High fantasy and mock medieval english
Feb. 7th, 2015 08:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI did a degree in English with Cultural Studies, so now I have a lot of opinions on language use, for all the good that does. And this makes reading high fantasy… kind of painful, on occasion.
Everyone is trying to be Tolkien. But Tolkien had a background in language, and made particular choices from available English, for his audience and era. Language has moved on, and most of his imitators are just copying the bits that stuck out for them. It limits their palette rather badly.
English happens in different registers, different levels of formality and informality, different specialist vocabularies to do with subcultures or occupations. It can, through use of more latin or anglo saxon root words, slide between class backgrounds. It can sound formal and posh or formal and common. It can denote the difference in class or respectability between the speaker and the one spoken to. You can get a pretty good idea of where in a hierarchy people stand by who they feel they can talk down to and who they try to polish their vocabulary with. And this is without the subtleties of region or gaping great divisions between British and American usage.
When people try and write like high fantasy they tend to throw out the variations to do any of that. Everyone speaks with the same levels of formality, because everyone is straining to sound like the narrator in every other middling high fantasy.
This isn’t me trying to tell other people what talking proper sounds like. Every language use group puts together their own version of how to do English. That’s fine.
But if you’re writing, it takes a really fine hand to be able to do the whole breadth of emotion and characterisation in the register equivalent of a monotone. Modern English gives you options like public school boy, northern miner, surfer dude. They'll all talk different to their mum and their mates and their boss or employer. If you can't vary your characters enough to get similar range, how distinctive can you make them? If everyone talks the same, all the time, with everyone else, you’ve dropped more than half the toolkit.
To put it another way, very few characters know they’re in high fantasy. A noble or king speaking in the throne room may well aim to communicate with posterity and foreign dignitaries, and hence may well polish things up to that particularly ponderous note. But most people, most of the time, are going to think they’re down the pub, or on a road trip, or heading to the shops. They just aren’t going to use the same vocabulary.
Everyone tries to write kings and courts like Shakespeare, but when he did it the nobles talked posher than the commoners, and most of them used dick jokes.
Liven things up a little.
Everyone is trying to be Tolkien. But Tolkien had a background in language, and made particular choices from available English, for his audience and era. Language has moved on, and most of his imitators are just copying the bits that stuck out for them. It limits their palette rather badly.
English happens in different registers, different levels of formality and informality, different specialist vocabularies to do with subcultures or occupations. It can, through use of more latin or anglo saxon root words, slide between class backgrounds. It can sound formal and posh or formal and common. It can denote the difference in class or respectability between the speaker and the one spoken to. You can get a pretty good idea of where in a hierarchy people stand by who they feel they can talk down to and who they try to polish their vocabulary with. And this is without the subtleties of region or gaping great divisions between British and American usage.
When people try and write like high fantasy they tend to throw out the variations to do any of that. Everyone speaks with the same levels of formality, because everyone is straining to sound like the narrator in every other middling high fantasy.
This isn’t me trying to tell other people what talking proper sounds like. Every language use group puts together their own version of how to do English. That’s fine.
But if you’re writing, it takes a really fine hand to be able to do the whole breadth of emotion and characterisation in the register equivalent of a monotone. Modern English gives you options like public school boy, northern miner, surfer dude. They'll all talk different to their mum and their mates and their boss or employer. If you can't vary your characters enough to get similar range, how distinctive can you make them? If everyone talks the same, all the time, with everyone else, you’ve dropped more than half the toolkit.
To put it another way, very few characters know they’re in high fantasy. A noble or king speaking in the throne room may well aim to communicate with posterity and foreign dignitaries, and hence may well polish things up to that particularly ponderous note. But most people, most of the time, are going to think they’re down the pub, or on a road trip, or heading to the shops. They just aren’t going to use the same vocabulary.
Everyone tries to write kings and courts like Shakespeare, but when he did it the nobles talked posher than the commoners, and most of them used dick jokes.
Liven things up a little.