Historical Accuracy

After reading this blog post, I started thinking about how important historical accuracy is to me. I’m a bit of two minds about the topic, if I’m honest. On one side, I do love history - so much that I actually studied it for a while. On the other side, I don’t think not being 100% accurate with history when you’re writing fiction should be a crime. How’s that?

First of all, history as a science is still evolving. With new means of analysis and new historians who do not automatically assume the same things as generations before them, our picture of history is ever-shifting. There are truths which do not change, but there’s also an awful lot changing (especially as women and minorities are concerned, both were happily ignored by many historians and archaeologists in the past). For instance, it has recently come to light that there were female warriors among the Vikings, too, something a lot of historians would have laughed at in the past (because how can there have been a woman fighting alongside all those pillaging and raping men?). Female gladiators are also a historical truth - women were eventually no longer allowed as fighters in the arena (apparently, one of them kicked an emperor’s ass too hard in a fight, but that is legend), but for quite some time, they were not unusual. What is historically accurate by today’s standards, can be historically fictional tomorrow or in a few years.

In addition, there’s always the exceptions from a rule. For instance, as a rule you would not expect to find many people of colour in a small Norwegian Viking village. However, some people travelled far, even in the past. In addition, Vikings travelled all around Europe and even into the Mediterranean and they had a habit of taking slaves. A dark-skinned man or woman from North Africa could have come to that village. Perhaps they did something noteworthy (the Vikings clearly respected courage and honour, for one thing) and were freed and given the same rights as everyone else. So if you spin it right, it’s not impossible to have a person of colour in that village. Strangely enough, the audience doesn’t really question it when it comes to the ‘great white saviour’ trope where some white guy (more rarely a white girl) arrives in another culture and saves them from whatever the big problem is. But a dark-skinned woman who lives in a small Norwegian village with her light-skinned husband and their kids? That’s totally historically inaccurate and horrible and the author was just pandering to the Social Justice Warriors and nothing else.

The calls for historical accuracy often even come up when we’re clearly talking about fantasy which is based loosely on specific eras. A lot of fantasy takes clues from the European Middle Ages and when you ask why there’s no noteworthy female character in the book (or someone who is not white), you get the ‘that’s how it was in the European Middle Ages’ excuse. This is completely stupid for two clear reasons: first of all, this is a fantasy environment. There might be dragons or additional sentient races like dwarves and elves. It’s a completely different world, so who says that everyone has to be white? It’s likely, because this is biology and not history, that every world has climate zones and people in different climate zones have different looks. So chances are extremely high there will be non-European humans on this world. And there’s no reason not to include any, just because the European Middle Ages didn’t. Not to mention, as a second reason, that there were people of colour in Europe during the Middle Ages - as traders, as diplomats, as slaves, as descendants of all of the above or the Roman mercenaries (the Roman Empire recruited from everywhere and they held a lot of ground in North Africa, too). Not as many as white people, but the ‘there were none’ argument doesn’t work.

Again, this is not about writing a non-fiction book about history. If you write non-fiction about any historical era or topic, you need to keep to the facts. That’s the point about non-fiction, after all: there’s no fiction in it. But whenever you write fiction, you will take liberties with the truth. You will take liberties with historical personalities or events. You will have to, because your self-created characters can’t have been there. Because your plot might ride on something which did happen, but will, most likely, not have a huge historical impact. And that’s perfectly okay.

No historical novel does a perfect recreation of the times. There’s much we don’t know, for one thing. When it comes to the lives of the everyday, common people, we know a lot less than about the nobles and the kings and queens. For one thing, for a long while the common people mostly built with wood and wooden structures don’t last as long as stone structures. The common people didn’t write or read, so they kept no diaries and suchlike, either. And they had no scribes who would put down details about their lives and their possessions. So we have a pretty good idea, at least in Europe and some other parts of the world, of how the noble and rich people lived, those with influence and power. But it’s always a lot of guesswork when it comes to the lives of the peasants and the simple workers in the cities.

That leads to two possible kinds of stories: stories about invented or real nobles (usually taking a lot of liberty, despite the known facts) and stories about invented commoners (where most details of the lives of the people in question are guesswork).

And while I will buy the excuse ‘that’s how it was at that time’ to a certain degree, I do not buy the ‘it was like that in our history, so the alternate history with the dragons has to be the same.’ Dragons are very, very big lizards. Fire-breathing, very, very big lizards, to be more precise. We know that it’s often enough the little things (like a person being late or something of that kind) which change the course of history. How much must history change when we speak about humans taming and controlling fire-breathing, flying lizards? A lot more than just ‘well, it’s a little more sanitary than in reality.’ It’s likely the borders will be a lot different from those in our reality. Whole kingdoms might no longer exist. There might be areas which are just as uninhabitable as Nagasaki or Chernobyl, but for different reasons: because everything there has been turned to ash by a few dragons fighting (or, perhaps, courting - you never know with huge, fire-breathing lizards). Fashion will be different. Political alliances will be different. Society will be different, because those who tame dragons will, most likely, take the place of our nobles - they have real power in their hands. What if as many women as men have the talent to tame dragons? What if people from Africa or Asia excel at it? It would change everything.

Why do so many novels which use a historical background still feature the usual group of main characters, in which there’s mostly white dudes, nobody is gay, and the only woman is a love interest and future reward for the hero (see my ravings about damsels)? There were badass women in the past. Homosexuality has been around since the Stone Age. There have been people of colour in other areas of the world than just those where you would expect them. And why not revert the usual ‘great white saviour’ trope? Instead of having the white protagonist solve another culture’s problem, let a character from another ethnicity come to Europe and help a small community solve a big problem.

If you’re writing fiction, then the ‘it’s because of historical accuracy’ excuse doesn’t work. You will never be 100% accurate and quite some of the things you can do to make the cast more diverse actually did exist at that time, so there’s no reason to leave them out. It’s an excuse and nothing more.

Be brave. Dare to write something new. Dare to go past the way most people see a historical era and write a good story with strong, diverse characters. I’m sure you’ll find your readers - especially today, when you can always self-publish.

After reading this blog post, I started thinking about how important historical accuracy is to me. I’m a bit of two minds about the topic, if I’m honest. On one side, I do love history - so much that I actually studied it for a while. On the other side, I don’t think not being 100% accurate with history when you’re writing fiction should be a crime. How’s that?

First of all, history as a science is still evolving. With new means of analysis and new historians who do not automatically assume the same things as generations before them, our picture of history is ever-shifting. There are truths which do not change, but there’s also an awful lot changing (especially as women and minorities are concerned, both were happily ignored by many historians and archaeologists in the past). For instance, it has recently come to light that there were female warriors among the Vikings, too, something a lot of historians would have laughed at in the past (because how can there have been a woman fighting alongside all those pillaging and raping men?). Female gladiators are also a historical truth - women were eventually no longer allowed as fighters in the arena (apparently, one of them kicked an emperor’s ass too hard in a fight, but that is legend), but for quite some time, they were not unusual. What is historically accurate by today’s standards, can be historically fictional tomorrow or in a few years.

In addition, there’s always the exceptions from a rule. For instance, as a rule you would not expect to find many people of colour in a small Norwegian Viking village. However, some people travelled far, even in the past. In addition, Vikings travelled all around Europe and even into the Mediterranean and they had a habit of taking slaves. A dark-skinned man or woman from North Africa could have come to that village. Perhaps they did something noteworthy (the Vikings clearly respected courage and honour, for one thing) and were freed and given the same rights as everyone else. So if you spin it right, it’s not impossible to have a person of colour in that village. Strangely enough, the audience doesn’t really question it when it comes to the ‘great white saviour’ trope where some white guy (more rarely a white girl) arrives in another culture and saves them from whatever the big problem is. But a dark-skinned woman who lives in a small Norwegian village with her light-skinned husband and their kids? That’s totally historically inaccurate and horrible and the author was just pandering to the Social Justice Warriors and nothing else.

The calls for historical accuracy often even come up when we’re clearly talking about fantasy which is based loosely on specific eras. A lot of fantasy takes clues from the European Middle Ages and when you ask why there’s no noteworthy female character in the book (or someone who is not white), you get the ‘that’s how it was in the European Middle Ages’ excuse. This is completely stupid for two clear reasons: first of all, this is a fantasy environment. There might be dragons or additional sentient races like dwarves and elves. It’s a completely different world, so who says that everyone has to be white? It’s likely, because this is biology and not history, that every world has climate zones and people in different climate zones have different looks. So chances are extremely high there will be non-European humans on this world. And there’s no reason not to include any, just because the European Middle Ages didn’t. Not to mention, as a second reason, that there were people of colour in Europe during the Middle Ages - as traders, as diplomats, as slaves, as descendants of all of the above or the Roman mercenaries (the Roman Empire recruited from everywhere and they held a lot of ground in North Africa, too). Not as many as white people, but the ‘there were none’ argument doesn’t work.

Again, this is not about writing a non-fiction book about history. If you write non-fiction about any historical era or topic, you need to keep to the facts. That’s the point about non-fiction, after all: there’s no fiction in it. But whenever you write fiction, you will take liberties with the truth. You will take liberties with historical personalities or events. You will have to, because your self-created characters can’t have been there. Because your plot might ride on something which did happen, but will, most likely, not have a huge historical impact. And that’s perfectly okay.

No historical novel does a perfect recreation of the times. There’s much we don’t know, for one thing. When it comes to the lives of the everyday, common people, we know a lot less than about the nobles and the kings and queens. For one thing, for a long while the common people mostly built with wood and wooden structures don’t last as long as stone structures. The common people didn’t write or read, so they kept no diaries and suchlike, either. And they had no scribes who would put down details about their lives and their possessions. So we have a pretty good idea, at least in Europe and some other parts of the world, of how the noble and rich people lived, those with influence and power. But it’s always a lot of guesswork when it comes to the lives of the peasants and the simple workers in the cities.

That leads to two possible kinds of stories: stories about invented or real nobles (usually taking a lot of liberty, despite the known facts) and stories about invented commoners (where most details of the lives of the people in question are guesswork).

And while I will buy the excuse ‘that’s how it was at that time’ to a certain degree, I do not buy the ‘it was like that in our history, so the alternate history with the dragons has to be the same.’ Dragons are very, very big lizards. Fire-breathing, very, very big lizards, to be more precise. We know that it’s often enough the little things (like a person being late or something of that kind) which change the course of history. How much must history change when we speak about humans taming and controlling fire-breathing, flying lizards? A lot more than just ‘well, it’s a little more sanitary than in reality.’ It’s likely the borders will be a lot different from those in our reality. Whole kingdoms might no longer exist. There might be areas which are just as uninhabitable as Nagasaki or Chernobyl, but for different reasons: because everything there has been turned to ash by a few dragons fighting (or, perhaps, courting - you never know with huge, fire-breathing lizards). Fashion will be different. Political alliances will be different. Society will be different, because those who tame dragons will, most likely, take the place of our nobles - they have real power in their hands. What if as many women as men have the talent to tame dragons? What if people from Africa or Asia excel at it? It would change everything.

Why do so many novels which use a historical background still feature the usual group of main characters, in which there’s mostly white dudes, nobody is gay, and the only woman is a love interest and future reward for the hero (see my ravings about damsels)? There were badass women in the past. Homosexuality has been around since the Stone Age. There have been people of colour in other areas of the world than just those where you would expect them. And why not revert the usual ‘great white saviour’ trope? Instead of having the white protagonist solve another culture’s problem, let a character from another ethnicity come to Europe and help a small community solve a big problem.

If you’re writing fiction, then the ‘it’s because of historical accuracy’ excuse doesn’t work. You will never be 100% accurate and quite some of the things you can do to make the cast more diverse actually did exist at that time, so there’s no reason to leave them out. It’s an excuse and nothing more.

Be brave. Dare to write something new. Dare to go past the way most people see a historical era and write a good story with strong, diverse characters. I’m sure you’ll find your readers - especially today, when you can always self-publish.