Concerning Names

Names are a difficult part of fantasy writing:  too esoteric—too full of double “XX’s or unpronounceable strings of vowels, and they feel too artificial; too plain and you lose any sense of other-worldly difference. Only a few fantasy authors have succeeded in creating clear and usable naming systems. Akardy Martine’s number-noun pattern in Memory of Empire, e.g. “Three Seagrass,” “Twelve Azalea,” etc. works really well. On the other hand, in The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Atkinson’s system of changing suffixes and prefixes by gender and rank ends up totally confusing me. 

For years, while I was in the midst of writing The Nine Realms, I marched the ten-minute walk to my parking lot to an internal chant, “Gimli, son of Gloin.”

Readers of Tolkien will recognize the names of two of his dwarves. This kind of slantwise chime is what I wanted for The Nine Realms because I had so many characters—the style list of people, animals, and places for the four books ultimately grew to around 600—I knew that readers would need all the help they could get. 

So, I set up patterns. My first decision was to separate names by gender. Female names would end with a long “a” or a long “e” sound and male names wouldn’t. 

Then, as the realms multiplied, I inserted “nationality” markers. Lorther names include an “il.” Green Isles names an “et,” while Oro names include the letters “um.” Alpie names had either a double vowel or a double consonant, e.g. “Gunnit,” “Aloon.” The queens of Weirandale all have names that start with a “C.” I relied mostly on English and French phonemes (because to wander into Chinese or Arabic sounds would smack of cultural appropriation), but sticking strictly with familiarity would be too parochial so I took a few chances on made-up spellings such as “Yurgn.”

 Before a reader plays “gotcha,” let me confess I stuck to my own rules only 90% of the time: sometimes I was too attached to a name or sound to give it up. (Apparently, in every world, parents sometimes like to be different.)

I extended patterns to the animals. Goats carry the names of flowers; horses are named after common objects, usually decided by color: “Cinders,” “Teapot,” “Barley.”

The holy grail I always reached for was “Gimli, son of Gloin,” that is, ways of connecting families. Sometimes I fell into the same pattern as Tolkien, that is, an exact rhyme, like his dwarves “Fili” and “Kili.” In The Nine Realms “Dalogun” and “Balogun” are twins. I’m more satisfied with the names of three Free State brothers—“Hake,” “Thalen,” and “Harthen”—because their names are similar but not clones. By the same token, “Percia” is the daughter of “Stahlia.”

Will the effort I spent on creating and sustaining these patterns pay off? Will my choices help readers identify characters? Most will never bother to puzzle out the rules I crafted, but my hope is that they will work on a subconscious level. As a reader, I hate being confused so I did my best to provide subtle guidance.

If you ever do feel at sea, never fear, I included an easy-to-use Appendix of character and place names at the end of each book!