Getting it Wrong (On Purpose?): Anachronisms in Historical Fiction

by Katherine Langrish

So here is Jael, from the Book of Judges, about to hammer a very large nail (or stake, or tent peg, depending on which translation of the Bible you use) into the temples of the sleeping Sisera.  The painting was made by James Northcote, RA, in 1787,  and I think you will agree its impact is not diminished by the fact that no attempt has been made at historical accuracy and Sisera is (most uncomfortably, one supposes) lying fast asleep in a suit of 15th century armour.

So how important are anachronisms?

I write historical fantasy, not straight historical fiction: which you might think offers me a loophole out of strict adherence to absolute accuracy.  After all, if my books set in the Viking Age also include trolls, ghosts and water spirits – for which clearly there is no historical evidence – then surely it won’t matter too much if some of the details of everyday life on a 10th century Norse farmstead aren’t exactly right either?

Actually I don’t see it that way.  For one thing, there’s the small point that Viking age people believed in ghosts, trolls and water spirits, as well as in a mixture of gods – Christian and pagan – for whom there can be no evidence of physical presence either.  And so I don’t feel that fantasy is necessarily less ‘historical’ than non-fantasy.  Indeed, partly to correct this notion, I have sometimes referred to my fiction as ‘history with the beliefs put back in.’ 

But let’s come clean.  Even with the best of intentions, I’m never going to get everything absolutely right. There is not nor ever can be such a thing as absolute historical faithfulness.  The past is a jigsaw with many missing pieces. Did Richard III really murder the Princes in the Tower?  We’ll never know.

Historians relay social, political and domestic information about the past: facts derived from primary and secondary sources which most of us do not have the skill or patience to read.  There is room for many interpretations of history.  And when history is remodelled as fiction, there is not only room but a licence to go further.  It’s not the duty of an historian to determine Richard III’s guilt (though quite a few of them try); but for a novelist (as for Josephine Tey in 'The Daughter of Time') it may be an imperative, and the reader will understand it as fiction: a possible, not definitive, version of events.

Further, anachronisms can be used to bring an old story to life.  In the painting of Jael and Sisera, above, it's probable that the artist used anachronistic clothing (old fashioned, yes, but nothing like old-fashioned enough!) as a way of giving Jael's murder of Sisera a more universal meaning: in the Bible, Sisera is a leader of the Canaanites, an enemy of Israel: his downfall at the hands of a woman could be seen as the downfall of a tyrant.

Sir Philip Sidney once said in his ‘Defence of Poesy’ that poetry – by which he meant invention: fiction – was less likely to deceive the reader than history, because it does not pretend to be the truth: 

“What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing Thebes written in great letters upon an old door, doth believe that it is Thebes?  If then a man can arrive at that child’s-age, to know that the poet’s persons and doings are but pictures what should be, and not stories what have been, they will never give the lie to things not affirmatively, but allegorically and figuratively written.  And therefore, as in history looking for truth, they may go away full-fraught with falsehood, so in poesy looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention.”

However, some anachronisms do matter.  Even one can grate, breaking the illusion.  Too many, and I don’t see the point of using an historical background for your novel at all.  Many fantasies are set in a sort of generic ‘medieval England’ with no relation to a genuine historical period.  It sets my teeth on edge if I read a book placed, say, in 12th century England, only to find the characters all have 14th or 15th century names like Alison and Matthew (or even Rose and Jack), while the villages are full of 16th century inns complete with 19th century-type regulars and landlords, and everyone speaks English (of course they do: it’s a modern novel) but there’s not the slightest hint that the 12th century was a linguistic and racial melting pot of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Welsh and Latin.  Stick a white witch at one end of the village street and an evil Norman overlord at the other, and you’re done.  Medieval Disneyland.

Beliefs even in fairies changed over the centuries.  When I wrote my own 12th century fantasy, ‘Dark Angels’ (‘The Shadow Hunt’ in the US), I tried not only to indicate some of the racial and linguistic issues mentioned above, but to investigate 12th century fairy lore, courtesy of Gerald of Wales, Gervase of Tilbury, Walter Map and other 12th century men of letters.  It turns out that the characteristic story of the time was of abductions or journeys into or out of underground fairy kingdoms: The Green Children of Woolpits, Elidyr, Wild Edric; and of ‘dead’ wives being seen with the fairies: Sir Orfeo, The Sons of the Dead Woman.  This supernatural underworld was assumed to be ruled by a king: belief in a sovereign fairy queen – as in the 16th century ballads of Tam Lin and Thomas the Rhymer – seems not to have come till later (perhaps not until Elizabeth Tudor and the literary cult of the Faerie Queene).

Does any of it matter?  Well yes, to me it does: to me it’s worth trying to be faithful to the 12th century experience of the world, which is different from that of later centuries – and interesting in its difference.

But there are occasions when deliberate anachronisms are permissible when writing fiction.  Or at least, I think so, and here’s an example. In my first and second books, Troll Fell and Troll Mill, a lot of the action takes place in a dilapidated old water mill, an important element which I needed to visualise very clearly.  Off I went to visit the local (18th century) watermill up the road, to talk to the miller, who was a knowledgeable enthusiast.  And I learned that in the10th century, watermills were very different. 

You can picture a watermill, can’t you?  An old wooden or stone building with a big, vertical waterwheel turning around and around on its horizontal axle as the water rushes through the mill race?  And if you’ve ever been inside a mill, you’ll have seen the heavy-duty machinery of cogs and gears which turns the horizontal rotation of the axle into a vertical rotation to drive the millstones.  Well, in the 10th century, watermills weren’t like that.  Instead, water would be led from the mill dam down into the mill itself via a long wooden chute, to strike against the paddles of a horizontally-laid wheel whose vertical axle would have disappeared up through the floor of the grinding platform to drive the millstones directly above.  Much simpler.  No cogs, no gears.

It’s not easy to imagine without a diagram, but the point is that a 10th century mill would have looked very different inside and out from the sort that we’re used to picturing.  Trying to describe it would have taken up a lot of space, added nothing to the narrative, and probably confused my readers.  I decided I wasn’t writing a treatise about early water mills.  So the mill in ‘Troll Mill’ is an anachronism – a water mill of the sort that wasn’t seen in Europe for another two hundred years.

Does this contradict what I said earlier?  Isn’t this just part of the Disneyfication process?  Maybe…  But if there are anachronisms in my work, at least I know they’re there.  I chose for them to be there. 

And that, I think, is important.


Katherine Langrish is the author of 'West of the Moon', HarperCollins 2011, a YA fantasy set in the Viking period, and of 'Dark Angels', HarperCollins 2009, set in the 12th century.  Visit her website and her blog Seven Miles of Steel Thistles