Monday, Monday, Monday… so, as usual, I’ve got a Fantasy with Friends post for you! All the prompts are hosted at Pages Unbound, if you’d like to join in. This week’s prompt is on anachronisms in fantasy:
Do anachronisms in fantasy bother you? Should fantasy be “similiar” to the time period it’s based on, either in terms of language used or things like invention, fashion, customs, etc.?
I think the question implies an assumption that all fantasy is necessarily copying a historical period and should do so in its entirety, rather than coming up with an aesthetic and historical background of its own, which is interesting! I don’t see fantasy that way: obviously, historical fantasy needs to believably fit into the period it’s set in to work, but otherwise, I don’t see why a fantasy story needs to be copying a given time period with all of its assumptions. If it’s making its own thing, why should things be the same as in our world’s past?
When it comes to something like language, unless the dialogue is written in Anglo-Saxon, a book set in a fantasy setting that’s kind of like Britain in 999AD is just as “anachronistic” whether the protagonist is speaking modern English or weird faux Ye Olde Englishe. Most of the dialogue people think is “appropriate” in a pseudo-medieval setting is far more modern than that (and also super fake and contrived), but people are so lacking in education about how language has developed that they somehow think that a) that’s “Old English” and b) it actually suits the period.
Just gonna say it straight, unless the dialogue of a given “medieval” fantasy novel set in Britain sounds something like this, it’s already anachronistic: “Haþel, by heuen, þyn askyng is nys, and as þou foly hatz frayst, fynde þe behoues. I know no gome þat is gast of þy grete wordes; gif me now þy geserne, vpon Godez halue, and I schal bayþen þy bone þat þou boden habbes.”
(That’s Middle English, from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.)
Pretty much nothing about the way fantasy novels are written actually sounds anything like “authentic”, and few modern readers can parse sentences like the above, so I don’t personally care when authors choose to avoid faux Ye Olde Englishe in favour of something more familiar. I definitely prefer that over badly done faux archaic phrasing.
(That said, there are also authors who do it well, usually those who’ve considered exactly what they’re doing and are building congruent, sense-making worlds of which that language is a part.)
Moving on from language, often there are assumptions that come with certain levels of technology (“if you’ve got peasants with carts you must have knights and homophobia as well”) that lead to accusations of anachronism as well. Mostly, I think that kind of thing is often used as an excuse for unexamined assumptions (like sexism and racism), and again… if you’ve got a fresh new world where you control all the rules, why should you feel constrained by what “actually happened”?
Sometimes, when writers don’t include sexism and racism in their world, it’s used as a stick to beat them with because it’s not “historical”. Well of course not — it’s fantasy!
I would also gently note that a lot of what we think “actually happened” and things which we think are “true” are not. When it comes to sexuality and gender alone, there are so many assumptions about what the past was like which don’t hold true… and the same is true on almost every topic. I’ve seen readers claim things are “anachronistic” when they’d existed for hundreds of years by the time a given story was set. Your average fantasy reader is a terrible judge of what’s “realistic” for a given “period”, even assuming you grant that fantasy is set in any specific “period” at all.
Overall, I’m personally less worried about anachronism and more about what feels congruent: does your social structure make sense with the other moving parts like, I don’t know, levels of literacy and provision of education? I don’t need it to look exactly like a specific period of history: mixing and matching if you need inspiration is fine, or just coming up with something out of whole cloth, just… try to have it make sense. Don’t, for example, have “Christmas” in a world that doesn’t have Christ, and consider carefully whether the social mores you’re importing make sense without factors like religion and colonialism that have affected our history.
Overall, my grasp on what is historical is not always amazing anyway: I’m terrible with keeping historical periods straight, especially when you add different countries into the mix. So I’m fairly easy to please on that front, even in historical fiction! For me, it just has to make a certain amount of sense, and we’re good.
