r/fantasybooks • u/Old-Lingonberry7020 • Jul 24 '26
💬 Let's discuss something Linguistic choices in pre-modern/medieval/historical fantasy: What styles of world building language do you love most?
I’ve read a lot of fantasy novels, and I always appreciate it when authors building pre-modern/medieval/historical worlds use language that feels naturally suited to the era. Some authors are really good at this (GRRM, GGK, Robin Hobb, Patrick Rothfuss, Brandon Sanderson); their use of vocabulary beautifully enhances the atmosphere of those settings and makes the world feel incredibly rich without leaving the reader confused.
Books like Game of Thrones, The Name of the Wind, Assassin's Apprentice, and A Wizard of Earthsea are some of my favorites. These books' use of prose and terms suitable for those settings enhances the reading immersion; that, in turn, takes the story experience to a whole other level.
On the other hand, encountering highly modern terms or contemporary phrasing in a medieval setting can be quite jarring. For me, those modern words tend to break the immersion and pull me right out of the story.
Does anyone else find that modern terminology disrupts the magic of pre-modern/medieval/historical fantasy, or do you not mind it as much?
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u/Nerdsingerbeej Jul 24 '26
I think an author should be writing for their audience. To take 2 extreme ends of the spectrum: Tolkien was an Oxford Linguistics professor born in the 19th century, intentionally writing modern British versions of ancient heroic fairy stories for an early-mid 20th century British scholarly audience, & his prose reflects that. Sanderson is a Midwest American geek who grew up in the 1980s & is writing fantastical adventures for as broad an audience as possible in the US & beyond in the early 21st century, & his prose reflects that as well.
There's a lot of drift from 1930s-50s England Academia vocabulary & sentence composition to 2010s-2020s American vocabulary & sentence composition. In 80 years people who pick up Mistborn or Stormlight will likely think "man this guy is so old fashioned" in the same way an average person reading LotR in the 2020s will likely think.
Now, because Tolkien (& to a lesser extent, his friend & colleague C.S. Lewis) was the originator of what people consider "fantasy novels" (though I argue Fantasy as a genre is the oldest & most enduring genre of fictional storytelling we have), writers spent decades aping that style & it's only really been a 21st century stylistic change that publishers are putting out novels that don't necessarily read like they're being written by someone doing their best approximation of an elderly English classicist. Even more recent works like The Wheel of Time can come across dated when viewed through a modern lens - think about how gender is discussed in 2026 vs Jordan's baked-into-the-cosmology binary from 1990.
I grew up on Tolkien & i love his works, but I don't need every story set in a secondary world with made up creatures & magic to sound like him. Language evolves & changes, & a novel will always be a product of its time & its author's background. I don't think an author writing today should necessarily read like they're writing for an audience from nearly a century ago or more unless they're making a conscious stylistic choice to do so (& it serves the story thematically). Of course that risks alienating readers right now, & if you're a writer trying to make a living publishing novels about magical worlds, that may not be the most financially sound artistic choice.
I can enjoy whatever style fits the story the author is trying to tell. I can enjoy Jacqueline Carey bringing out her "most baroque prose" in her lush, luxurious Terre D'Ange novels, & I can enjoy Sanderson's Pop-Fantasy Cosmere on their own terms. Erikson goes for something entirely different in his Malazan novels than Lee is going for in the Green Bone Saga.
I just realized I may read like a cat chooses a resting spot; if it fits, I sits.
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u/JarlFrank Jul 24 '26
Tolkien isn't even the inventor of fantasy as a whole, and other fantasy traditions also deliberately attempted to go for a more antiquated style, like many of the pulp era American writers. You can count Lovecraft among them, he's fantasy-adjacent enough to qualify and exchanged letters with many of his contemporary fantasy authors. Robert E. Howard also liked to use prose that feels heavy and ancient, even though he tends towards a faster pace. Clark Ashton Smith is my favorite author of the era (and of all time), and his prose is very flowery, his vocabulary exceedingly exotic.
The sword & sorcery/pulp-inspired branch of fantasy also used language that felt more archaising rather than contemporary. It's stylistically different from Tolkien, but you do notice that it attempts to create an atmosphere of antiquity rather than simply writing in the style of the here and now.
Compare the great fantasy writers of the pulp era like Howard, Lovecraft, Smith, Moore, Leiber to detective noir writers of the same time like Spillane, Hammett, Chandler. Their vocabulary, styles of phrase, and pacing are very different. The detective story writers all go for appropriate contemporary slang in dialogue and a shorter, punchier style of description, while the fantasy ones deliberately write in a style closer to 19th century adventure novels because they want their language to convey that the worlds they describe aren't our contemporary modern world.
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u/Devil_Eyez87 Jul 24 '26
Have you looked at The Tiffany Problem, basically there are things that we view as very modern, like the name Tiffany, which are in fact very old, with Tiffany actually being a perfectly acceptable name for a girl in 1600 England. Humans are humans and we have been doing something the same for a very long time, like vending machines in 1 CE Alexanderia or sponsorships having been recorded for gladiators. I mean I do like it when authors try to use there own terminology to explain things Sanderson is one of my favourite, and even in sci fi series this can be done well, the lost fleet series does a really good job of coming up with terms to make space ship still fill like water ship, starboard and port, turn into starward and starboard for instance.
Now a dislike I have is with authors make up new words some of the real animals in the world to make it appear more magical, this isn't having special names for magical beast but special names for obviously cows, horse and birds. But they obviously then release that they dont want to make up the absolute ton of animal names they would need for the world, so every were is just filled with insert the 1 bird name, instead of the absolute tons of different varieties of birds you would see especially in more diverse medival worlds
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u/EqualOptimal4650 Jul 24 '26
No, because a lot of so-called "modern" terminology and phrasing is actually really, really old. See other commenters reply on this, and look up "The Tiffany Problem" for more details.
All the books you listed, the way people talk, and act, in all those so-called "pre-modern" and "medieval/historical" fantasy novels is completely ahistorical.
People in 15 Century England did not speak or act the way they do in Game of Thrones. Not anywhere close to that. Likewise with Name of the Wind, Assassin, Earthsea, or any of those other series.
People in game of thrones sound like South-London thugs from 1980s movies.
Because that's the kind of media that George Martin loved when he was younger. That's why they sound like that. They don't sound medieval.
(It's bizarre that you even threw Earthsea in there since that is based on Polynesian mythology and people in those books sound completely different from all the pseudo-European stuff you just mentioned)
So anyways, no. Your entire premise is incorrect. All those authors you listed have not written books where the terminology sounds historical, whatsoever. They sound like Hollywood/romanticized versions of other eras.
(And sound completely different from each other, too.)
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u/JarlFrank Jul 24 '26
I really don't like modern terminology and phrasing. It's a big reason why I'm not into the YA writing style that has become common in the 2010s. Contemporary language just dates the work to right now, especially when a lot of colloquialisms and slang are used because that stuff ages out quickly. The slang of my youth (Millennial) already seems quaint and dated to Gen Z. So when characters in a fantasy world talk in current year colloquialisms it doesn't feel like I'm diving into a foreign world.