Using dates In Fantasy Worlds

[RX-79G]

Just a footnote: ALL days of the week come from Norse origin.

Kinda/sorta. Spanish days are Roman Gods, and most of the English days of the week are the Norse equivalents of those same Roman Gods. Mercury = Odin, etc. It would probably be more accurate to say that the Norse were using days of the week that originated in the Greek pantheon that turned into the Roman pantheon and morphed into the Norse gods in that region. I'd be interested in reading anything that demonstrates that Christianity had much to do with it.

 

[Eli Grey]

Thanks everyone for your input. One thing I did was create a character whose legend spawned not just a religion but was revered by his comrades enough to name the days and months. That's the direction I'm leaning in right now. There is just one aspect that comes to the foreground but remains subtle for the most part, and that is that this character implemented a ritual that must be done each day. They are tedious rituals which aren't entirely relevant here. I will attempt to name the days and months this week.

World building is so exciting.

 

[Brian G Turner]

Another problem with dates is they are going to be completely irrelevant to most fantasy characters. The sun rises, the day's work needs doing, you go to sleep and then do it all again. The routine continues through a year of changing seasons, broken up perhaps by feast days and market days which mark specific times of the year integral to agriculture. The name of the day, month, or year, is going to be irrelevant to most people.

Writers who simply use the modern calender and change the name Tuesday to Flagglylumf, or June to Bogglemonth IMO are being lazy and unimaginative and irrelevant. If the calendar is going to be tackled then it needs doing properly. First of all, solar or lunar? Why? And so on.

I developed my own calender for my writing, but it barely gets referenced, and even then, only when essential to a particular character because a specific feast has specific relevance.

I may have extreme views on the subject.

PS: I've probably put a few hundreds hours into playing Bethseda's Oblivion and Skyrim. Although the game developers use their own dates, I could tell you any of the names they used for days or months etc because they were entirely irrelevant to my gaming experience. Time passed - that's all I needed to know.

 

[Eli Grey]

Another problem with dates is they are going to be completely irrelevant to most fantasy characters. The sun rises, the day's work needs doing, you go to sleep and then do it all again. The routine continues through a year of changing seasons, broken up perhaps by feast days and market days which mark specific times of the year integral to agriculture. The name of the day, month, or year, is going to be irrelevant to most people.

Writers who simply use the modern calender and change the name Tuesday to Flagglylumf, or June to Bogglemonth IMO are being lazy and unimaginative and irrelevant. If the calendar is going to be tackled then it needs doing properly. First of all, solar or lunar? Why? And so on.

I developed my own calender for my writing, but it barely gets referenced, and even then, only when essential to a particular character because a specific feast has specific relevance.

I may have extreme views on the subject.

PS: I've probably put a few hundreds hours into playing Bethseda's Oblivion and Skyrim. Although the game developers use their own dates, I could tell you any of the names they used for days or months etc because they were entirely irrelevant to my gaming experience. Time passed - that's all I needed to know.

I personally like the idea of using terms like the ones you used above. Sun rise, tomorrow, yesterday, three nights past, six days hence, four suns ago, etc. I will use a lot of this to describe the passage of time. But since yesterday, I've been developing a world calendar or.

As I mentioned above, there are rituals to indicate the days as well. So my characters might all subtley take pieces of bark off a nearby tree and burn it on one day, and the next day drink a certain beverage to show reverence that day. Every day a Sunday for them. HAHA. So if my characters are showing reverence, the days likely will be talked about. I find the best solution for naming days and months is to just make up a history and have people do similar to what the ancients in our time did to name days and months.

For lunar or solar, my cousin told me it'd be a cop out if I used those since we already do that. I still may go that route for some part of the naming process.

Thanks.

P.S.
I've not played Skyrim in years, by the way. I sort of miss it. But I will be engaging once again in The Witcher 3 soon.

 

[Phyrebrat]

Tell me about it...

How many times do I find myself checking whether I should saying vespers, nones, sext or tercel etc.

bloody medieval awkwardness

pH

 

[Theophania Elliott]

For lunar or solar, my cousin told me it'd be a cop out if I used those since we already do that.

Yeah, but we do that because seasons and moons are a natural way to mark time. Today it's full moon; in two weeks' time it'll be the dark of the moon. Sun-based calendars are more technical, but still easily do-able because you don't need a mechanical contrivance to keep track. Once you start saying that your month is thirty days rather than just a lunar cycle, how do you keep track of that without a man-made device?

So if you don't base your calendar on a natural event, what you end up with is something even more sophisticated (in the sense of being more mechanical rather than more natural), like the French Revolutionary Calendar, which is pretty much all decimal with new names for the month related to the weather and season-appropriate activities. (OK, I admit it, I'm writing a fantasy novel and my point-of-view country has moved from a nature-based lunar calendar to a new calendar which I have pretty much copied off the French.)

The good thing about fantasy, of course, is that if you're making up the world you can structure it how you like. For me, though, the major question to answer is: how did it get that way? If you can't explain why people are doing it the complicated way instead of the simple way, then you may need to rethink.

English days of the week are the Norse equivalents

Wikipedia has a good page on days of the week (not all Norse - some astronomical, some Roman, some others), which I can't link to but which you should be able to find by searching "names of the days of the week" - you can bore everyone you meet until next vineri/du triach/Biyernes/frijjoz dagaz...

 

[Eli Grey]

Yeah, but we do that because seasons and moons are a natural way to mark time. Today it's full moon; in two weeks' time it'll be the dark of the moon. Sun-based calendars are more technical, but still easily do-able because you don't need a mechanical contrivance to keep track. Once you start saying that your month is thirty days rather than just a lunar cycle, how do you keep track of that without a man-made device?

So if you don't base your calendar on a natural event, what you end up with is something even more sophisticated (in the sense of being more mechanical rather than more natural), like the French Revolutionary Calendar, which is pretty much all decimal with new names for the month related to the weather and season-appropriate activities. (OK, I admit it, I'm writing a fantasy novel and my point-of-view country has moved from a nature-based lunar calendar to a new calendar which I have pretty much copied off the French.)

The good thing about fantasy, of course, is that if you're making up the world you can structure it how you like. For me, though, the major question to answer is: how did it get that way? If you can't explain why people are doing it the complicated way instead of the simple way, then you may need to rethink.



Wikipedia has a good page on days of the week (not all Norse - some astronomical, some Roman, some others), which I can't link to but which you should be able to find by searching "names of the days of the week" - you can bore everyone you meet until next vineri/du triach/Biyernes/frijjoz dagaz...

I agree with you. Natural ways to tell time are best. Thanks for your input.

 

[Martin Gill]

I've run into this issue though on a more micro level. Days, seasons, years etc are easy enough for fantasy or historical characters to parse, but I keep finding myself looking for creative ways to say second, minutes and hours. A while, a moment, a heartbeat. All morning. Its part of the fun of trying to think in a different mindset.

 

[Overread]

Thing is stuff like seconds and minutes are almost invisible words to most people. They understand what they mean without having to actually pause to read them. So they don't wonder too much why a world has seconds and minutes; its the same as why the lead characters speak english instead of something else.

If you change that it can be neat, but on the flipside you've got to info-dump (stealthily) that Mimis is a second or a Fragor is a minute. You can also then run into problems because those words might then roll into others and before you know if you're not only spending a lot of time on this but also starting to get quite a library of alternate words.

It's interesting to me that things like Elfish and Klingon are very complete but hardly appear in the main story of their respective worlds. They appear in bits here and there; a little bit of complete alien/mystical that enhances and draws the reader in - all whilst they still have minutes and days of the week and seasons as similar to the real world.

 

[Theophania Elliott]

Thing is stuff like seconds and minutes are almost invisible words to most people. They understand what they mean without having to actually pause to read them. So they don't wonder too much why a world has seconds and minutes; its the same as why the lead characters speak english instead of something else.

Well, for my part... yes and no.

On the language side of things, the characters aren't necessarily speaking English: they're speaking whatever is their own language. You've just written it in English. Otherwise, when your book is translated into French, all your characters would have to learn a new language too... You could have your characters speak in their own language in the text, but that probably wouldn't gain you many readers (although there was a murder-mystery computer game written entirely in Klingon, I think...). Language is one of those invisible things that doesn't matter until you have two (or more) of it - as in Tolkien.

What I find slightly jarring in epic fantasy is where everybody in the book speaks the same language. Anybody would think the whole world had been set up so the author didn't have to figure out how to get their characters from A to B when they can't say anything understandable that's more complex than "Where toilet?" and "Two beers please!"

Minutes and seconds... yeah. I hear you there. Not to mention inches, yards, miles... Where do you stop? At what point do you just give up and accept that if you try to change all the measurements of time, weight, and distance to "in-world" measures, your story becomes almost unintelligible? You can probably get around a lot of it by being intentionally vague (people are "very tall" rather than "six feet eight"), but there are always going to be some points at which you're pinned down to a number.

 

[Overread]

You can probably get around a lot of it by being intentionally vague (people are "very tall" rather than "six feet eight"), but there are always going to be some points at which you're pinned down to a number.

I don't know if its just me, but I find that things like weight or height being stated as actual numbers is generally meaningless in most stories; whilst descriptive elements are far more appealing. But also I feel that in a fantasy/primitive setting people wouldn't be using measuring sticks to inches so it feels too clinical and wrongly placed - in a futuristic setting though it sounds perfectly find to have everything measured out to the nearest millimetre.

However I find that in general measurements don't need to be perfect. People do things visually by eye not by measuring sticks; So "he was super tall, taller than most door frames that he had to stoop low to get his head and shoulders through." It's not actually given a height; but it gives an idea of scale for the person in the story and if anything is more easy to imagine for the average person. Of course you then have to assume that any point of reference (in this case a door frame) is now going to be whatever is roughly standard for people today not in the past (as many older buildings often have smaller doors as people were shorter in the past in general). So you've got to be a little careful or at least build in enough references that people get the idea.

 

[Theophania Elliott]

But also I feel that in a fantasy/primitive setting people wouldn't be using measuring sticks to inches so it feels too clinical and wrongly placed

If you're writing medieval-esque fantasy, absolutely. The tape measure wasn't invented until the nineteenth century, as I recall... (in the Real World). But if you're writing set in a more industrial period, then numbers become more important. Nowadays, people think of heights in feet-and-inches (or metres): if you ask someone how tall their friend is, they'll probably say "Oh, about five six," or, as happened to me on one occasion, "about four foot two and a fag-packet".

It all comes back to what's natural for the setting - and then you have to deal with it.

Maybe not having this problem is why urban fantasy is so popular?

 

[Brian G Turner]

IMO it's good to look to the ancient world for general use of measurements. Finger-widths, hands-widths, feet, strides, and miles were all used in the ancient world - even if their technical definitions differ a little from modern ones. And they remain pretty familiar and easy to envisage for the modern reader as frames of reference.

 

[Venusian Broon]

IMO it's good to look to the ancient world for general use of measurements. Finger-widths, hands-widths, feet, strides, and miles were all used in the ancient world - even if their technical definitions differ a little from modern ones. And they remain pretty familiar and easy to envisage for the modern reader as frames of reference.

Mmmm, miles were really local and could be spectacularly different!

So let's see:

English - 'old' ~1.9km whereas the 'statute' i.e. current ~1.6km
Welsh mile - 6.2km (More hills and things???)
Scots mile - ~1.8km
Irish mile - ~2.04km

and then you go to the continent:

Hungarian - Varied from 8.3790 km to 8.9374 km before being standardised as 8.3536 km.
Germanic - The standardised Austrian mile used in southern Germany and the Austrian Empire was 7.586 km; the Prussian mile used in northern Germany was 7.5325 km

I could go on

Want to do a marathon of 26 miles using the Prussian definition?

 

[RX-79G]

If you're writing medieval-esque fantasy, absolutely. The tape measure wasn't invented until the nineteenth century, as I recall...

Noah must have had some sort of cubit stick, though.

As I read the back and forth in this thread, I really wonder what sort of wall people are running into with fantasy and measurements. It isn't that you have to convert inches into fingers or seconds into moments - what is happening in a fantasy story that requires this very modern, time driven view of life that can't be described without an integer reference system?

I just finished a very fantasy-like SF novel (from Peter Hamilton's Void series), and I can't recall the author referring to time or distance for ordinary action at all, unless we're counting "the sun was low by the time he arrived home". Some places could be traveled to in the same day, some took multiple days. Some people "towered", others were "average in height".

If time has passed, the character was likely doing or thinking about something in that time or distance, so why not write about what happened instead of jumping forward in reference to a measurement? If there is a measurement, it is likely to compare. Why's the comparison important.
One hour = replied to some letters and drank tea from a distant land.
5 minutes = had a reverie about the woman he's rescuing.
30 minutes = made herself lunch - the first in days.
Walked far enough uphill to sweat in the cool air.
He watched the tide had come and go, allowing her return along the sandbar.
He reached up, stretching on one toe.
Lars bow was longer and thicker, converting his great strength to great range.
Affording to employ the finest masons, Thebes' buildings towered.
Fill in the blanks!

Ideally, your writing would fill every waking moment in the depicted life of your characters, and every pause or stretch is the time for the character fill in backstory with their thoughts, letters, aching old wounds, uncomfortable stolen shoes, wariness of watchers, etc. (Not like Proust.) But a simple statement can both describe the passage of time and serve to describe something, so it doesn't need to be in an info dump somewhere else. "Five minutes later" is a lost opportunity to tell a story, not an important description.

If that isn't going to work, could people maybe post a paragraph showing the conundrum?

 

[Venusian Broon]

I just finished a very fantasy-like SF novel (from Peter Hamilton's Void series), and I can't recall the author referring to time or distance for ordinary action at all

Yep.


I've been told that Alastair Reynolds, being a space physicist and all, worked out the correct dates for the chapters in the Revelation space series. Which is no mean feat as he was using relativistic craft and travel and therefore would have been a bit of a headache to actually work out...

Except of course, I the reader, paid no attention whatsoever to the dates. Because the story didn't need them.

In fact, I can't think of any story that really does.



Also, I occasionally also stumble across descriptions of characters in some works (honestly!) like 'he was six foot one...'

Hold on, do I ever look at someone at the street and go 'Yep, she's 5 foot 1 inch in height'.

Erm, Nope. I don't. I might think, 'she's short/small/diminutive....'

Best to think 'human' when writing your characters

 

[Martin Gill]

Why's the comparison important

Usually I find its not. I think you hit the nail on the head in terms of how to describe time. It's interesting trying to maintain a mindset though where a viking character (in my current case) doesn't say "wait a minute." Instead they say "hold on there." Its not rocket science, just a nuance of more historical style writing. I stumbled on a couple recently like "they'd been at sea for hours" and when I came back and proof read that got converted to "they'd been at sea all morning."

Right now I'm in the middle of writing a sea chase - so relative time, but not measured in microscopic fight-time, is important. I can handle fight-time because its heartbeats, breaths, things that are very personal to the POV character who might pant a desperate breath or two to buy time (as oppose to pause for a couple of seconds). But two longships at sea... that feels like hours pass as they tack and weave. Its harder to impart the sense of "slow urgency" I want