Ye Olde Fantasy Language Problem
Ye Olde Fantasy Language Problem
Writing fantasy and historical fiction without getting tripped up on your words
[Note: Since Substack launched Notes this week, I’ve gotten a few hundred new subscribers. So… welcome! This newsletter is mostly about weird books, publishing demystification, and craft advice. Hopefully that’s interesting to you! If not, well, there’s not much I can do now…]
This week I’ve been thinking about a craft question I’m calling “ye olde fantasy language problem,” which is to say the question of how to make a fantasy world feel like an older and fantastical world with your language. Fantasy writers tend to opt for one of two tactics, both of which can be grating. Either they create a fake ye olde English voice— “Forsooth ye dastardly bandit! Feel the wrath of mine steel!”—or else do the opposite and write with anachronistic snark—“Bro, you’re itching for an pwning by my epic blade!”
(I saw these poles put well by the writers Matthew Claxon and Matilda Lewis on Twitter. I’d embed their tweets normally, but embeds have been killed during this ongoing Substack/Twitter war so I’ll just encourage you to click and read their threads.)
Both of these tactics are awkward. The “ye olde fantasy” voice is stilted, a bit goofy, and not accurate anyway. Most fantasy doesn’t take place in the real world, but even if you are using the European middle ages as the closest approximation, well, the actual English of that time is mostly impenetrable to us today—see for example the opening of 14th-century The Canterbury Tales: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licóur.” Few people are reading an epic fantasy novel written like that. So instead authors opt for a voice that’s part Shakespearian, part pirate, and mostly awkward.
It reminds me of how Hollywood has decided that a modern British accent = fantasy (at least medieval European-inspired fantasy), even though medieval people in what is now the UK didn’t speak anything like that. And there’s no reason a French or Spanish accent shouldn’t conjure a faux medieval Europe any less than Hugh Grant’s accent. I digress.
On the other end of things, going overly colloquial and modern can fail to conjure the feeling of a fantasy world. Readers of epic fantasy tend to want to be immersed in the imagined world, and nothing can take a reader out of the world quicker than modern lingo. If your troll is talking about how they were “ghosted” by the Dark Lord and your elf is calling fairy magic “on fleek,” then I’m closing the page as quick as I can.
I’ve been calling this a fantasy problem but similar questions are at play for historical literary fiction or far-future science fiction. How do you conjure a world that’s different than our present reality using language that’s understandable to present readers?
This question has been on my mind a lot recently as I’ve been tinkering with an epic-fantasy-by-way-of-Kafka project called Hang the Wizards from the Ramparts. (Don’t seal my title!) In general, my preferences are an approach that’s modern without sounding too modern. Language that could as easily be from 50 years ago or 100 years ago as today. So no slang, internet jokes, etc. But also avoiding most of the ye olde fake English too. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books are excellent at this. Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is another historical fiction book with language that’s modern without taking you out of the fictive dream. In the SFF world, N.K Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy does a great job balancing the language and Ted Chiang’s clean style works equally for the present day, futuristic, and alternative history stories he writes.
Outside of recommending writers, here’s some principles I’ve thought about.
Effects matter more than authenticity
We always have to remember our audiences are alive now, and so we have to write not just what makes sense to them—e.g., no actual Old English—but also what effectively conjures the effects we want. Take the famously curse-filled TV show Deadwood. It was set in the 1870s in the Wild West, but the most of the actual curses of that time and place were religious in nature and sound silly to us today. “Gosh” comes from god and “zounds” was once a blasphemous curse derived from “God’s wounds.” Now they’re what a cartoon character shouts on a kids’ show. So the creators simply changed the curses and instead there’s a lot of talk of cock-sucking mother-fucking fucks instead of
A little Ye Olde Fantasy Lingo goes a long way
If you do want to use the ye olde fantasy voice, I think a little goes a long way. George R. R. Martin gets a lot of mileage out of using older (or invented) versions of real-world names—Eddard and Catelyn instead of Edward and Caitlin—for example. A simple and elegant move. Martin also peppers his work work well with some archaic words like “wroth” instead of “wrath” and “leal” instead of “loyal.” Although that can become distracting too, as many a ASOIAF nuncle knows… It’s a delicate balance.
Eliminate words that conjure specific real-world contexts
Perhaps the trickiest thing—especially for fantasy set in other worlds—is how much of our language is derived from our world. Okay, yes, all language comes from our world. But I mean how much of our language is derived from specific historical and cultural contexts that can be really distracting in a work of fantasy. Think of how many plants and animals are named after earth locations—Arctic wolf, European robin, Japanese maple—or else closely associated with specific countries. You could have an eagle in your second world fantasy realm, but would you want a “bald eagle” in it?
This came up in my fantasy project when I described something as “navy blue” and then stopped. Navy blue makes me immediately think of the British navy and US navy, whose use of the color gives it the name. I don’t want readers thinking about that. I could mention “a navy” in my fantasy world, as that term has just become a generic term. But “navy blue” feels too specific to me.
This is an issue for far-future science fiction too. I’m currently reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a towering work that lives up to all the hype I’ve heard about it. I did, however, have one moment of being thrown from the text when a character on a distant alien planet describes something as “chivalry.” I can’t hear that word without thinking of it’s very specific historical context as a knightly code in Western Europe.
Perhaps I’m being overly cautious eliminating “navy blue” and maybe most readers wouldn’t be taken out by “chivalry.” But I have to imagine many would by reading about a character’s “Achilles’ heel” or have them eating “French fries” or cooking in a “Dutch oven.”
When writing in alternative worlds, I think we have to opt as best we can for words and phrases that have become generic and neutral and avoid the ones that conjure specific historical and cultural contexts that we don’t want to conjure.
Those a few tips for conjuring imagined worlds without distracting the reader without having them trip up on the language. Additional ideas and disagreements welcome in the comments. Now, I’m going to log off and play around with some dragons, demons, and vile wizards on the page…
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”
Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).
Gene Wolfe deployed actual archaic and forgotten vocabulary to evoke the beautiful strangeness of his Urth in The Book of the New Sun. His conceit is that of a translator of a work written in our far, far future, in a time so distant that the book reads like a fantasy tome instead of science-fiction. The words, not being complete inventions, hover on the almost familiar, and yet also the uncomprehending. It makes for a very compelling and bizarre reading experience. I don't think I've encountered anything else quite like it.
Tolkien is one of the masters of this and as a philologist, he thought carefully about almost every word, avoiding the use of English words of French origin. Of course he didn't actually have to do this as canonically he was writing a translation of whatever language Frodo and co *actually* spoke, but it gives Middle Earth a certain 'mood' that is hard to replicate.
Still there are certain exceptions. Bilbo and Frodo's meddlesome relatives are the Sackville-Baggins clan, with 'Sack' and 'Ville', being French words, thus the overall effect is somewhat anachronistic, but also serves to show how the SBs have perhaps more modern temperaments than the more laid back Bagginses