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Linguistic Anachronism

You may already know that ASOIAF draws inspiration from the War of the Roses, which occurred in England during the middle of the 15th century. What if Martin took inspiration from that era’s language as well as its wars?At the outbreak of the War of the Roses, the printing press was newer to them than DVDs are to us today.

Let’s take a look at a text from that period. In 1485, Le Morte D’Arthur was published. We can consider this a grandfather to ASOIAF, since it inspired T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, which inspired ASOIAF in turn.

If you have enjoyed my own fantasy novels, you owe it to yourself to read […] T.H. White.

Le Morte D’Arthur is quite strange to modern eyes. This excerpt is brought to you by the letter Y:

Terrabyl / So his wyf Dame Igrayne he putte in the castell of Tyntagil / And hym self he putte in the castel of Terrabyl the whiche had many yssues and posternes oute / Thenne in alle haste came Vther with a grete hoost / and leyd a syege aboute the castel of Terrabil / And ther he pyght many pauelyons / and there was grete warre made on bothe partyes / and moche peple slayne / Thenne for pure angre and for grete loue of fayr Irayne the kyng Vther felle seke / So came to the kynge Vther Syre Vlfius a noble knyght / and asked the kynge why he was seke / I shall telle the said the kynge / I am seke for angre and for loue of fayre Igrayne that I may not be hool / wel my lord said Syre Vlfius / I shal seke Merlyn […]

Obviously Penguin wouldn’t pull that off the slush pile in 2015. At the same time, it’s appealingly archaic. Language is a technology, too, and when you write fantasy you want your language to feel contemporary to the crossbows and drawbridges. There are tradeoffs, though; if you want to drive an antique car, you better be willing to sacrifice horsepower for style. Look again at that Morte d’Arthur quote. It doesn’t feel old just because of the orthography. There’s a different psychology at play. Not many fantasists are willing to embrace that. We want the horses, swords, castles, and latter-day psychology – it’s all a metaphor for our society anyway. Gene Wolfe and Cormac McCarthy do present alien voices, and the effect is exactly that. Most fantasists settle for a few linguistic relics to give a historical veneer. (Or opt for a formal diction that isn’t specific to any particular period, but still feels old because we certainly don’t talk that way now.) Martin has a few of these, like the much-teased “must needs”. There’s also “soon or late”, “pretend to surprise”, and “near as” for “nearly as”.

It’s not a crazy strategy. Worldbuilding aficionados overemphasize week one of the Almighty’s to-do list. Lift up the mountains, pour out the oceans, loose the fish of the water and set flying the birds of the air, sure, that stuff has to be there: but you can get away with less than you think. What we need to do is build cultures, not worlds. And before anything else, culture is a language, a voice. Nailing that down is what’s going to make the reader feel like they’re dealing with a native rather than a tourist. It matters if characters are called sir or sire, or if you narrator can use a word like notwithstanding. It matters what kind of trees you name, what sort of animals. I ask again: are there pugs in Westeros?

Tyrion had no doubt that Dancy would be a lively handful. She was pug-nosed and bouncy, with freckles and a mane of thick red hair that tumbled down past her waist.

She was older than he’d thought at first, Jon realized; maybe as old as twenty, but short for her age, bandy-legged, with a round face, small hands, and a pug nose.

There was ice under the big man’s squashed pug nose, where his snot had frozen.

What about longshoremen?

Arya could not read the name painted on the hull; the words were strange, Myrish, Braavosi, perhaps even High Valyrian. She grabbed a passing longshoreman by the sleeve. “Please,” she said, “what ship is this?”

Every word you pass is a marked bill. They all have histories, some much shorter than you’d think. Longshoreman came into English in 1811, according to Etymonline.com. Something as basic and stolidly named as a blueberry debuted in the 18th century, since it’s native to North America. (Blueberry still being available in the 18th century is like ask.com being an unclaimed domain name in 2015.)

Condone is latinate, but it took hold in English thanks to the Matrimonial Causes Act, an 1857 piece of legislation having to do with divorce.

A word like yen, which probably sounds old-timey because it looks like the ancient word ken, is in fact about a hundred years old, and probably borrowed from a Chinese dialect. As Etymonline has it:

“sharp desire, hunger,” 1906, earlier yen-yen (1900), yin (1876) “intense craving for opium,” from Chinese (Cantonese) yan “craving,” or from a Beijing dialect word for “smoke.” Reinforced in English by influence of yearn.

How about burp? Only a few decades older than Martin.

Readers don’t generally think about this until you get into an extreme case, like when Martin mentions snarks. (The snark is a fanciful monster invented by Lewis Carroll, and by using it in the exact same context, Martin shows you the seams of his work.)

In practice, this is something we rarely have to worry about. When you’re interacting with little kids, you automatically clean up your act. Same thing happens while writing. All the other narrators you’ve read and internalized now shape your expression. Which is wonderful, of course… up to a point, of course. Even a very young author has a rough sense of what a fantasy novel sounds like, and can approach a decent output pretty quickly. But there are limitations on this generic fantastic voice. It isn’t very funny, it gives easy credence to ideas of heroes and villains, and it has this noxious sense of fatedness. (Is it an accident that ASOIAF zags on almost all these issues?)

I have to imagine this is another legacy of Le Morte D’Arthur. These seminal works lay out the themes that will persist in the genre for centuries to come, but because of the limitations of literary technology at the time, future writers also receive an impoverished psychological gamut.

We’ve gone too long without a chart. Here are some words in ASOIAF that surprised me, for being obviously or surprisingly modern.