RangerWickett
Legend
I'm writing a bronze age fantasy novel, and in a bid to stay with the aesthetic of the era, I keep running into fun challenges of world-building. My latest: tea.
Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in hot water to make a tasty infusion, but these days we often call all of them 'tea' even if there are no tea leaves in them. I recall in one episode of Man vs Wild while in some frozen northern area, Bear Grylls boiled water and tossed in pine needles just to make a warm drink.
But if you were reading a novel set in a region analogous to Mesopotamia, and someone ate lasagna or a hamburger, that would take you out of the narrative, right? If they ate chocolate or potatoes (new world plants), that might fly under the radar for some, but for me it would be immersion disrupting. Sure, it's a fantasy world, so I could say that in this 'fertile crescent' region maybe cocoa grows here natively, or whatever. Maybe some famous priest invented the hamburger, and it's just called whatever the Sumerian word for 'ground beef on a bun' is. (Gur-ab-sag-ninda means grind-cow-inside-baked-good.)
But if I have a couple characters meet up and one provides a friendly drink for the other, what would be within the bounds of immersion for you?
Water, obviously (though often it was not necessarily safe to drink). Beer existed, yes, as did wine. Potentially even some fruit juices. Milk. Fermented yogurt drinks.
But tea and coffee? If they were drinking 'boiled water with plant but not the tea plant,' what word would work but not feel awkward? Just use tea? 'Infusion' is weird. 'Brew' for me evokes beer, and sometimes coffee? Should I make up a word, introduce it casually early in the book, and then just treat it as normal from there on?
Like:
Farron accepted the cup, pausing to savor floral scents carried on the steam. It was stronger than the mila she could afford, made with dried leaves sailors brought from Otharil. She wondered if that field she had seen in front of her host's estate meant he actually grew his own mila plants here. If so, it was another reason to stay in the man's good graces.
What are your thoughts?
Tea is a beverage made from steeping leaves of the tea plant in hot water. There are numerous other types of plant you can steep in hot water to make a tasty infusion, but these days we often call all of them 'tea' even if there are no tea leaves in them. I recall in one episode of Man vs Wild while in some frozen northern area, Bear Grylls boiled water and tossed in pine needles just to make a warm drink.
But if you were reading a novel set in a region analogous to Mesopotamia, and someone ate lasagna or a hamburger, that would take you out of the narrative, right? If they ate chocolate or potatoes (new world plants), that might fly under the radar for some, but for me it would be immersion disrupting. Sure, it's a fantasy world, so I could say that in this 'fertile crescent' region maybe cocoa grows here natively, or whatever. Maybe some famous priest invented the hamburger, and it's just called whatever the Sumerian word for 'ground beef on a bun' is. (Gur-ab-sag-ninda means grind-cow-inside-baked-good.)
But if I have a couple characters meet up and one provides a friendly drink for the other, what would be within the bounds of immersion for you?
Water, obviously (though often it was not necessarily safe to drink). Beer existed, yes, as did wine. Potentially even some fruit juices. Milk. Fermented yogurt drinks.
But tea and coffee? If they were drinking 'boiled water with plant but not the tea plant,' what word would work but not feel awkward? Just use tea? 'Infusion' is weird. 'Brew' for me evokes beer, and sometimes coffee? Should I make up a word, introduce it casually early in the book, and then just treat it as normal from there on?
Like:
Farron accepted the cup, pausing to savor floral scents carried on the steam. It was stronger than the mila she could afford, made with dried leaves sailors brought from Otharil. She wondered if that field she had seen in front of her host's estate meant he actually grew his own mila plants here. If so, it was another reason to stay in the man's good graces.
What are your thoughts?
