Folklore is made up of multiple layers, like the sediments that compose the soil. Some of them probably have a pre-Roman, perhaps even a Neolithic, origin. Like the old stones of the hillforts, these materials have been constantly recycled, mixed, reinvented and adapted to the tastes of each time and audience. In the Middle Ages, the Jacobean routes brought us new fashions: the Chanson de Roland and the Arthurian cycles were fragmented into tales that got rooted in the landscape. In this fertile soil, the population of the countryside composed their own legends about the ancient inhabitants of the forts and their fight with knights of medieval resonance. Later, experts in heraldry, in their eagerness to provide lesser gentry with epic stories to give brightness to their new coat of arms, searched through medieval archives and completed the ancestry of these new lineages with fantasy and mythological references. To these stories were added themes borrowed from high culture and scholarly speculations, and all this material was returned to the people, just as the old fables had been later codified as literary works and written romances had emerged from the folk ballads. Thus, stories told by fishermen, travelers, grandmothers to their grandchildren, "fiadeira" nights and storytellers by the fire were adorned with these influences, transformed and remixed, and gave rise to new motifs, which were later cultivated with the wavering language of the romantic writers of Galician Rexurdimento, who bequeathed them to more recent authors such as Ferrín, Cunqueiro, Xohán Cabana... who managed to combine these old themes with a literary voice of their own. And that, in short, is folklore: an underground current that springs up in fountains or pools or seasonal lagoons, an ever moving stream that collects water from the infinite kisses of rain, as well as from nameless brooks and famous rivers... Something that anyway keeps flowing and make us all its tributaries and debtors.

Nesa idea, de que o folclore non é -non debe ser- un corpus pechado ou unha ruina inerte, como tampouco o é a lingua, fúndase a filosofía deste proxecto. Por iso Illas das marabillas, que dende a súa propia concepción como xogo interpela á participación, é tamén nunha invitación a prolongar eses túneles subterráneos cara a Mourindade compartida onde conservamos os nosos tesouros.