For Want of a Horse

Like many women (and some men too), I loved horses when I was a kid. I still do, though nowadays I am more likely to be running alongside my dogs as they race around an agility course than hurtling over jumps (or around barrels) on a horse's back. I never realized my adolescent ambition of owning my own horse, but I did work at a stable for a couple of years as a teen and I've taken riding lessons off and on since I was a kid.

One of the things that appeals to many people about traditional high fantasy settings is the notion of using horses as transportation. There is no doubt that mechanical conveyances are faster, not to mention easier to care for. But the emotional bond that can form between horse and rider has long been romanticized in folklore and literature.

Since most people living in the modern world have had only passing contact with equines, there are a lot of things that people don't know about these animals and a lot of inaccuracies that can creep into stories with horses in them. If someone is setting a story in an actual historic setting, or is trying to create a parallel world that is at the exact same level of social development as a historic period, the potential for anachronisms exists as well.

I thought I'd rack my memories, do a little research and put down some "fun facts" about horses that may be useful to anyone writing a fantasy (or other stories) where travel by horseback or in carriages is involved. I delved into my collection of Equus magazines for some of this information, and did a little web research for the rest.

How fast can a horse travel?

A horse can walk 3-4 mph (a league was once defined as the distance a horse could walk in an hour).

A horse can trot about 8 mph (though this varies with breed and conformation)

A horse can canter 10-17 mph

A horse can gallop 25-30 mph

A horse can only gallop at top speed for a few miles/minutes at a time and will have to spend some time recovering afterwards at a walk (just as you would after running a foot race). On a long journey, a rider typically alternates between walking and trotting and the horse will need some brief rests over the course of the day and a long rest in between. It can canter or gallop for brief periods, but this will be more strenuous and require more recovery.

A well-conditioned horse that is not carrying a really heavy rider or load could ostensibly travel up to 100 miles in a day, but this would be exhausting and not something the animal could do day after day.

For a horse on a long journey of several days, 20-30 miles in a day would be more sustainable. The load a horse is carrying, its overall condition (and the terrain) will affect this.

How much weight can a horse carry or pull?

Saddle horses typically range from 875-1300 pounds and can safely carry 15-30% of their body weight. Live weight (a rider) is easier to carry than dead weight (a pack) since riders can shift their weight to make things easier for the horse. So pack horses may show signs of stress when they are carrying 25% of their weight or more.

Horses can pull considerably more weight than they can carry. It is not too hard for a horse to be able to pull its own weight, and they can even pull several times their own weight for shorter distances. The size of the vehicle's wheels make a difference, with larger wheels being easier to pull than smaller ones but conveyances with smaller wheels providing faster acceleration and greater maneuverability.

Dray (or draugh/draft) breeds, such as modern Clydesdales can weigh more than 2000 pounds and stand 18 or more hands (a hand is four inches) high!  The heavy horses used by knights were the ancestors of many of the dray breeds that are still around today, though horses (and people) tended to be shorter back then.

How much food and water does a horse need?

Whether or not a rider needs to carry grain for a horse will depend on how hard he/she is working the animal and how much forage there is along the way or if they are stopping at inns at night.

A typical diet for a 1000 pound horse doing moderate work would be 20-25 pounds of feed a day, most of which would be hay or grass (if grass, the weight will be higher, due to its high moisture content). Approximately 2-5 pounds of this would typically be taken in as grain (often oats or mixed feeds) each day, though this amount would vary depending on the amount of work the horse is doing and how much grass or hay is available. Horses do better with frequent small meals than they do with just 1-2 large meals a day. Horses that have adequate time to graze and are not being worked really hard usually do fine with just hay and grass in their diet.

A horse will drink 6-10 gallons of water a day on average, and of course if it is working hard or in hot conditions, it will need considerably more. It is not possible to carry enough water for a horse's needs, even for just a day or two. This means horses are not useful in very arid environments where there are long pulls between water holes.

Potential anachronisms in historic settings

Horseshoes: The inventor of the horseshoe is unknown, but they came into existence in the early middle ages. Horses that are not traveling a lot over hard/paved/rocky surfaces actually do quite well without shoes, but the invention of shoes did prevent excess hoof wear once people began to pave streets. Prior to the middle ages, Asian horsemen used leather booties when horses were traveling over rough terrain, and Romans sometimes fitted horses with leather "hipposandals." There is no record of people nailing pieces of metal to horses' feet until the 6th or 7th centuries CE. By around 1000 CE, cast bronze shoes with nail holes made an appearance, and iron horseshoes became widespread by the 13th or 14th centuries.

Stirrups. Although the horse was first domesticated around 4500 BCE, the saddle didn't make an appearance until around 800 BCE and the stirrup not until 200-300 CE.

Sidesaddles: Although there were prototypes available as early as the 13th century, they did not allow for easy control of a mount, and so European ladies often rode with split skirts or on pillion saddles behind male riders until the 16th century when a more usable design was developed.

Horse Collar: The horse collar was an improvement over chest harnesses for heavy pulling, because it distributed the weight more evenly around the animals' shoulders. It was probably invented in China by the 6th century CE (possibly earlier) but didn't make it to Europe until the early tenth century.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:Medieval_horse_team.jpg

Sources of Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidesaddle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait

http://www.horsesciencenews.com/horseback-riding/how-much-weight-can-a-horse-carry.php

http://www.ehow.com/about_5399073_history-horse-harnesses.html

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/asianinventions/a/Invention-Of-The-Stirrup.htm

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blhorseshoe.htm

 

When is A Novel Really Finished?

I attended  my first writer's workshop recently. I met some phenomenal people and received (and hopefully gave) some useful advice and feedback about writing. One thing that two different authors mentioned is that a writer needs to know when it's time to finish his or her current novel and send it out into the world. In writing terms, this means to start querying your manuscript and to start in on a new project. This is a vital question for me, because by nature, I'm intellectually monogamous. I have a heck of a time working on more than one major writing project at a time. Revising and refining Umbral Heretic this summer has prevented me from writing any short stories, seriously starting another novel, or even writing entries for this blog regularly.

So, is Umbral Heretic done? Is anything ever really done? The short answer, of course, is no.

Writers are never completely satisfied with what they have written and with good reason. There is always something you can change about a plot thread or character that would ostensibly strengthen the work. The story you put down on a page will never be as deep, beautiful and profound as the one in your head ( a couple different authors said this at the workshop last weekend). And of course, there are those annoying sentences and paragraphs that never seem polished enough, no matter what. I am a perfectionist, so going back and reading something I wrote as recently as an hour ago, can make my toes curl in agony.

Then there is the sometimes conflicting feedback we get from our critiquing partners. What if two of your trusted sources disagree greatly about a turn of phrase, element of your world building, scene, character or even an entire plot thread? Who do you trust if you're undecided yourself? That nasty little voice of doubt will never go away completely, and all writers have a tendency to think that something they wrote a while ago and then came back to is rubbish.

So how do you know if it's really ready in spite of all your misgivings? The answer, of course, is you don't ever know for sure, at least not until/unless a prestigious publisher offers you a lucrative contract and the book actually does well in sales. Even then, I suspect, writers wonder if they could have done better. The best thing you can do is get some people who know something about writing and storytelling and the market you are aiming for to read the thing the way they would a novel and give you honest feedback. 

Their sharp eyes will pick out those clumsy passages, confusing timelines and plot threads that don't tie themselves off satisfactorily. They will also tell you if a character is bugging them in a way he or she is not supposed to be bugging them, and they can tell you whether the timing and pacing and causality of events makes sense to them. And hopefully, they can give you some ideas about how to fix the things that are fixable and whether the things they dislike that you can't fix would be possible deal breakers to most readers. Since they are reading the novel in its entirety, and not just chapter by chapter, they may be able to spot things that you the author and the initial set of critiquing buddies were too close to see.

My novel is complete, and I think, ready to send to some beta readers. Once that process is over (barring very discouraging news), it will be time to start querying it. As much as I've been working towards this goal for the past year, the notion scares the hell out of me--and not just because of my hatred of query writing or because of the poo-flinging doubt monkeys that live inside my head.

I've spent the last year creating, refining, thinking about, obsessing over, dreaming about, and dare I say it, loving my characters and their world. They feel like friends to me. Soon, I will have to say goodbye to them and move on to a new project. This is necessary for me as a writer, since I've probably learned and grown just about as much as I can from this novel. It is also necessary, because in the end, I don't want to put all my eggs in UH's basket. Even if it is phenomenal for a first novel, the odds of any one piece of work being published are far from good. Failure will be less demoralizing if I've managed to publish some short stories and am halfway through a new novel.

 But when I send Jarrod and Tesk out into the world to stand or fall on their own merits (or really on my merits as the writer I was when I created them and their story), I will miss them terribly. Even if I write a sequel someday, my relationship with them will be very different.