Measurements in fantasy

Hi. Newbie here!

I'm not sure if others have some issues with this but measurements in fantasy seem to be a tough one to figure out. Though the english language does not exist in fantasy it is often avoided to use real world measurements (such as kilos, minutes, metres). However i've read that even G.R.R. Martin used "hours" in some of his books, Miles has also been used in a few fantasy novels.

So my question is what kind of measurements are generally acceptable, and what tips or measurements are good subsitutes especially in more advanced fantasy where engineering is prevalent?

Time
Quarter/half day, sun positions.

Distance
Leagues, paces

Length
Hands

Weight
??

Volume
Cups

Do you think that imperial measurements are acceptable (miles, feet, pounds, yards, pints etc)

In the fantasy world created, the language might not be English, but if it wasn't written in English then we wouldn't understand any of it! A friend of mine asked when watching Game of Thrones "How come they can speak English! How come they have that sort of accent!" My way of viewing it is that if it were an actual reality, they wouldn't be speaking this way at all but it's conveyed in a way we understand. I don't see why it wouldn't be the same in measurements too. I often thought this, but with measurements, like Cady Heron said "Maths is the same in every country" and if they didn't call it feet, it would be called something else entirely but essentially the same thing.

It would be an idea to research how it was referred in the setting you've placed your story. I do that a lot. Also, look the etymology for it and see how it might fit in to your writing. Most of these units are derived from Latin, so it might be difficult to fit it into fantasy but like I say, the language your book is written in is like a translation from the world it is. Latin in reality might be called gobbledegook in your fantasy. They have the same meaning.

On a side not, I would also consider how it's referred to in different races and cultures. For example, the UK measures a persons weight in stone but in America, it's weighed in pounds.

That's just my view on it. I think it's different with the characters and how they would refer to it, which is why I think it's important to research it in the setting you've written in, but if you were describing the height of a tree, it would be plausible to describe in feet even if the characters wouldn't do.

Welcome to Chrons, fellow zebra!

I think, in general, you're perfectly ok using imperial measurements in fantasy. The alternative would be to make up a system of your own, and that would be odd if you weren't also using different words for everyday things. Your hands, leagues, paces, etc. are acceptable as well. Just be consistent, whichever words you choose.

Consistency and the reader experience trump all things whether we're talking about measurements, settings, characterizations, etc. As long as you frame a fantasy world a certain way and ensure you remain consistent the reader will enjoy the story.

If you are writing science fiction or fantasy based on OUR world however, your time period, culture, geography, etc. will basically guide you in choosing the correct terms for measurement. When in doubt, do a little research on your "real world" setting and your readers will recognize those efforts.

I am reading a book based in Biblical times right now and the measurement system is completely different than today. In most cases I can understand the distances through context, but the author also provided a great chart at the beginning - I appreciate his taking the time to provide the correct measurements since this story is based on Earth, just sometime in the distant past. If he chose feet, miles, or even kilometers I would not like it since none of the Greeks were around to coin those terms at that time!

There are some older terms that wouldn't be out of place in a fantasy novel. Also by examining what people used to use for measuring things can give you ideas for your own set of measures.

Time used to be measured by the sounding of the church bells for different services. Then there were candle clocks. where the wax would take a certain amount of time to burn down to a mark on the pillar. Candle marks were usually an hour apart. Then they had sundials and moondials and in some cases, water clocks.

Weights and measures were a serious affair, and mostly reckoned by the use of a universal determiner familiar to most if not all persons.


The principal unit of measurement in ancient Egypt was the royal cubit, 52.4 cm, approximating the length of a man's forearm. The royal cubit comprised seven palm widths each of four digits of thumb width, dividable into 28 digits.

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/measures.htm#ixzz3hR7GjyYl

Here is a link to a list of ancient measures.

http://hemyockcastle.co.uk/measure.htm

http://home.clara.net/brianp/quickref.html

This has some interesting early time keeping devices

http://www.smashinglists.com/10-early-firsts-in-timekeeping-devices/

This lists the times at which church bells would ring for the different services throughout the day, as well as describing several ancient time systems.

http://www.quora.com/How-did-people-in-the-Middle-Ages-tell-time

This is a blog post telling a bit more about the church bell comunication system.

http://www.ottsworld.com/blogs/girona-cathedral-church-bells/

TheDustyZebra said:

Welcome to Chrons, fellow zebra!

I think, in general, you're perfectly ok using imperial measurements in fantasy. The alternative would be to make up a system of your own, and that would be odd if you weren't also using different words for everyday things. Your hands, leagues, paces, etc. are acceptable as well. Just be consistent, whichever words you choose.

Click to expand...

This, and don't, "over stress", or go into detail about them, unless they are very important to the plot. Your characters know the system their society uses, just like we do, so treat it as an everyday item.

Zebra Wizard said:

G.R.R. Martin used "hours" in some of his books

Click to expand...

"Hours" have been in use since at least Ancient Rome - however, the way they were used was completely different to what we have now.

In the early mediaeval period, there were 12 hours in a day - but these were divided across the daylight hours only. This meant that an "hour" was much shorter in winter than in summer, and vice versa. There was no standard hour. It was the perceived need for monks to pray at specific times of the day that led to the invention and use of the mechanical clock - which introduced the concept of a standard hour, with the day divided into equal parts regardless as to whether there was sunlight or not.

For travel, miles and stadia were often far less useful units of measurement than the actual time required to do so. So someone in a village would not normally say that they lived 15 miles from a town, but instead, "half a day". For small measurements, a foot or a stride were common.

However, the big caveat is that there was no standardisation in mediaeval times - for any thing. So one person's 10 foot could be another person's 8 foot, etc.

Hope that helps - and welcome to chronicles.

Brian Turner said:

In the early mediaeval period, there were 12 hours in a day - but these were divided across the daylight hours only.

Click to expand...

The Ancient Babylonians may have had "standard" hours.
Many societies and civilisations ended day at sunset. The Romans decided day changed at midnight.
In UK the first generally accepted standardised time was due to railways and called Railway Time before it was commonly known as GMT.

I think Historical Fiction and Mediaeval themed Fantasy are not the same thing. One needs to have the context of the culture. For Fantasy and SF generally I think you can use anything, but I tend to use Metric in SF (with sometimes a hint that the "editor" has translated the Aliens' measurements). In fantasy I tend to use archaic British Imperial as USA, Ireland & UK readers are comfortable with it anyway and reads less jaring, even if in some cases it's also really a "translation" (Elves on some mysterious "otherworld" don't use Imperial measurements). Also Imperial such as grain, inch, foot, yard, furlong, etc are mostly derived from more obvious sources than SI / Metric etc.
Some "Biblical" measurements are of course "mistranslations" from King James or earlier era. In some cases they don't know what the Hebrew, Aramaic (Daniel mostly) or Greek terms exactly were.

Even today someone might ask for two fingers of Whiskey. If your beta readers aren't tripped up and it's obvious from context ...
I don't think there is any need to actually make up measurements unless your entire book is written in an Alien or fantasy language, there is always the assumption of "translation" in SF & F.

Zebra Wizard said:

my question is what kind of measurements are generally acceptable, and what tips or measurements are good subsitutes especially in more advanced fantasy where engineering is prevalent?

Click to expand...

The main problem is, if you start inventing your own measurements, your readership would have to do significant mental efforts to keep them in mind. Usually no one would do it, so either your units would be ignored completely thus making the text more obscure or the irritated reader would simply abandon your text.

As it was already mentioned, you can use medieval terms or modern terms with different meanings (for example, who said that "a foot" must be 30 centimeters in length or a week must contain exactly seven days on any planet?). However, it's not much better than inventing your own measurements, and you have to remind the reader about it all the time. I prefer to use convenient units adding to them one or two modern or obsolete measures with different meanings. It adds to the flavor of the text and rarely confuse the readership. And even doing that, now and then I get a letter from a reader who says, like, "I've found a mistake, half an hour is not forty minutes!".

Using modern measures is not that bad. When books are translated between different languages, sometimes units of measurements are translated between imperial and metric systems as well. An SF book is similar to translation from an alien language, so we can always say that we did exactly that: transformed alien units into convenient ones.

thanks all, for the input.

I agree that formulating a fictional measurement system will just bog down the reader. Even real measurements are hard enough to understand by majority of people. (I'd imagine alot of people don't know how many inchs ->feet -> yards or lb -> stone. Kind of like when fantasy novels include made up calender months.

My novel is an alternate/secondary world fantasy, so everything would be very different. though i have written alot of it, and used a mix i just wanted some outside feedback to develop some consistency (developing science based world)

Now my second question is:

If it was written that an hour was said to contain sixty minutes, would that feel too close to what we have and feel out of place, on the other side of things, if you used a different amount of minutes per hour, wouldn't that make people think "wait thats false"?

Fantasy books are on a fictional world for the most part and when they talk about hours, miles, or days I never read it and think...'well how big is their planet, and how far from their two suns are they? I think their day may only be 20 standard earth hours' You just read it and take it for what it is.

I think in science fiction, this is something that is probably a little more scrutinized by the readers. But that is just an assumption.

There was someone I read that used candles as a time rating. I can't remember if they called it candle-marks? or something like that.

(and welcome aboard Zebra Wizard)

Unless your plot revolves around the time it takes for things to happen (this is almost never the case) then maintaining consistency with what people are used to makes your story easier to read.

There are times to be creative and there are times to make your book so common day that readers expend no energy keeping up with areas of the story. You want their focus and mental efforts on your plot and characters, not your time frames. Of course you might get the oddball who calls you on it, but he's a rarity and honestly probably read your book to find such a flaw rather than was "interrupted by your consistent use of time measurement" - that sounds ridiculous anyway!

Not to mention - and this might make me lazy - but if I had to adjust my timescales without changing the terminology my head would explode. Calculating orbital speeds, accelerations, distances at x % light speed is hard enough. Factoring in 2000 seconds isn't really 2000 "seconds" would make me quit writing the book!

Hi ZW,

And another welcome to Chrons!

Zebra Wizard said:

Now my second question is:

If it was written that an hour was said to contain sixty minutes, would that feel too close to what we have and feel out of place, on the other side of things, if you used a different amount of minutes per hour, wouldn't that make people think "wait thats false"?

Click to expand...

I suppose the question I'd ask you is: Is there ever going to be a moment in your writing where having different minutes or different numbers of minutes actually needs to be mentioned? So unless you need to make these measurements radically different from what we experience them and this is a plot point, then perhaps there's no need to worry about this?

My WiP1 is Epic Space Opera and goes through quite a few planets. I hummed and hawed about what sort of time system my characters would use, as each planet would have different rotational characteristics and therefore widely different day lengths. I ended up deciding that as all the worlds are inhabited by humans (mostly), they would all adopt the 24 hour day, 60 minute hour system but then each 'local' hour and minute is specifically fixed to the world. So some worlds might have 90 second minutes for example (seconds being rigidly defined now to be independent of the Earth's orbit and rotation, so they are the same in the WiP as they are now). However there was a standard minute and hour defined by Earth that could be used in comparisons. (In some manner. I don't know what they'd do about the ever changing periods that occur - Earth as we know is slowing down in its rotation. But to be frank I don't care how they handle it!)

After all that thinking about such issues, I only brush against the above in passing once, in ~180k words, and to be frank that could be cut, and then the inhabitants of one of the worlds decided to divide the day up into sixteenths, putting on an additional layer on top of the traditional 24 hour division...

If you do decide to go down the route of creating your own system (which I don't necessarily recommend) then I have some software that lets you quite easily set up your own units and then use them consistently (ie. you can easily convert our hours to your tweens) so you don't accidently have your characters walking 10 yurgs in 5 tweens, which actually turns out to be doing the equivalent of 20 km in 5 seconds!

Zebra Wizard said:

If it was written that an hour was said to contain sixty minutes, would that feel too close to what we have and feel out of place, on the other side of things, if you used a different amount of minutes per hour, wouldn't that make people think "wait thats false"?

Click to expand...

If you're using a mediaeval world, I would advise against using minutes at all.

Half and quarter hours may be acceptable - but the mediaeval world just wasn't fast enough to warrant a need for minutes in any ordinary conditions. For most people, the days themselves were the only required measurement. Merchants, monks, and some government officials might count hours - but only in terms of subdividing the day.

Additionally, there just wasn't the technology to make minutes a meaningful reference - perhaps in a post-Renaissance world with pocket watches - but not in a mediaeval one, where the town clock is going to be the single reference point - for those who need it.

In a mediaeval world there is no way usually to measure less than 1/4 hour (at best?*), anything less is either
At once, shortly , soon, or less than a 1/4 hour.

Brian Turner said:

the days themselves were the only required measurement

Click to expand...

Or perhaps Dawn, Noon and Dusk. Apart from Monks, keeping watch etc.

*What sort of time periods were hour glasses made in apart from the obvious 1 hour? When did egg timer "hourglasses" arrive?

Vertigo said:

you quite easily set up your own units and then use them consistently

Click to expand...

I use spreadsheet. Irritating that there is only Tellurian Localisation on Calendar functions. Date conversions with Aliens are a pain to setup. But once the formula is done I have 1st column in Earth Months/years, then events, birthdays, chapter/sections and alien date. For fantasy I just assume it's similar enough, though the old Celtic Calendar is odd (the four major feast are NOT the Solstices & Equinoxes!). At some very early stage they might have had a 9 day week too. They did have "fortnights" in a sense as each "moon"/"Month" was divided in two.

So some research for the region/culture AND period is always needed. Or you just use all modern stuff and a note that it's "translated".

Ray McCarthy said:

So some research for the region/culture AND period is always needed. Or you just use all modern stuff and a note that it's "translated".

Click to expand...

Which I think is often the better way as your reader doesn't have to keep doing conversions in their heads.

It's like many things. If it looks and behaves exactly like a horse, call it a horse, not a kraka-chaka. You can get into a complete mess with time units: c.f. Battlestar Galactica (http://www.kobol.com/archives/timeunit.html) which not only couldn't keep consistency, but used the same word for both time and distance units apparently randomly and for no good reason.

Some things are easier to deal with than others - you can change month names without much trouble, and it tends to make sense to do so for fantasy stories, anyway, because people do react with "why do they still call it January?" response. People tend not to go "why do they call them seconds?"

If you rename units, as well, you have to decide what you're going to do about common phrases. If, for example, your unit of moderate travel distance is not "the mile" but "the forkra" then you might end up having a character "run a forkra from that", which never plays quite as well as one would hope.

If you need it to be different, though, for your world to work, then you should change it. But there's a good chance that your readers will have to go "a centon? Uh... oh, yeah, that's either a week, a mile, or a kilogram. Probably a week from context. OK, I think I'll keep reading".

Brian Turner said:

If you're using a mediaeval world, I would advise against using minutes at all.

Click to expand...

So would I -- they were known, but not used on clocks (many early clocks only had the hour hand). If you POV has a pressing need to know minutes, perhaps? Sailing, for one example.

This is a look at the evolution of using minutes (and degrees)

astronomers of the 16th century began physically realizing minutes and seconds with the construction of improved clocks with minute and second hands in order to improve measurements of the sky. While sextants and quadrants (no telescopes yet) had long been used to quantify the heavens, due to the movements of the sky their accuracy was limited to how well a user knew the time.

Click to expand...