It’s no secret that I am working on a fantasy novel right now. And when you write in a fantasy setting, there are some expectations that readers generally bring with them about language. You don’t often see characters referring to things as “cool” in a fantasy-styled world, for example. The language used is something more akin to what we imagine people talked like in Medieval times, though I’m no linguist, I believe fantasy language has more in common with the English writing style of the early to mid-20th century and almost nothing in common with the Middle English of the Medieval era. We may have Tolkien to thank for that much of the tone and language that modern fantasy contains.
Sometimes I worry though. Many novels written in the 19th century are a slog to read, and the farther you go back, the tougher it gets. If you go back to Chaucer, an author definitely well-placed at the end of the Medieval time period, The Canterbury Tales is borderline unreadable. Without a formal knowledge of Middle English, you are either going to have to guess at a lot of the words, look a lot of stuff up, or read a modernized version.
So why do I worry? So many great books and stories are being produced every year. I even have some stuff floating around out there, and eventually, I’ll have more, but will the English language evolve beyond it all? We’ve imagined worlds where English no longer exists as the primary language or even at all. What if some of the ideas in those worlds come to pass?
I hate that I have to read works like Beowulf or The Canterbury Tales through someone else’s lens and knowledge of English. Even Shakespeare often feels like something people enjoy out of pretentiousness and not out of an actual love for the material. I’m probably wrong, and I hope that I am, but I for one always had trouble pushing through on of his plays.
Art evolves. That’s the bottom line. That’s what I have to accept. All that is good in the literary world today is built on the backs of art that has become unreadable or—even worse—lost to time. As language has evolved, so has the craft. Often one has informed the other, in a beautiful dance that is told through time. Any contribution I make is not a new dance, but a step in a dance that hasn’t ceased since the first story was told by early mankind around some campfire.
So while I reserve the right to be fearful that my work will one day be unreadable by a vast majority of people, I also have to take comfort in that fact. Not only is this the way it is, it’s also the way it should be.

Quote of the Moment:

“Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve to any erthely man;”

Translation:
“Love is a greater law, by my skull,
Than may be given to any earthly man;”

– Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

Current Reads:

Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson