Guest Post: Finding Your Heroes and Yourself by Elle E. Ire

“Since your book’s technological advances place it during the Renaissance, your characters are wrong because they should be speaking like Shakespeare.”

Imagine my surprise when a friend and avid fantasy reader said this to me. I can’t remember the last time I met someone who believed that level of linguistic authenticity necessary in a fantasy world. While I love Shakespeare, if every fantasy novel I read was written with historically and culturally accurate language, I’d go mad. I don’t speak German any more than I speak Old English. Egad! Not even the people of Shakespeare’s time spoke like Shakespeare.

Imagine if The Lord of the Rings trilogy were written like this:

Or like this:

Hwanne Dryhten Bilbo Baggins of Faetels Ende abeodan se he dulmúnus aer gebréfan beon he endleofan-fyrest ongean a gebéorscipe fram déore, þider beon fela acwepan end onwæcenness in Hobbiton.

Not so bad in Shakespeare’s tongue, but how enjoyable would the reading be in Old English?

It’s a common misconception that all fantasy is based upon medieval Europe, and everyone talks like they’re in a Shakespeare play.

One reason I call shenanigans on this misconception is that when the day is done, it’s fantasy. It’s up to the author to build a believable world however they wish. That’s not to say that linguistics doesn’t play a crucial role in world building, but as the author, you have some wiggle room in how you develop your world or universe.

In my fantasy novel, Amaskan’s Blood, the world of Boahim consists of twelve kingdoms. Each one has their own culture that I built from a mixture of Earth cultures. But at its core, Boahim is a fantasy world that doesn’t exist on planet Earth and never did. I can set their scientific advances to be comparable to Middle Ages France, and yet, use magic to control indoor plumbing if I wish.

But what about linguistics? More specifically, word choice? If a kingdom is based on Renaissance France, must I write the novel in Old French? Tolkien certainly didn’t, and he was a linguistics master.

Yet Linguistics is more than word choice. It’s phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and the order of parts of speech. (You can read more on each of these here.) These are all elements an author must consider as they write a story in a fantasy world.

Rather than dealing with absolutes, writers should consider linguistics as an essential piece of world building. You would no more have a character in Renaissance France talking about gigabytes or than you would a scullery maid speak with a refined and educated diction.

So how do we find balance with our linguistics?

1. Your language must be believable. It should fit the time period and culture of the society, unless it has a strong reason not to do so.
2. Don’t overdo it with newly invented words. If I need a glossary at the end of the book to translate all your made up words, I’ll be sucked out of my enjoyment to do “homework.” Harry Harrison’s West of Eden comes to mind. I made it twenty pages in before the chore of translation drove me to toss the book in the “donate” bin.
3. Don’t overdo dialects. Dialects are also indications of language and cultural status, and should be used sparingly. If over used, it can fatigue the reader. (You can read more about dialect here.)

While Tolkien sprinkled bits of Sindarin, Khuzdul, and the Black Speech throughout his trilogy, he did so sparingly enough that it became flavor text””enrichment to his world building rather than a stopping block for the reader. That should be the author’s goal as well””enrichment.

While revising my fantasy novel, I kept a running list of terms that felt modern or out of place as I reread the novel. Then I used the Online Etymology Dictionary to look up the offending words. (There were over 300 of them, but it was well worth looking them up to ensure a good reading experience.)

For example, the word faux pas, French for false-step, dates back to 1670. In Boahim, one kingdom’s culture is heavily influenced by Renaissance France. It made sense in my timeline and culture for the word faux pas to exist. All that was left was double-checking whether a particular character would know and use the word. Word choice is as much a part of who your character is as the culture in which they belong.

If the time period or culture had been wrong””say from the 1800’s””it’s my job then to research why/how the word came about. I would have to make the ultimate choice on whether that word fit into the world I’ve established and the character using it.

Ultimately, it is up to the writer to build their world and decide what the characters would and would not know. Do your homework with your world building, and we’ll gladly follow the characters on their journey.

Bio: Raven Oak is the author of the bestselling fantasy novel, Amaskan’s Blood, and the upcoming sci-fi novels, Class-M Exile and The Silent Frontier. She spent most of her K-12 education doodling stories and 500 page monstrosities that are forever locked away in a filing cabinet.

She lives in Seattle, WA with her husband, and their three kitties who enjoy lounging across the keyboard when writing deadlines approach.

For more information and excerpts, visit http://www.ravenoak.net

Raven can also be found on the following sites:
Twitter: @raven_oak
Facebook: http://facebook.com/authorroak
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/raven_oak
Google+: https://www.google.com/+RavenOak
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/kaonevar/

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In my romantic-noir urban fantasy novella The Demons of Wall Street, magic and the existence of demons are secrets kept hidden from most people. Only a relatively small number of sorcerers, bankers, and their agents are in on the conspiracy, on the order of thousands of people worldwide.

The premise of magic-done-only-in-secret is not exactly an original conceit, and indeed it has become so familiar over not just years but generations of fantasy literature that it is hardly something to be questioned when it appears. It’s a convenient explanation for how magic can possibly exist in our familiar and ostensibly non-magical world.

Still, the idea of a very widely-kept secret to which thousands of people are privy may seem rather implausible. Surely someone would let the information slip? But as it happens, there are quite a few historical examples of widely-held secrets that were kept so well we aren’t sure what the truth of them was anymore.

I refer you first to the mystery cults of the classical world. In ancient Greece, and subsequently throughout the Hellenized and then the Romanized world, a great many people subscribed to the mystery cults of Eleusis, Samothrace, and (in Roman times) Mithras, among others. These cults required terrible binding oaths from their aspirants, and in many classical-period cities, substantial percentages of the middle and upper classes were members. But we don’t know, apart from a few scattered hints, what the cults believed, what their rituals were, or how members were expected to recognize and support one another outside of the ritual centers. It might be that the masonic phrase “I have seen the sun at midnight” was originally part of the Eleusinian mystery, which we know had something to do with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. But then again, that might be just wishful thinking on the part of the masons based on some modern invention. The names of the deities worshipped by cultists at Samothrace were forbidden to be uttered aloud, and while it’s believed they were mostly chthonic female members of the Greek pantheon, we really don’t know for sure. And even the cult of Mithras, to which millions of Roman legionaries and a great many other citizens belonged (including the emperor Julian the Apostate) is almost opaque to us now. There was probably the sacrifice of a bull involved at some point, but we know very little more than that of their beliefs and practices.

In any event, during this period of around 2,000 years (1600 BCE to 400 CE), everyone was well aware of the existence of the mystery cults, but the members kept their secrets quite effectively, as hardly a scrap of period writing survives that reveals any of their hidden knowledge; indeed, even elliptical references and allusions are rare.

And so, through folk culture, literary memory, and possibly even through the survival of cult remnants outlawed by the Catholic Church, the idea of secret organizations, hidden rituals, and underground magical practice was passed into medieval and then modern times. Early Christianity often assumed the form of a secret cult during the time in which it was forbidden, and splinter groups such as the various gnostic sects became hard-to-extirpate heresies that survived well into the 1400s. These heretic cults changed form from time to time as individual groups were scattered or forced underground, but eventually many of their beliefs were incorporated into the nonconformist branches of Protestantism, and thus into some present-day sects.

There’s no era of recent European history in which secret organizations didn’t thrive, and in many cases, we have only vague knowledge of their dissemination and indeed of their actual beliefs and purposes. Consider for example the 18th century Illuminati, made famous by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s gonzo novels starting with The Illuminatus! Trilogy published in 1975, and revived yet again on a more literary basis by Umberto Eco in Foucault’s Pendulum in 1988. It seems Adam Weisshaupt organized some quasi-masonic lodges in Bavaria and elsewhere that might have been political, might have been magical, or might just have been the Enlightenment equivalent of an old boys’ social club with a few secret forms and rituals thrown in for fun. Who knows, really? No one living. But even today we have quasi-secret organizations with wide membership like the various masonic groups, whose rituals are admittedly only officially secret. But there are also a great many more serious, smaller groups, including the various descendants of the Golden Dawn and the organizations founded by Aleister Crowley and his disciples, who include, at just one remove, L. Ron Hubbard. The bizarre pulp-science-fictional beliefs ascribed to Scientology’s elite, while no longer secret, are certainly consistent in style with their many predecessors.

Which brings us back to urban fantasy and its pervasive notion of magic performed in secret behind closed doors by organizations of oath-sworn initiates that any of us might trip over or better yet be invited to join.

Is this mere wish fulfillment? Escapism? Fantasies of power and transfiguration? Certainly. But these are fantasies with the most distinguished of heritages, wending their way back to ancient times, and given the imprimatur of the greatest writers and thinkers of antiquity one must concede there is a certain solemn majesty to the idea.

So if you read The Demons of Wall Street (first in a series, the sequel The Demons of the Square Mile will be out at the end of the year or early in 2021!), I do hope you’ll enjoy it; the novella’s purpose is entirely to entertain. But should the notion of a secret organization of sorcerers and financiers hiding in plain sight in the boardrooms of the great firms of Wall Street give you pause, consider this little essay as a preemptive justification of a grand conceit passed on from earliest antiquity all the way to the present day.

Buy the book here.

BIO: Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and technologist. He has worked in R&D at such firms as Bell Communications Research and Google, and he has five patents along with numerous industry publications. His areas of expertise include Internet and cloud-based applications, artificial intelligence, telecom applications, and online games.

He has published many science fiction and fantasy stories and is a member of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Find out more about Laurence Raphael Brothers on his website.

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