Denominations of time in epic fantasy

It's your world, and there is certainly no reason why an alien world would have the exact same year and day length as ours or would have months and weeks etc of exactly the same length, or why they'd have a day divided into two 12 "hour" segments. I've read fantasy where they use words like marks, bells, glasses, ticks, clicks, beats etc. as names for units of time that are roughly equivalent to ours. I've also read books where there are glossaries that name the months, moons or days etc. Same for units of measure that are appreciably different from real world ones (like feet, yards, inches, pounds etc). Some readers like this approach while others dislike it. I'm not sure whether changing the word for things like "seasons" makes sense or not.

But it's not unreasonable to just "translate" the units of time and distance into the closest applicable ones for our world, just as other words and concepts are "translated."

I always scratch my head, though, when people comment that shorter units of time (aka minutes and seconds) are something that didn't exist until mechanical clocks with second hands were invented.

Actually, time measuring devices go back a long way, and the concept of the second is pretty old. It was first defined as as 1/86,400 of a mean solar day in 1000 BC (this definition lasted until 1960). And the Babylonians actually were the ones who came up with the idea of subdividing time units into 1/60 of 1/60 of 1/60.

The first mechanical clock with a second hand appeared in the late 16th century, but that doesn't mean the concept of a second didn't exist before then or that people needed watches with second hands to conceptualize or roughly estimate the passage of short time units.

Some links about time in case anyone is interested:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_of_time

And this one covers the history of many types of timekeeping devices.

http://nrich.maths.org/6070

I think I tend to get knocked out when a person uses measures (whatever they may be) that are too precise for the situation. If I'm hiding in the bushes without a watch or something, I won't think "five minutes passed." I may think "approximately five minutes passed" or "several minutes passed."

Same for distances. Unless I have a tape measure, I won't know someone is standing exactly twenty feet away.

That's really a pov issue, when you think about it.

fergrex said:

Science fiction writers do this sometimes with the "year" on their planets. In one annoying case, a character who was described as 15 turned out to be 45, because the planet's year was three Earth years.

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If you're going to do this well, it needs to be made clear very early what's going on. This can take clever writing if you're in a character-focused pov (and not omni), or you don't want one of those telly "history lesson" prologues, because of course, the person in question takes the year length (and the fact that 15 is middle-age and not adolescence) too much for granted to even think about, but readers may really get thrown out by hints (like, say, your 15 year old middle-aged grumbling about his bad back and thinning hair).

ScottMc said:

This is my hope. Unfortunately, not all readers (and writers) of fantasy are smart enough to figure out it means average. No given measurement in a novel should be taken as 'exact', unless it is clearly supposed to be exact. The one exception is 'moment' - if I write "He waited for three and a half moments", then that is exactly how long he waited, not a millimoment less or more.

This is precisely the problem I had which led me to starting this thread. "Several minutes passed" is what happened between the end of a scene and the start of another, but without the concept of minutes, how long does my POV character think has passed? A "short while", I imagine.

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Assessment of the passage of time is always somewhat subjective. Sometimes a minute can seem like an eternity (like if you're hiding from someone and crouched in an uncomfortable, cramped position). Other times, a minute whizzes by (like when you hit your snooze bar). But people who live in a world where they don't depend on pocket watches and constant access to various timekeeping devices tend to be more practiced at accurately estimating/counting than people living in our situation.

I think the best way to get novel concepts across in your book (like a different measure of distance, say) is to establish a context. Something like: The sign said the next town lay ten sneperks away. Oh hell, he'd never make it before it got dark.

WriteMinded said:

Anyone not smart enough to figure it out, wouldn't be able to read. Anyway, I'd be surprised if you found one in ten million readers who would agonize over exactly how much time it takes for a heart to beat in each situation.

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You'd be surprised at the things readers can obsess over in their quest to be deliberately obtuse. But the point is, you can't please everyone.

FlashFictioneer said:

Fascinating thread. Why not have a clock (of sorts) in medieval fantasy? No they didn't have clocks in the real middle ages. However, they also didn't have cities full of wizards, bad ass dragons and reanimated corpses. That doesn't stop people putting them in. As to the denominations of time I think I agree with the idea of sticking with seconds and hours. At some point it gets confusing if everything is made up and needs explained.

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Actually, timekeeping devices of various kinds go back a long ways, into the ancient world (well before the middle ages). Sundials, water clocks, hourglasses, candles etc. are all very old. And mechanical clock/bell towers driven by falling weights made their first appearance in the later middle ages. Think about it. People were called to prayer services several times a day, so they needed a way to designate the correct times.

The concept of the day being divided into two 12 hour periods is also very old and predates the middle ages.

Whether the average medieval peasant who did not live near a town with a water clock in its church thought in terms of hours in his day to day life (the way we do) is a hard call. I don't know how ubiquitous things like sundials might have been in town squares. I would guess they used the position of the sun a lot more than we do to designate the passage of time (we'll have lunch at sun high or go to the evening prayer service at sundown etc.). It would certainly be the way people who were traveling away from town with any sort of time keeping device would have to keep track.

It seems to be the case, though, that "everyone knows" they didn't have any way of measuring the passage of time in the ancient world and the middle ages--an example of something that is not actually true being common knowledge. This is not an uncommon issue in fantasy (and then there is the issue of whether or not your "standard" fairy tale/mythological fantasy world is actually meant to be a faithful reproduction of medieval technology or a medieval world at all).

So perhaps if one is going to use hours, minutes etc. in one's fantasy books, a fleeting mention of something like a water clock, a clock tower or hourglass or some such device might serve as a reminder to readers that people have had the means of tracking hours since antiquity.