By Odin’s Beard! What the frack is all this sprock?

Recently I found myself reading Courtney Cantrell's newest book, the first in what will be a long running fantasy series, Legends of the Light-Walkers: Rethana's Surrender. Peep this cover art.

I've mentioned it briefly before, but it really is a fantastic book. I cannot recommend it highly enough. There's pretty stunning character work, some impressive world building, some semi-annoying fake languages (so many vowels and apostrophes...but we forgive her!), but mostly there's just an amazing story of a sheltered, frightened girl trying to figure out how to take care of the little sister that's wasting away in front of her eyes.

I'm told that eventually there'll be a war. You can see how that kind of thing would make Rethana's priorities even more complicated.

But the words I really want to talk about isn't the one with all the vowels and extraneous punctuation. I want to talk about dirty words!

Rethana fantasy curses like a fantasy longshoreman. And the cursing is fantastic.

I'm not sure when I noticed it exactly, but once I did, it could not be unseen. I immediately texted Courtney about Rethana's predilection for dirty words. She rightly defended it by pointing out that most of Rethana's friends are guys who have served mandatory military time. Courtney also pointed out that Rethana censored herself better when she was around her great grandmother.

I thought about how the Vikings I'm writing about in Saga of the Myth Reaver: Downfall curse and how complicated that was for me to figure out. That's when the light bulb went on.

More than religion, more than language in general, more than government, more than clothing styles, the thing that most defines any given culture might be how it decides to curse. And, most shockingly, this doesn't seem to enter into world building all that often. I mean, you can see in in the post title. The first is comic book Thor swearing by his actual dad's facial hair, honest to goodness stubble of  the guy he probably just saw at breakfast. The second is so the surly military folks on the Battlestar Galactica revival could drop the F-Bomb more or less. Seriously, despite a lot of cultural barriers, there seems to be no difference in usage between our own favorite f-word and that of the crew on BSG. And, lastly and nearest to my heart, you have the catch-all curse word from a thousand years in the future used by the Legion of Super-Heroes.

I think these are pretty typical stand-ins. And the thing I notice is that they are either ridiculous or nearly 1-to-1 with our own style of cursing. Ridiculous I can dig, that's always at least fun. And it does say something about the tone of the work even if it doesn't speak to the characters. But 1-to-1 is boring and almost as bad as fake curses that aren't thought out at all.

Courtney and I conversed via text about this for a couple hours and it reminded me of all kinds of things. It reminded me how the producers and writers of Deadwood had tried a script that used period curse words, and they jettisoned that idea because everyone sounded like Yosemite Sam. That made me think of how, until very recently, cursing was mainly blasphemous rather than scatological (Biological? Whatever.) as we are now.

Think about Shakespeare. It's all "God's Teeth" and "Zounds" (a shortened form of "God's Wounds"). People still damned things, of course, or suggested that God should do so. But, again, that's all in the realm of "blaspheming." Nowadays, we are almost pathologically concerned with fecal matter and sexual activity when it comes to our cursing. Or at leas colloquially we are.

Then I couldn't help wondering, what caused that shift? It happened way before the Post-Christianization of the Western world, so it couldn't be that. Courtney suggested the growing focus on personal hygiene in the West might have something to do with it. That's a fantastic theory, but I don't know if it's true. What's worse, I don't know how to find out!

And it could really matter! Whatever caused that sociological shift could get injected into a fantasy or sci-fi world I'm creating and I wouldn't pay attention to the attendant cultural shift in curse words. That feels wrong, like introducing the printing press but having it be no big deal.

This is why my "fantasy" Vikings curse the way they do. I thought about going the Deadwood route for all the same reasons, but it just didn't feel right to me for my Vikings. Others have gone that route, and it more or less worked, but not for me. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of easily accessible scholarly work on how Vikings cursed. So I went the blasphemous route with a little biology mixed in. This is why most of my guys are all "By Loki's dangling balls!" or "What in the name of Tyr's bloody stump is this?" And this is working for me now, but what about the next thing I write?

And what about non-Western cultures? Courtney grew up in Germany and they pretty much curse like us only in German. But we've also been living in their kitchens for the last 60 odd years, so that's not surprising. My friend Zac who spent a lot of time in Japan, tells me Japanese curse in a very boring, pedestrian way. I love that information because, with very little pondering, that totally makes cultural sense.

Anyway, this is getting long (probably because I find it fascinating). For now, go buy Courtney's book and review it when you inevitably love it. Second, if any of you have or know of scholarly works on this subject, link me. Better yet, blogs and such where it's getting broken down for the layman would be perfect. Lastly, just for funsies, put in a comment with your favorite fantasy or sci-fi curse word or phrase.

I can't wait to learn how to curse in even more made up ways!