Jump to content

Daniel Abraham debunks the idea of "historically accurate" epic fantasy


aidan

Recommended Posts

If a writer claims historical accuracy as a defence for the racism or sexism in their work then it's fair for the reader to assume that the writer has done some research (and by research I don't mean watching Braveheart) rather than than just basing things off their own preconceived notions.

There's nothing wrong in basing things off their own preconceived notions, I expect to read the fantastical outpourings of a fantasy writer's imagination, but then if the writer is caught out for the type of sexism or racism in their work you can't fall back on historical accuracy.

If the writer is inspired by the spirit of Ivanhoe and King Arthur and is larding that on their modern ideas there should be honesty about that rather than an attempt to claim that something deeply alien to Chaucer or Boccaccio is an historically accurate version of the European middle ages.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

the USA are not the whole world. There are people outside it. There may also be some people still living in Yurop. Writers, too. Shocking, I know.

Also, I think the average US citizen is fully aware that Europe had and still has a myriad of languages, that his family comes from Europe, and that his faux-medieval society is not a Huron one. It's more easy an inference than the sexism one, to think a faux-medieval thing might include those languages and that Englishmen may not have understood German or French any more than they do right now. (I will assume they don't think too much about language drift and evolution)

Sorry if I offended you by talking about the one country I know the most about, but I can't really speak for the average reader in other countries. And I was commenting about the fact that few Americans would realize that two people from the same country would have trouble conversing, not someone from France and someone from Norway. Of course people have different accents in the U.S. but those accents rarely make communication impossible or even very difficult.

I actually have a history major with my math major. Form my observations here, if you get a history major it is often heavily Eurocentric. I went to a fairly large university and there were still very few options of courses you could take not focusing on the U.S. or Europe. There were no required courses outside the U.S. or Europe. Anyhow, I rarely recall any professors discussing language issues and this includes a medieval history class taught by a Dutch woman who was a bit of a social historian (I actually had her for one of my Western Civilizations courses too). Thus, from my experience, even historians don't focus very much on language and it seems like a pretty difficult challenge for writers to attempt to do. Does that mean they shouldn't try? Maybe, since language is one of the things I see most ridiculed on these boards by people who think it is not done well.

So if I add this to what I stated earlier, I think it is highly understandable for American readers not to realize that there may have been many language barriers for people from the same countries. I can not comment on what it may be like for European, Asian, Canadian, African, or South American readers.

I would hope most Americans realize that there are lots of different languages in Europe, but I wouldn't put it past them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I didn't mean for it to come off as belligerent or offended, sorry for that.

I just have a bit of a hard time to understand how one could learn French (greek, latin, spanish, whatever) in high school, and not realize that it's another language. You know what I'm talking about? It's not truly about learning, it's about putting two plus two together. The only thing necessary is thinking thirty seconds about it. I mean, nobody thinks frontiers are eternal and that languages spring fully formed within their confine, right? Nobody would think of medieval-like continents-spanning countries as the modern entities unified around one language, right? And even if they don't see it in school, stuff like Hot Fuzz (as linked in a previous post) doesn't provoke actual surprise right?

Also I'm not saying they should try anymore than they do (though I would like if they did), but that it is an essential par of being accurate (if you did your research), just like religion, but both are generally skipped, so why cling so fiercely to sexism for the sake of "accuracy"? It's cherry picking what gets to be "accurate", and as such it doesn't feel right to have guys claiming that the author "tries to be accurate": he definitely does not.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm willing to forgive languages. Not everyone has Tolkienian knowledge of linguistics, and I'd rather a book just pretend there's a generic and universal common tongue than the author make a half-arsed attempt at pretending there is more than a handful of nonsense words behind their supposed ancient language.

But GRRM did quite well in conveying different languages on Essos without elaborate fantasy linguistics.

Westeros would have felt much more plausible to me if the North, Iron Isles and Dorne had separate languages, with nobles also speaking the Common tongue (analogously to Latin and then French as international languages in Europe) , while everybody else had discernible regional accents.

These 3 locations are just too different historically, geographically, ethnically and culturally and too stand-offish even after the unification to believably have the same language as everybody else.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Language problems have to be simplified somewhat. Even nowadays in the small language area of Dutch people have to speak the common language because the local dialects are mutually unintelligible if you move more than a few dozen miles (and at times even smaller distances). And before mass communication the problems were bigger because the actual dialects were much more prominent and the common language a lot less entrenched.

International traders and diplomats also used a shared language to communicate across the language barriers, french, which was widely spoken by the upper classes, just look at the use of french in War and Peace by Tolstoy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Language problems have to be simplified somewhat. Even nowadays in the small language area of Dutch people have to speak the common language because the local dialects are mutually unintelligible if you move more than a few dozen miles (and at times even smaller distances). And before mass communication the problems were bigger because the actual dialects were much more prominent and the common language a lot less entrenched.

This is what I was talking about that many would not realize. There are accents in the U.S., but English speakers almost universally understand each other.

But yes, when you talk about the whole continent of Europe, which would be a similar situation to most fantasy, people would realize there are different languages.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Language problems have to be simplified somewhat.
My first reaction would be to agree, but thinking about it, why should they be simplified? History makes for good stories too, and the language problem cannot be simplified there. Martin shows he can do it with the multiplicity of languages in the East, and it doesn't stall the story. What's the problem with including those languages, in the end?
Link to comment
Share on other sites

language problems work well in stories too - if you've seen the old film of "The Third Man" aside from Orson Wells giving his the Medici vs the Swiss cuckoo clock speech the monolingual point of view character is left isolated and confused because the Russian characters speak Russian, the French French and the German German. The non-English characters who want to help him speak English only very badly while teh characters who speak English well want to confuse and misled him - its a great effect.

Or what about the ancient Israelites whose soldiers on the Jordan recognised their enemies by their inability to pronounce the word 'shibboleth' correctly.

The potential for misunderstandings, dependency on unreliable translators, tricks and traps should make it a natural to include in an adventure story...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Now I'm really confused. You just think it's bad prose I assume?

I guess I just found the use of the word "disgusting" a little too extreme for "I didn't like the prose". /shrug

I quit "in disgust." It hadn't gotten disgusting. . . yet, at least I'm told ;)

No, he's reflecting his own (and society in general's) idea of what life was like back then.

The same way the general ignorance of language differences or of the nature of pre-modern religiosity or the like is also reflected in these works.

These settings reflect how we believe medieval life (or historical-setting-of-choice life) was. That they don't reflect how life, as far as historians know, actually was is pretty irrelevant to the above point.

Well, exactly, they are a mirror of our own narratives of what we think our past is. Doesn't matter if the narrative is true or not. It is interesting to me that sexism is the one thing that lots of people glom onto as the thing that HAS TO HAVE BEEN TRUE in the past. It says something very particular about our current culture.

This is what I was talking about that many would not realize. There are accents in the U.S., but English speakers almost universally understand each other.

But yes, when you talk about the whole continent of Europe, which would be a similar situation to most fantasy, people would realize there are different languages.

Well, again, for the sake of accuracy, I think Swedes and Danes can, grudgingly, understand each other without a translator. Ditto for Spanish and Portuguese and some say Spanish and Italian. Even within mutually intelligible dialects, however, there is lots of room for misunderstanding and error. (Let's take a well known example - the word "fag" in UK English slang and US English slang mean very. different. things.). That could be very interesting conflict (but I like that sort of thing). It's to my mind a universal state of being. Why then, do people think it is so much more important and fundamental to depict sexism, even in this thread? What does that say about us?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Why then, do people think it is so much more important and fundamental to depict sexism, even in this thread? What does that say about us?

Ehm, perhaps because there is some perception that western society is no longer sexist. Remember that only sixty years ago, sexism was an accepted norm.

Imho, there is still a long way to go before we truly start to come close to some kind of gender equality that is able to embrace the facts of the physical differences between males and females or even properly recognize what the psychological differences might be (once disentangled from the suffocating pressures of long held social conditioning).

Perhaps many readers and authors are (on various levels) interested in reflecting upon and exploring the driving 'historical' social forces behind entrenched sexism. Of course we shouldn't expect acurate historical renditions in fantasy, but I think speculative fiction is concerned with our internal landscapes and assessing how we as individuals define ourselves within the context of our changing social mileau.

So I think what this says about us is that we care about sexism, that we aren't confident that this issue has been worked out and that we perhaps suspect that future generations will see us as barely more enlightened than our great-grandparents - perhaps even as the generation that dropped the ball on this issue. I think it's safe to say the majority of women alive today still suffer abuses of their human rights simply because they are women - especially in non western societies.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My first reaction would be to agree, but thinking about it, why should they be simplified? History makes for good stories too, and the language problem cannot be simplified there. Martin shows he can do it with the multiplicity of languages in the East, and it doesn't stall the story. What's the problem with including those languages, in the end?

Yes, that was probably a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.

It is probably better to say that you need a really good writer to pull of a near approximation of the language diversity that exists. Especially since books tend to rely on dialogue to transfer information.

I would expect it is mostly used as a tool to show isolation of people in foreign locations, and less on the subtleties that occur in real life, especially since the confusion caused by a shared language is probably considered to be a cheap trick.

The whole existence of a widely spread common language of course has occurred in our world, but I have no idea what proportion of the population could use them. (Latin and greek in the roman empire, arabic, mandarin, swahili. lingua franca in the med, lower saxon in the baltic).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

For me, dystopian societies are much more interesting to read about in fantasy than pleasant societies, and one would expect a dystopian society to be rife with various forms of prejudice.

Westeros and Essos, or Angland and Styria are, for many of their inhabitants, utterly appalling places to live in, so one should expect the characters' attitudes and beliefs to be consistent with such societies.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Some other examples -

In greek/ Rome times homosexual sex was often happening with the losers after the battle was done. In Rome they'd take children for cata mite lovers sometimes. By comparison, the islamic armies of the crusades were under strict orders not to rape with the penalty of death. And as noted Mongols would happily rape and pillage, but only after a resisting city fell: one that surrendered was guaranteed safety.

It's really not that hard to figure these things out. In particular for the dothraki it would make a bit of sense that they were less prone to rape simply because their livelihood was built around tribute from other nations. In any case, it's less a historical fact that war rape always occurred and more of something that did occur some times.

Or justify it. Say all women who bear a dothraki child become dothraki, as do their kids. Talk about how the dothraki aren't genetically one group of people and how they have a ton of diversity. And you complain because this required work? That's what being a good writer is.

Put it another way - not including the rape at all would have been less work, no?

IMHO, that's a somewhat romanticised account of the behaviour of Mongol armies. The carnage that they inflicted on Northern China, Iran, Russia, Afghanistan was of an order of magnitude several times greater than anything the Dothraki did in ASOIAF. Immediately surrender your city, and they'd probably spare your life, but they'd did still their pick of the women as concubines, the men as slaves, and thoroughly pillage it.

Saladin's army may have been disciplined, (and even Saladin committed his share of atrocities) but Islamic armies were no less prone to rape and pillage than their Christian counterparts.

You're right that the concept of war crimes is an ancient one, and that many writers in the past condemned the treatment meted out to civilians in war, but the fact remains that the sort of treatment that gets handed out to civilians in Westeros and Essos has been pretty much the norm throughout history.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think religion is somewhat unrealistic in GoT in that there is a suprising lack of true xenophobia and zealous persecution. Perhaps the reason for this is that the Old Gods and the Seven have coexisted for thousands of years, and because Aegon instilled a pragmatic, real-politik approach to religion. Also, let us not forget that this book is written mostly from the perspective of the upper, landed class. In Medievil history, the upper class treated religion as a means to an end, or a staging ground through which to wage continues power games against other people of power. True devotion and religious humility was left more for the lower, serf population, as a salvation from the misery of everyday life. And, frankly, more religious discussion would bog down the books.

Many of the followers of the Drowned God and R'hllor are pretty intolerant of other religions.

Some of the nobility are devout, such as Ned, Catelyn, Sansa, Ser Bonifer, Lancel, and Jon. Others are pretty agnostic like Tyrion, Dany, Stannis, or at best just supersitious, such as Cersei and Jaime.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

In a recent UK poll more people believed that Winston Churchill was a fictional character then Sherlock Holmes.
You've got to be kidding me. Got a link?

You know, the weird thing there is that he is insulting himself in half his assertions, and he's not even disagreeing with Daniel Abrahams, at the core, the difference is in the wording, and how it allows him to say "I" a lot.
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...