Word Rivets: On Quibbling about Language in Historical Fiction

[Originally appeared in Christopher Gortner's blog Historical Boys on 13 October 2008.]

I paid attention to historical accuracy when I wrote An Involuntary King: A Tale of Anglo Saxon England. The novel is based on stories a friend and I wrote as teenagers, and though it is set in a fictional Saxon kingdom in the late 8th century, I gave it my attention. I could call it alternate history and get away with anachronistic murder, but while preserving elements of the adolescents' vision, I got rid of the castles and knights and replaced them with timber stockades and shield walls. Home free? Not a chance.

My husband uses the expression "rivet counters" to refer to people who pick away at minor or irrelevant mistakes in historical fiction. He refers to those people who cannot get through a movie like Titanic without pointing out there are too few rivets in the hell. Thus, rivet counters are those people who overlook all the characteristics of fiction, in particular the skill of the storytelling, to point out trivial inaccuracies.

I quickly learned as I embarked on my career as a historical novelist that the author is as much or more likely to be jumped on for "too few rivets" as for any thinness of plot or unevenness of character development. It became apparent to me quickly that my fate was to have these irrelevant peccadilloes pointed out in scathing terms in public. It has, so far, only happened to me personally a couple of times, but I watch other authors getting creamed for what boil down to the critic's own beliefs and often misunderstanding of the author's chosen era. In particular, however, I want to address a criticism that is so obviously illogical I am surprised it is uttered at all, and that is the use of certain terms to denote an object or other concept in another time. In a nutshell, "You can't use that word because it did not exist in that year."

I personally got this one when I set up The Blue Lady Tavern blog (http://nanhawthorne.blogspot.com) and was informed that there was no word "tavern" in the late 8th century, that it did not come into use until the 13th century. Um, yeah, that's right. But then they didn't have the words "blue" or "lady" either.. they did not speak the English we do. It's the same as saying I could not call the establishment "The Blue Lady Tavern" because there were no such words in Tagalog at the time. Another writer told me how she was corrected when she used the word "pitcher", as no such word existed at that time. I promptly produced for her pictures of Anglo Saxon era pitchers. She had been told to use the word "jug". Do her critics mean that the Saxons called both jugs and those vessels with big looped handles "jugs"? How did they distinguish between them? Or could it be.. that they spoke a different language than we do and called them neither jugs nor pitchers?

There are two issues at work in this sort of word rivet counting. One is the old "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Someone got a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary and started looking words up. So they find that the first written reference to pitchers is not until the 14th century". But the word was not coined at the same time. The word had been in existence for some period of time before someone had occasion to write it down. Use and documentation are quite different matters. When you recall that most writing for many hundred years was done by clerics it becomes possible to imagine that many words might not have made it into print for generations.

More germane to my own use of "tavern" is the fact that when I write about the late 8th century in Lincolnshire I am in theory writing a complete translation. If I wrote the book in accurate language, the entire 648 pages would be in Old English, as in "Sume is incumen in, lhude singe cuccu." When I take whatever word a real person from that era uses to refer to a place where you can go to get a bowl of ale, it is my job as the writer to choose a word that expresses the idea so the reader can form a picture in his or her mind. Sure, I could have used "ale house" but that's not Old English either. I think tavern works fine. At least I didn't call it The Blue Lady Nightclub or The Blue Lady Disco!

I for one do not understand this quibbling over approximate or interchangeable terms. Why do some people insist on counting rivets? Yes, I want realistic settings and the history correct in those novels that are based on actual events. But these books aren't and never were intended to be nonfiction history. I appreciate those authors who add an author's note explaining which characters were real and which invented for the novel, what liberties were taken with the real history to make a more cohesive story. What really happened and what was made up. But in the long run, novels are about people and their lives, their stories and their feelings, their struggles and how they overcame them. The lovers in Titanic were not real, there were no such passengers on the ship, no massive jewel thrown into the sea. But Jack's and Rose's love, their self-sacrifice, their enduring will, those are things we can relate to and make us care about other human beings. How sad to miss it when concentrating on the rivets, "425, 426, 427…"