Hey everyone! Here we are again with another weekly blog post. It’s the second to last of this series and hopefully you continue to find the posts helpful and enlightening. So, without further ado…
Worldbuilding: History
The reason I do history last is not because I actually do history last – but because history is the one aspect that seems to affect all the other aspects of world building. No matter which of the other aspects you are working on there is always a little element of history that comes through because the history of a people and place is important to the development of a lot of different things. So today, in this post, I just want to write about how history can affect some of the other aspects of world building and how to incorporate it the best.
Religion is one of those aspects that can be strongly affected by history. Anyone who looks into the history of any major religion knows that they change and fluctuate and create branches and offshoots of their own throughout history. Many religious historians can tell you that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share the same religious roots and yet in the modern world, they are very different religions with their own vast and complicated religious histories.
What different religions exist in your world? Why are they important? What is their religious history? Are they related to each other? Did they change so much in history that they no longer seem related? Are there religions that came about in opposition to others – to contradict the doctrine other religions set up? Was there simply a theological difference that caused a whole century worth of differences?
Religion and history can also be related to politics. Is there a region or country that is run by a religion? How did they gain control of that region? Does this affect their political alliances with the countries around them at the time of your story and also in the history of the world? Has this created shifts in political borders over the years? Does this theocracy colonize or take over other nations? Does this affect their relations?
Does discrimination exist and if so, what kind (racism, sexism, or something related)? Why? What caused it? Was it economic issues, political issues, religion, or simply culture? Was it because of trade? Does discrimination in your world affect the trade with other countries or even the stereotypes about each country? In Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive the kingdom of Alethkar has strong discrimination between light eyes (people with light colored eyes) and dark eyes (people with darker colored eyes). This discrimination affects their trade, their politics, and their economics. This is also related to history. SPOILER We learn the origin of this discrimination between light eyes and dark eyes comes from the fact that Knights Radiant’ eyes change into lighter colors through the use of stormlight and this is why light eyes were seen as nobility or royalty rather than dark eyes. SPOILER END.
How have the languages of your world changed throughout history? How many language families exist? Are there any strange hybrid languages that develop in the space between language families? How do your languages spread to different countries? What are the linguistic borders? For example, in East Asia, Chinese, Korean, Mongolian, and a few other regional languages in that area are in the same language family. However, Japanese (which uses a similar character system to Chinese and Korean) is not in the same language family. It’s grammar and vocabulary are phonetically more similar to the other indigenous languages of the current Japanese islands like Ainu and Ryukyuan.
The last aspect that I could think of related to history that I haven’t covered yet is the wars of a region. Who has fought the wars? Why did they fight them? Who won? How did this affect the politics, religion, and culture of that region? Were there any wars to win back areas stolen in other wars? When was land ‘stolen’ and when was it ‘returned’? How did the wars affect trade in other countries? Were there certain foods that were no longer available because of conflict in other regions?
There are so many aspects of history that it’s hard to cover all of them, but I hope this gives you a little bit of a start on how it is related to all the other aspects of world building. History is one of my favorite parts of world building although I know that it takes a lot of time compared to the other aspects. You also don’t always need to do it in detail but just a little bit of history is important and useful.
Next week will be the last post of this series. It will be a little bit of a wrap up and some last advice on how to do your world building without feeling like it will take you months or even years to finish it. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, become a blog page member, share, and follow me on social media at the links below. And remember,
Get Up, Get Writing, and Get Published. See you next week!