Re: writers rant

Rangers were known to cover a lot of ground in a single day (on foot through the wilderness)
Even today 55 miles is not an impossible distance for a fit man/woman to travel in a single day.
Of course wagon trains sometimes considered 20 miles a good amount of progress - so a days journey does require some context.
I agree better to use an anachronistic measure of distance if your book is set in that time period.
I believe Leagues, Rods and Ells are all old measurements not in much use any more
(Why do we still measure a horse in Hands??)


Susan Allen
Kill them with kindness. Unless you have a gun."


----Original Message----
From: "Ian Walden" <ian@doc2prod.demon.co.uk>
Sent: Mon, Aug 11, 2014 2:14 PM
To: "Susan" <tamson-house@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: writers rant

In your message regarding Re: writers rant dated 08/08/2014, Susan said ...


> On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 2:10 PM, Sibyl Smirl wrote:

> I am able to overlook a certain amount of bad punctuation; but Not "to stupid
> to live" detectives

Strange things can throw you. Some while ago, I was reading, and enjoying,
a book set in the 7th century in Ireland.

It somewhat threw me when one of the characters referred to some place as
being a number of kilometres away.

Had they said miles, I might not have even noticed. Even if the mile we
know now is relatively modern, the concept of a mile as a unit is
sufficiently old (e.g. the Roman Mile). Had they said leagues, I wouldn't
have blinked, since it sounds old (and again, there is a Roman unit). But,
a kilometre, just sounded too modern and jolted me out of the fictional
world, interrupting my enjoyment.

It would have been so simple to avoid the problem entirely by having the
character say "Oh, it's about a day's walk up the river valley" or "If you
rode hard, you could be there in a couple of hours" or similar. That way,
you avoid all anachronisms. Of course, then you would get some pedantic
bugger saying - no way could somebody of that era have walked that distance
in a day - they didn't have proper shoes, and the path would have been very
slow...


Ian

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