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
One of the things I'm doing in a far future political space opera is coming up with a different type of time measures, because if you're running a Galactic Congress, are you going to go by "day," "night," "hour," "minute" and so on or are you going to do something different? I went with different. But dang, it's HARD. I know I'll have to do a lot of searching and replacing when I'm done with it.
Great piece! I usually get thrown out of an epic fantasy text when it uses terms from Freudian psychoanalysis - e.g. neurotic. I may be weird about that though.
I'm currently writing a "genderfluid orcs resist colonization" novel and felt the need to replace "bootlicker" with something more in-world. OTOH, the term patriarch is important in-world, so I'm keeping it even though it will strike some readers as modern the first time they see it. (It's like the Tiffany problem and medieval naming -- people don't expect certain things to be common in the past that actually were. H/T to Jo Walton on that one.)
The one that I'm struggling with is the desire to use Anglo-Saxon-based words for genitalia, despite those being widely considered vulgar to American readers today. The choice seems to be: Bow to modern convention or have some readers nope out because I used a word that's considered crude, even if the historical basis for doing so is analogous to the power relations in my secondary world.
My view has always been that you need to meet readers where they are. While using slang of the moment will immediately throw any reader out of most books, regardless of genre, I think dialogue is where you want your characters to sound like recognizable humans. I think Steven Erikson handles this very well in Malazan Book of the Fallen, for the most part (Tehol and Bugg's conversations are a good example of this [is this reference too specific to be useful? maybe!]).
I think comparing Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon to Dexter Palmer's Mary Toft is also useful. While Pynchon just goes all in on period style, Palmer gives the reader the feeling of reading Georgian prose without sacrificing a modern approach to narrative, dialogue, and style, and so one novel has far fewer barriers for entry while evoking similar eras to the reader. I suppose Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell would be another good example of feeling like the Regency Era without actually writing like it's still 1815.
Someone else mentioned Gene Wolfe and I think what's maybe the larger achievement and the more important one than all the archaic usage is how the dialogue just feels right. It often doesn't have anachronisms (except for those required by the worldbuilding/linguistic conceit) and it's stylistically not so dissimilar from a contemporary novel from the 1980s. He's able to do this, I think, because of the world he evokes so powerfully, which makes the modern dialogue make the novel feel *more* otherworldly rather than less.
I’ve run into the “navy blue” stumbling block myself. Fortunately, that’s an easy one to overcome. I had a writing group friend who called this “epic speech” and was only to happy to call me out on it when my yearning for lyric prose waded into the deep end of faux- medievalisms. There is a sweet spot between modern anachronisms and those sweet cadences of yore, but it is a challenge only the best writers can maintain!
The Locked Tomb series notably goes the complete other way with this--lots of "modern" sounding sentences and direct references to memes. The style is polarizing but it has a huge audience who adores it.
An author who I think succeeds marvelously well in crafting a language suitable to the medieval fantasy world she creates is Angela Slatter in her "Sourdough" universe of short stories and novels. The characters she creates are so believable, despite their extraordinary circumstances (and the occasional appearance of "Anglo-Saxon-based words for genitalia" that others have remarked upon), that you easily become immersed in their world.
I really liked Martin's approach. 'mayhaps' is my favorite of his invented words. It's easy to understand but still does the work of making the world more strange.
Your suggestion of only taking the most generic and neutral of our expressions for fantasy does not feel right to me. If I can't comw up with better inventions, that of course is the way to go, but I think even better than that is to name things after your fantasy world and use curses that fit the experience of your fantasy people.
For example:
I have a race that has the elves as feared archenemies and who believe that the stars show you your destiny.
So everytime I would write devil or satan in a modern setting, I switched it out for elf : " you act like I'm an elf" "you're worse than a bloodelf!"
And everytime I would mention god I switch it out for ' the star/ the stars: " by the stars of heaven, help!" It's easy to understand and it reinforces their culture.
I intend on developing specific expression for my other fantasy cultures too, so that: ' are you Gryandian?' You sure sound like one!' makes sense for the reader without actually hearing the character speak.
As far as using authentically archaic language, one book I've read that did this effectively was Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin. It's not exactly a fantasy novel--more a historical novel synthesizing elements from the lives of various Orthodox saints, with the main fantastical element being an Italian who has visions of the future. The original is peppered with lines written in an older form of Russian or Old Slavonic, and for the English version, those lines are rendered in Middle English. It really helped convey the overall "The past is a foreign country" atmosphere of the story.
Well considered take on the matter, olde chap! Pip pip and all that. Heh. 🤪 I blame Tolkien and the goofballs at T$R back in the day, especially St. Gygax. But…
It’s my belief that fantasy and sci-fi readers come to genre fiction to meet the world as a character. Language, music, poetry, place names, and all that. Which means linguistic choices matter deeply. When I was reading Paolini’s “Eragon” to my kids when it first came out, I felt assaulted every time I read about the elves with their otherwise mellifluous language living in a forest with a Germanic travesty name like “Duweldenvarden.” 🤓 Great book otherwise—my kids loved it.
On the flip side, I’ve gotten occasional feedback from readers who think I should be more “creative” in my dark epic fantasy to invent profanyms that won’t hurt their delicate sensibilities like fuck and shit and such do. 🤷♂️ Can’t please ‘em all.
Two examples of tripping readers up with language on purpose: A Clockwork Orange, with all of its pseudo-Russianized English (Russglish??); and The Last Unicorn, which is mostly written in what I think of as lush high-fantasy style but then throws out lines like, "Have a taco," or has the prince reading a magazine. It feels delightful and slightly perverse, and prepares you to be attentive to the ideas about storytelling and metafiction that become really important at the climax.
Thanks for the thoughtful deliberation, on how to use language in a fantasy novel. I have just finished the second draft of a prequel to my fantasy series which starts with THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC and I’ve set a series on the coast of Northumberland. This is an area of England where, both in the 14th century, and in the 20th century, (these are time travel books) people use the word “aye” instead of yes. The boy calls his father Da which is typical. That’s the way I decided to ground the reader in the time and the place without resorting to “olde English.”
Glad you mentioned Wolf Hall, which to me is the gold standard of this kind of balancing act. For historical fiction it really depends on how legible the language of the period and question is for readers. The tv adaptation of The Terror is a pretty good example of this and arguably better than the book when it comes to dialogue - for the writers room they basically built the script out of vocabulary and idioms available in the 1840s, so it would still be understandable to modern ears but not sound too anachronistic.
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
One of the things I'm doing in a far future political space opera is coming up with a different type of time measures, because if you're running a Galactic Congress, are you going to go by "day," "night," "hour," "minute" and so on or are you going to do something different? I went with different. But dang, it's HARD. I know I'll have to do a lot of searching and replacing when I'm done with it.
Great piece! I usually get thrown out of an epic fantasy text when it uses terms from Freudian psychoanalysis - e.g. neurotic. I may be weird about that though.
I'm currently writing a "genderfluid orcs resist colonization" novel and felt the need to replace "bootlicker" with something more in-world. OTOH, the term patriarch is important in-world, so I'm keeping it even though it will strike some readers as modern the first time they see it. (It's like the Tiffany problem and medieval naming -- people don't expect certain things to be common in the past that actually were. H/T to Jo Walton on that one.)
The one that I'm struggling with is the desire to use Anglo-Saxon-based words for genitalia, despite those being widely considered vulgar to American readers today. The choice seems to be: Bow to modern convention or have some readers nope out because I used a word that's considered crude, even if the historical basis for doing so is analogous to the power relations in my secondary world.
My view has always been that you need to meet readers where they are. While using slang of the moment will immediately throw any reader out of most books, regardless of genre, I think dialogue is where you want your characters to sound like recognizable humans. I think Steven Erikson handles this very well in Malazan Book of the Fallen, for the most part (Tehol and Bugg's conversations are a good example of this [is this reference too specific to be useful? maybe!]).
I think comparing Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon to Dexter Palmer's Mary Toft is also useful. While Pynchon just goes all in on period style, Palmer gives the reader the feeling of reading Georgian prose without sacrificing a modern approach to narrative, dialogue, and style, and so one novel has far fewer barriers for entry while evoking similar eras to the reader. I suppose Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell would be another good example of feeling like the Regency Era without actually writing like it's still 1815.
Someone else mentioned Gene Wolfe and I think what's maybe the larger achievement and the more important one than all the archaic usage is how the dialogue just feels right. It often doesn't have anachronisms (except for those required by the worldbuilding/linguistic conceit) and it's stylistically not so dissimilar from a contemporary novel from the 1980s. He's able to do this, I think, because of the world he evokes so powerfully, which makes the modern dialogue make the novel feel *more* otherworldly rather than less.
I’ve run into the “navy blue” stumbling block myself. Fortunately, that’s an easy one to overcome. I had a writing group friend who called this “epic speech” and was only to happy to call me out on it when my yearning for lyric prose waded into the deep end of faux- medievalisms. There is a sweet spot between modern anachronisms and those sweet cadences of yore, but it is a challenge only the best writers can maintain!
Hang the Wizards is a great title! 👏
The Locked Tomb series notably goes the complete other way with this--lots of "modern" sounding sentences and direct references to memes. The style is polarizing but it has a huge audience who adores it.
An author who I think succeeds marvelously well in crafting a language suitable to the medieval fantasy world she creates is Angela Slatter in her "Sourdough" universe of short stories and novels. The characters she creates are so believable, despite their extraordinary circumstances (and the occasional appearance of "Anglo-Saxon-based words for genitalia" that others have remarked upon), that you easily become immersed in their world.
I really liked Martin's approach. 'mayhaps' is my favorite of his invented words. It's easy to understand but still does the work of making the world more strange.
Your suggestion of only taking the most generic and neutral of our expressions for fantasy does not feel right to me. If I can't comw up with better inventions, that of course is the way to go, but I think even better than that is to name things after your fantasy world and use curses that fit the experience of your fantasy people.
For example:
I have a race that has the elves as feared archenemies and who believe that the stars show you your destiny.
So everytime I would write devil or satan in a modern setting, I switched it out for elf : " you act like I'm an elf" "you're worse than a bloodelf!"
And everytime I would mention god I switch it out for ' the star/ the stars: " by the stars of heaven, help!" It's easy to understand and it reinforces their culture.
I intend on developing specific expression for my other fantasy cultures too, so that: ' are you Gryandian?' You sure sound like one!' makes sense for the reader without actually hearing the character speak.
As far as using authentically archaic language, one book I've read that did this effectively was Laurus, by Eugene Vodolazkin. It's not exactly a fantasy novel--more a historical novel synthesizing elements from the lives of various Orthodox saints, with the main fantastical element being an Italian who has visions of the future. The original is peppered with lines written in an older form of Russian or Old Slavonic, and for the English version, those lines are rendered in Middle English. It really helped convey the overall "The past is a foreign country" atmosphere of the story.
Well considered take on the matter, olde chap! Pip pip and all that. Heh. 🤪 I blame Tolkien and the goofballs at T$R back in the day, especially St. Gygax. But…
It’s my belief that fantasy and sci-fi readers come to genre fiction to meet the world as a character. Language, music, poetry, place names, and all that. Which means linguistic choices matter deeply. When I was reading Paolini’s “Eragon” to my kids when it first came out, I felt assaulted every time I read about the elves with their otherwise mellifluous language living in a forest with a Germanic travesty name like “Duweldenvarden.” 🤓 Great book otherwise—my kids loved it.
On the flip side, I’ve gotten occasional feedback from readers who think I should be more “creative” in my dark epic fantasy to invent profanyms that won’t hurt their delicate sensibilities like fuck and shit and such do. 🤷♂️ Can’t please ‘em all.
Two examples of tripping readers up with language on purpose: A Clockwork Orange, with all of its pseudo-Russianized English (Russglish??); and The Last Unicorn, which is mostly written in what I think of as lush high-fantasy style but then throws out lines like, "Have a taco," or has the prince reading a magazine. It feels delightful and slightly perverse, and prepares you to be attentive to the ideas about storytelling and metafiction that become really important at the climax.
I found a similar problem when writing my nonfiction book about 18th century smugglers.
Was it appropriate to describe them as a “mafia”, and “gangsters” when those words are anachronistic to the period?
I decided to use the words that built the historical comparison I wanted to make.
Thanks for the thoughtful deliberation, on how to use language in a fantasy novel. I have just finished the second draft of a prequel to my fantasy series which starts with THE CASTLE IN THE ATTIC and I’ve set a series on the coast of Northumberland. This is an area of England where, both in the 14th century, and in the 20th century, (these are time travel books) people use the word “aye” instead of yes. The boy calls his father Da which is typical. That’s the way I decided to ground the reader in the time and the place without resorting to “olde English.”
Glad you mentioned Wolf Hall, which to me is the gold standard of this kind of balancing act. For historical fiction it really depends on how legible the language of the period and question is for readers. The tv adaptation of The Terror is a pretty good example of this and arguably better than the book when it comes to dialogue - for the writers room they basically built the script out of vocabulary and idioms available in the 1840s, so it would still be understandable to modern ears but not sound too anachronistic.