Writing Fantasy: Making it Sound Old

What separates LOTR from Fourth Wing, and how can you write fantasy that sounds old?

Yes, I just compared Lord of the Rings with Fourth Wing — but do not worry, we will gain something important from it. Look at the following (credit for these exmaples):

Fourth Wing

“My breath catches and my body warms, the traitorous bitch. You are not attracted to toxic men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, getting all attracted.”

Lord of the Rings

“Who can tell?” said Aragorn. “But we will put it to the test one day.”

“May the day not be too long delayed,” said Boromir. “For though I do not ask for aid, we need it. It would comfort us to know that others fought also with all the means that they have.”

“Then be comforted,” said Elrond.

The longest word from either excerpt belongs…to Rebecca Yarros. So, jamming your story full of words you gleaned from a thesaurus will not lend it gravitas.

What does, then?

The following are three things I believe make a tremendous difference in how old and “fantasy” your writing feels, and I’ll go through each one and explain why.

• Anachronisms

• Germanic words

• Thematic substance

Anachronisms

You can do much by simply avoiding terminology that rings modern to a reader. For example:

“My breath catches and my body warms, the treacherous thing. You are not to crave such men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, craving.”

If any of you have ever read Ursula Le Guin’s From Elfland to Poughkeepsie, I truly recommend you stop reading my writing and go read it — then you will understand when I say that what I just did was not a real fix.

In the words of Ursula herself:

If it was fantasy, I couldn't have pulled the dirty trick on it by changing four words. You can't clip Pegasus' wings that easily—not if he has wings.

So in our case, we cannot inject true fantasy by the reverse. But it was perhaps moved in the right direction.

Note here, I say true fantasy; like Ursula I believe that the fantasy has a noble potential, but that to reach it is difficult, and not always achieved by books with the label.

How Far?

Regardless of your structure and style, words used in a place ostensibly not of that time will jar your readers. In the excerpt from Fourth Wing, words like “toxic” to describe men, the phrase “getting all [verb]ed”, and even “bitch¹” smack of modern slang.

How deep do we go, though?

Should you explore the etymology of every word, should you use “bro” because it actually was used as slang in the 1600s? Can’t I have a few anachronisms?

Yes. But tread carefully.

Consider that the word “wizard” was largely popularized by Tolkien, and before that, it had nothing close to the meaning of “magical being in hat and robes” that we know it to mean today.

Your job with the “time” of the words you use is to properly evoke the feeling and setting in your reader of the place you are creating. In many fantasies, that’s a faux medieval, Tolkien-esque world — I have seen Sanderson get flak online for having one character say “awesomness” many times.

He gets this critique because his world begins as one with arrows, swords, and shields. Such a world is many hundreds of years removed from our sense of where awesomeness should be used, and Sanderson does not hint in any major way that we should dissuade ourselves of that notion.

On the other hand, consider Narnia. You have a perfectly valid explanation for why the author or a select few characters might describe or think of something like a “lightbulb” or “car” — while they now exist within a fantasy world, they did not start there.

On the other hand, it would be quite difficult (unless you were aiming at an ironic or comedic tone) to describe your cloaked evil villain as “dressed like a goth mallbrat” and maintain the sense of dramatic medieval.

Germanic Words

English is a Germanic language. However, as time has gone on, we have slowly incorporated more and more language, typically Latin (or French with eventual Latin roots). This has the following strange effect:

Words of Germanic root typically sound older than those of Latin origin.

Note I say typically; ire is a Latin-rooted word for anger, the Germanic equivalent, and I think ire sounds older. Though, even here I must point out — wrath is another German word for anger, which sounds decidedly more ancient than either of the first two.

I currently study German, precisely for this reason².

I watched a fascinating video here, where the difference between Sanderson, Rothfuss, and Tolkien was analyzed at a root-word level. Take a guess, how it broke down.

If you guessed that Tolkien used the most Germanic words, followed by Rothfuss, and then Sanderson, you would be correct — and I imagine most of you intuitively decided that, after learning that Germanic words lend age to writing.

Sanderson is a giant in the fantasy and world-building spheres, but even he is on record stating he aims to make his prose the vessel for pure story; a clear pane of glass that doesn’t stand out in and of itself.

Tolkien and Rothfuss differ in this regard, and the Germanic root is a key aspect of their style.

Let’s take that quote from Fourth Wing again, with the previous changes:

“My breath catches and my body warms, the treacherous thing. You are not to crave such men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, craving.”

“catches”, “treacherous”, and “remind” are all Latin roots. Let’s see how it feels to replace them with German words — “hitches”, “faithless”, and “tell”.

“My breath hitches and my body warms, the faithless thing. You are not to crave such men, I tell myself, and yet, here I am, craving.”

By brute force and hilarious word replacement we are carving a 21st-century romantasy into…well honestly it fails to serve the purpose of Yarros’s story anymore, so keep in mind we are not necessarily improving the writing (unless we did this to every sentence and the whole book…but then it would be a different beast).

But we are learning. Take a look at the two side-by-side:

“My breath catches and my body warms, the traitorous bitch. You are not attracted to toxic men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, getting all attracted.”

“My breath hitches and my body warms, the faithless thing. You are not to crave such men, I tell myself, and yet, here I am, craving.”

There is a clear difference, and for better or worse, the second version sounds older.

Thematic Substrate

Again, go read the Elfland essay. This section is effectively a highlight of that essay’s main point — the most important one.

Story can express something truer than fact.

Selah.

Story is capable of presenting emotional resonance within perfect logical cohesion — because you constructed it — that delivers a powerful form of an idea. Ideas are messy, statistics and real life often fly entirely in the face of what any ideal or belief might suggest.

But story can synthesize each messy part, each odd interaction, and deliver what you believe to be true about the subject.

Take stories like Narnia, The Lord of the Rings, and Die Hard (yes, Die Hard, a slight diverging from fantasy to prove a point).

These movies actually ask you to swallow some rather unbelievable “facts”, yet respectively they’ve become the grandfathers of a genre, and a cult classic.

• Narnia could suggest a group of teens and tweens have what it takes to rule a kingdom and win a war

• LOTR depicts a conniving old man uprooting simple lives

• Die Hard says it’s a fine thing the absent husband gets back with his wife

But…none of them actually say any of those things.

Narnia does not claim children are expert rulers. It echoes a sentiment like Tolkien’s: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” What will be their response to shouldering the burden of a kingdom? One answer within the rich themes of the work is that willingly shouldering such a burden brings out the best in you — and that trying to avoid it can bring out the worse, as in Edmund’s case.

LOTR is not the story of a trickster in a hat convincing a hobbit to kill himself on a hair-brained quest journeying directly into the center of war. Similarly, it’s the story of a wise man guiding a young man into taking on the hardest burden he can bare, for only in that way does one bring about the best in the world around them.

Die Hard is not advocating for women to take back their immature dead-beats if they can shoot guns; it is the story of a man who gets caught up in life, plain and simple (his own fault, no doubt), but even so, would gladly give his life twice over if it meant saving his wife. It’s the story of recognizing that disagreements can be resolved, if you realize that both of you are in this thing, do or die.

So…let’s look at the Fourth Wing quote again.

“My breath catches and my body warms, the traitorous bitch. You are not attracted to toxic men, I remind myself, and yet, here I am, getting all attracted.”

Our substrate here must be, at some level, added after the fact. This was more than likely just intended as a moment of levity; to analyze it this closely is beyond ludicrous. However, I tell you we can learn something by doing so, even if the end result would be terrible if placed in her book.

To add a substrate, we can consider what this hints at. Improper attraction, war with oneself, and poor self-image (yes, you don’t get to cuss yourself out, you are amazing).

We then, want to communicate that:

• We wish our heart overruled our carnal nature

• We view ourselves more harshly than we should; this could play into the former.

I will now play loosely with the original structure. As Ursula said, to achieve true Elfland is to be so far from normal that pure replacement could not then be mistaken for something else.

My breath hitches and my body warms, though I wish for anything but that vile urge. Such feeling should not be, nevertheless, it is.

Notice that this changes shifts us towards thinking exactly of those deeper themes. In this, I wish to emphasize something that I believe true fantasy does:

True fantasy should support its theme with every word.

This is an echo of what Ursula’s essay said (and I will place the full quote here):

I think it is, because in fantasy there is nothing but the writer's vision of the world. There is no borrowed reality of history, or current events, or just plain folks at home in Peyton Place. There is no comfortable matrix of the commonplace to substitute for the imagination, to provide ready-made emotional response, and to disguise flaws and failures of creation. There is only a construct built in a void, with every joint and seam and nail exposed. To create what Tolkien calls "a secondary universe" is to make a new world. A world where no voice has ever spoken before; where the act of speech is the act of creation. The only voice that speaks there is the creator's voice. And every word counts.

A Note on Humor

I do not believe this means you must be serious all the time. Far from it, the beginning of Lord of the Rings with Bilbo’s party and many of the interactions he has with Gandalf are hilarious, in my opinion.

‘I hope so. Anyway I mean to enjoy myself on Thursday, and have my little joke.’

‘Who will laugh, I wonder?’ said Gandalf, shaking his head.

‘We shall see,’ said Bilbo.

What I do believe, and why I think we lost the humor as we edited that random line from Fourth Wing, was the original humor was self-aware and poking fun at itself, almost. True fantasy does not apologize for existing, or ask you to be ok with the themes it presents.

A Final Note on Old Fantasy Writing

I believe theme to be the most important part of fantasy, should one wish to stand with the giants of fantasy.

I think this is part of Brandon Sanderson’s success — remember, his writing contains many more Latin roots, the least amount of poetry, and plenty of anachronisms, yet his work is well regarded, and I personally loved it.

I think this is because his themes are true, with respect to his beliefs, and he does not back down from expressing them. Dalinar’s arc, for example, is one of the most triumphant and heart-wrenchingly good emotional journeys I’ve ever read. Kaladin’s progression is resoundingly human and raw.

You’ll never hear Kaladin tell Syl, “Dang I’m seeming like a pretty lavender man right now, you sure about this whole honor thing?”

We do not suddenly turn around and lampshade the entire foundation of the magic system because it’s far-fetched — it’s powerful precisely because it’s far-fetched, and commitment to the system allows Sanderson to reveal truth about the human spirit in ways traditional fiction could not.

Because when fantasy is the real thing, nothing, after all, is realer.

— Ursula K. Le Guin

1. I am not suggesting that cussing immediately robs your novel of a fantasy feel; I am suggesting you must be careful. “bitch” was never thrown around casually in polite company centuries ago, so having the main character’s internal dialogue use it either makes them scummy, or skews the work modern.

2. I originally studied German because my grandfather did, but when I realized it greatly assisted my writing, I decided to continue my studies. Obviously, I am enrolled at the magnificent college of Duolingo.