names: The Trilby Highlands, The Castor Wilds, and Veil Falls? Their etymology is seemingly lost to time. For the Hylians who wander this way now there remains the beauty of a rugged, rustic paradise found, unspoiled by even the monsters that roam here.

Also, unlike some other instalments of the series—think of the thunderstorms that open Link’s Awakening and A Link to the Past, or the one which accompanies the escaping of Princess Zelda in The Ocarina of Time—this world is forever bathed in sunshine. In the world of The Minish Cap, night never falls. This is a paradise of eternal light, a permanent summer of love where darkness is reserved for the deepest of dungeons, where only heroes go.

The Spirit of Utopia

The final aspect of this consideration of Hyrule as Utopian ideal is the spiritual or religious. Aristotle pondered the soul and Plato certainly believed in Heaven and Hell in some form, the concepts being central to his idea of justice. In fact, spirituality and religion factor into the work of many philosophers, though very few of them could be said to be in agreement with each other. Some, like Georg Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard, held diametrically opposed views, the former believing God could be understood only through logic, the latter, anything but. For Kierkegaard, God was beyond reasoning and could be reached solely through