Cursing in a fantasy setting

Hello, been Catholic all my life, and my bible, and those of all my co-religionists, are in our native language, and have been since Latin stopped being an international language around 300 years ago.

I think @Wreybies is right on, you want to evoke the emotion in the reader that the English swear word would. I do historical fiction, but I didn't try to come up with Latin, Greek, Chinese, Bactrian or Aramaic swearwords, or made-up-by-me English constructions, when I have a perfectly usable set of shits, damns, fuck (used sparingly) and so forth. I used fellator once, immediately translated as 'cocksucker" for impact, because it was the first time the reader ever heard the Senator swear, and I wanted to convey that he was really pissed and did not like that person at all! Of course, I could have used other authentic swearwords in Latin, but I wasn't writing in Latin, and I would lose the impact just introducing a distracting word.

My advice is to have a few, very few, tailored epithets for use like above, and stick to standard profanity otherwise. Remember, you want to impress the reader with the story and the characters, not what a brilliant world-builder (or historical researcher) you are. It's about them, not you.

 

From what I know, some of the cruder body words were still considered at least a little vulgar. Cunt, for example, was used more freely than now but was still a cruder word that might be replaced with more medical or euphemistic terms in formal events or particularly classy setting.

 

Fuck came about round late 1400s, early 1500s and by 1590's is known to be recorded in a list of vulgar words, so you might be able to use it in your setting depending on how old your medieval type setting is.

 

I think you can invent a few fake swears, or use historical swears, as long as they aren't too hard to understand. And the use of religious context is definitely a good idea. For comparison, the Ice and Fire book series and Game of Thrones tv series use real vulgarities of various strength like "cunt', "fuck", "bloody" and "whore", but also has the religiously contextual "seven hells", which is particularly easy to understand given its similarity to real ones. At the end of the day with most writing decisions, if it works, it works. And if you can come up with a relatively compelling reason relevant to your context, its probably do-able even if some people wouldn't. There's no right answer exactly; just better and worse ones, and which is which isn't always agreed upon.

 

I didn't know that. That's...kind of cool to know.

 

You could use non-religous things we already say.
Instead of telling someone to go to the devil's fiery underworld, you can just tell them to, for example, to go die.

This also get's me wondering about why so many of our insults are just variations on that.

 

Isn't fracking already a term for oil mining or something?

 

That word exists, but in this case it represents a homophone with a different spelling and meaning, though yes, the pronunciation is the same.

 

I think swear words need to match the world building, which means we need to consider the meaning of the words, not just the function they serve in our language. For example, @zoupskim 's list of swear words that transcend time and space only do so if the other culture is as misogynistic and sex-negative as ours.

I wrote a fantasy world that was very sex-positive and had no religion, which made swear words significantly more difficult. Calling someone a slut or a whore in that world would have been meaningless, and "goddamn" or "hell" would have been just as unfitting. Even "fuck" doesn't have a lot of dirtiness to it when people are fucking like bonobos all over the kingdom. It'd be like using "breath" as a swear word in our world.

If your world echoes our attitudes in terms of the meanings behind our swear words, then, sure, use our swear words. But if the world's attitudes are different, I think the swearwords should be, too.