Measurements in fantasy

This is a great question. I've seen all kinds of uses. The problem with making stuff up is that the reader will have no frame of reference unless you write it carefully.

I usually use the metric system.

As a silly American, I use feet and inches, pounds and ounces.

Let them figure it out.

What I want to know is how far a horse can travel in a day.

bluejester12 said:

What do you usually see for measurements in fantasy, and what do you think is acceptable? English or metric system? An made up system?

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I used to get upset when I'd read feet, miles and inches, pounds and ounces, gallons, etc, in a space opera set in the far future. My scientific training led me to believe the metric system would be the ONLY system in use in the future.

Then I grew older, and now it IS the future and here we are still using yards and quarts. Not to mention more esoteric conventions such as wire and sheet metal guages, and heat (calories or BTUs?). I was so hopeful that by now the world would have come together on the same system.

But China has, for all its area, a single time zone, several other countries operate on time zones that're shifted from their neighbors' by a half-hour, and not everyone even uses the same calendar, let alone the same currency.

We're in trouble.

But the writers of the stories I read, and the readers of the stories I write are primarily Americans, with a smattering of Canadians and British thrown in--and we all understand what a mile is, what a quart is, and what time it is in Chicago when it's sunset on the 29th of February.

So even though it bugs me to read of a astrophysicist on Mars is talking about the distance to Ceres in miles, I get an immediate sense of the distance. I will admit that kilometers would be better, but like trying to translate English to German, I have to think about it...and that disrupts the flow of the story.

I think it's an even easier thing to accept the Imperial measurement system in fantasy, or in a sci fi story set on an alien world. After all, what we call a mile is a (somewhat) convenient distance. An inch is about the length of one joint in my index finger, a quart is about all the water I can drink at one sitting.

And as for the size of Boric's companion, well, it's not inappropriate to use feet, as long as Boric's feet aren't vastly different from ours.

You crazy americans. I have no idea what a quart is. And I've seen american cookery shows where they say "add half a cup of flour". A cup? A cup? What size cup?! Why would you have a standard size cup?!

I think the question has been already answered that in Sci-fi you should probably use the metric system. America is pretty much the only place not to have adopted it, and I'm sure everyone in NASA is pulling their hair out ("How many pounds of rocket fuel will get us ten yards?")

In fantasy, I would probably use imperial. The good thing about imperial is that the words are short and don't stand out in a text.

But if anyone's worried about realism, I'm pretty sure Tolkien had characters mentioning months like October and August (that were named after Romans). So unless you have a really picky reader, it doesn't matter.

Unless you want to go all the way with the details and write your book in middle/old English (or some other dialect) for a fantasy, for instance, I'd say you're going to have to use some current conventions of measurement for your book. For science fiction I'd use the metric system or something of the sort--the scientific community long ago adopted the metric system. But here's another thing to think about: the metric system is based on the size of the Earth. Aliens would have their own systems of measurement and would feel the same way about using the metric system as loquax feels about trying to add half a cup of flour to a recipe.

(Incidentally, in older recipes you don't even find standard sizes. My great-grandmother's recipe for boiled custard calls for adding a tablespoonful of an ingredient, and my grandmother explained to me when I was copying the recipe down that what Bessie meant was not a standard Tbsp, but a dessertspoon from the silverware drawer, and a heaped spoonful at that, rather than the ordinary level spoonful most recipes call for. Personally, I love deciphering that sort of stuff--but I can see how it would drive other people crazy.)

The metric system is based on the size of the Earth? I thought it was based on the number 10 (ala our number of fingers)

Nope. Size of the earth, as well as weight of water. Wikipedia has let me down on the specifics, but it all started with measuring the size of the earth and then basically chopping that size up into an even number of units--meters. I'm sure someone else who knows a lot more about it than I do can let us know if I'm right, though.

Apart from the kilogram which is based on a standard weight kept in a vault in Paris.

You could use the system of biblical measures - cubits, spans and so on.

I'm pretty sure the size of the earth only affects time. Everything else is based on water, and splint into units divisible by ten for easy conversion. Something like one litre of water takes up one decimetre cubed, which is ten centimetres tall, and weighs one kilogram, and takes one joule of energy to raise it by one degree. Or something like that..... I suppose I'd better consult the old wiki.....

Paces are good. As are ells. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ell

loquax said:

I'm pretty sure the size of the earth only affects time. Everything else is based on water, and splint into units divisible by ten for easy conversion. Something like one litre of water takes up one decimetre cubed, which is ten centimetres tall, and weighs one kilogram, and takes one joule of energy to raise it by one degree. Or something like that..... I suppose I'd better consult the old wiki.....

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Not so. Wikipedia explains it thus "The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one litre of pure water at a temperature of 3.98 degrees Celsius and standard atmospheric pressure. This definition was hard to realize accurately, partially because the density of water depends ever-so-slightly on the pressure, and pressure units include mass as a factor, introducing a circular dependency in the definition of the kilogram."

waylander said:

Not so. Wikipedia explains it thus "The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one litre of pure water at a temperature of 3.98 degrees Celsius and standard atmospheric pressure. This definition was hard to realize accurately, partially because the density of water depends ever-so-slightly on the pressure, and pressure units include mass as a factor, introducing a circular dependency in the definition of the kilogram."

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Isn't that pretty much what I wrote? Where's the Earth in all this?

loquax said:

Isn't that pretty much what I wrote? Where's the Earth in all this?

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Wikipedia then goes on to say that because of this they moved to a standard lump of metal.

IIRC the metre was supposed originally to be some minute fraction of the circumference of the earth. However I believe that they got the maths wrong and it actually isn't.

You could use the system of biblical measures - cubits, spans and so on.
Only if you don't mind not giving the reader a clear picture or are in a Biblical time frame.

A Cubit is defined as the lenghth from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow. This means a cubit is not a standardized length (like a cup is...in America at least), but varies from person to person. If you think of it in a general sense of the average adult's cubit lenth, you get a length of about 17 to 22 inches (as indicated at dictionary.com, I love that place!). People usually see a cubit as this average length, but still, it varies. Then of course, in the fantasy realm, Jordan the giant and Tinkerfell the elvin fairy have different cubits no matter whether or not they are adult's or children. There isn't even an average, they are a completely different species. So if you do use it you may want to say..."Max the wizard's house was as high as Jordan the Gian'ts cubit length," or something.

Anywho, let me get in my opinion. Do whatever you want. I would probably advise whatever is comfortable for the story and reader. If you make something up, make it clear. You can even do a little deffinition of measurements like Lockwas or whatever in the back.

bluejester12 said:

Whats an imperial?? Am I totally showing my ignorance here?

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Imperial is the English derived set of units. Miles, feet, yards, pints etc. as opposed to the metric metres, kilograms, litres.

Guessing only, I imagine a span would be the length that a bridge could span using a single arch.

I thought a span was the width of an outstretched hand, but that doesn't sound like enough distance in this case.
Maybe Mr Jordan meant something else.

Happy New Year everyone.

bluejester12 said:

"Not more than twenty spans back down the road a cloaked figure on horseback followed them..."

I can't even imagine what a span is. What do you picture?

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Whenever a fantasy author uses a term like that I usually just mentally susbtitute my own measurement, in this case my mind would've said "yards".

When I was a teen, it seemed like every fantasy author made their heroes "two meters high" Since I wasn't familiar with thinking of meters when thinking of measurements (being American), this would always throw me off. My mind would automatically replace the word with feet and I'd go "huh?" A 2 ft hero?

loquax said:

You crazy americans. I have no idea what a quart is. And I've seen american cookery shows where they say "add half a cup of flour". A cup? A cup? What size cup?! Why would you have a standard size cup?!

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The British invented quarts.


Only recently did Britain adopt the metric system. We crazy Americans merely kept the systems already in use. Why we adhere to them is beyond me... But then, a lot of what we do is beyond me.

bluejester12 said:

I just started reading Eye of the World and Robert Jordan wrote this on the 3rd page:

"Not more than twenty spans back down the road a cloaked figure on horseback followed them..."

I can't even imagine what a span is. What do you picture?

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I hate it when books do that. It takes me right out of the story when I have to puzzle over what the author means - is the cloaked figure right on their tail or not? I don't know*.

My take is that all fantasy books are written in translation anyway - they aren't "really" speaking modern English. If the dialog is translated, the units of measurement should be too, either metric or imperial as the author prefers. As an American, metric units always seem more "scientific" to me, so I would go with feet, gallons and miles per hour.

* Part of my problem is that I'm anal enough to stop reading and look it up, which literally takes me out of the story. In this case, Merriam-Webster says "the distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger of a spread hand; also : an English unit of length equal to 9 inches (22.9 centimeters)", so the cloaked figure was about 15 feet behind them. Why not say that? or even better, something descriptive like "two horse-lengths".