Daibhid's Journal

So, with it being the Year of the Dragon again (my own Eastern Zodiac sign), I'm thinking about year names in fantasy fiction. It's something I mostly associate with Discworld, but I've seen it in lots of other places. And I'm not sure where it comes from.

Obviously, the fact I made the connection means there's a superficial similarity to year names in the Eastern Zodiac. But it's not really the same.The Eastern Zodiac has a set pattern of twelve animals and five elements, for an overall cycle of 60 years. Learn that pattern,and "I was born in the Year of the Fire Dragon, and it's now the Year of the Wood Dragon" provides pretty much the same information than "I was born in '76 and it's now '24". But if I tell you Windle Poons was born in the Year of the Significant Triangle and it's currently (according to the Emporium) the Year of the Moribund Aardvark, that tells you absolutely nothing, because there's no pattern. The only way you can use that to calculate Windle Poons's age is if you've memorised all the year names.

This really struck home the other day when I was reading old Dragon magazines (appropriately enough), and there was a lengthy article about the history of Forgotten Realms, and every time it said an event happened in the Year of the Unstrung Harp or whatever, it added the year number in Dale Reckoning in brackets. Because without that, the year names are useless. But with that, the year names are unnecessary. The bit you need to know is that it was 1371 DR, and the Unstrung Harp bit is just decoration.

So does anyone know who started this trend in fantasy fiction, and why it caught on as something a fantasy society would do? It's not Tolkien for once; his cultures all had different calendars, but they all numbered the years sensibly, rather than giving them random names.

So I'm not doing the writing meme this year, because I completed one fic. "2x2" was an Arthur, King of Time and Space fic starring Arthur and Noah, and it had the best/worst first line, last line, title, not synopsis because it didn't have one, and so on.

Instead, I'm doing the WIP excerpts meme, with "in progress" meaning that I worked on them in the past year, Thereby assuring myself that I was actually writing in 2019. Here we go.

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Yeah, that took longer than I thought. I found myself utterly stymmied by the first question, moved on to the others, and then kept thinking "But I don't have an answer for the first one yet". And I still don't.

The characters were:

1. Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Ultimate Spidey cartoon)
2. Seventh Doctor (Doctor Who)
3. Granny Weatherwax (Discworld)
4. Father Dougal Maguire (Father Ted)
5. Larfleeze/Agent Orange (Green Lantern comics)
6. Random Dent (The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy)
7. Chris Cwej (Doctor Who New Adventures)
8. Martin McCabe (Absolute Power)
9. Lt Cmdr Data (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
10. Amy Pond (Doctor Who)
11. Ebenezer Scrumph (I'm Sorry I Haven't A Christmas Carol)
12. Barbara Gordon/Oracle (Batman comics)
13. Luigi (Super Mario Brothers)
14. Rev Geraldine Granger (The Vicar of Dibbley)
15. Constable Wee Mad Arthur Mac Feegle (Discworld)
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Well, clearly, being out of work, the absolute last thing I need is to start playing a subscription MMO.

But the thought of Callum Macintosh, the Kellas Cat, interacting with Superman and Batman beyond the world of very embarrassing fanfic I've never shown anyone is certainly tempting...