I’ve been working on creating names for my fantasy worlds recently, and have therefore been ruminating on the concept of a name. There is something powerful about a name. Names are words that serve as identifiers, and have long been held to carry meaning. Place names are often descriptive of the landscape, its residents, or its history. Personal names can be physically descriptive or reflective of a virtue or hero that the parents hope their child will emulate. Oftentimes, a name will be one common to a family and is repeated through the generations. The role of namer is one of honor. In Welsh tradition, only a mother could name her child. In the Bible, Adam names all the animals of the earth. Speaking the name of something was also held to be a powerful act, either as an invocation of its power or as a summons. The ancient magic of the Near East required invoking the name of a deity or spirit in their rituals. The ancient Jews deliberately removed the vowels from the true name of God, so that no one might accidentally speak his name in vain. Even today, Christians and Jews hold the name of God to be holy and powerful, not something to be taken lightly.
In Northern Europe, kennings were a common way of referring to something without invoking its name. Germanic and Finnish peoples refused to speak their word for “bear”, using kennings like “honey-wolf” instead. That taboo has led to the loss of the real word for “bear” in all Germanic languages. Even the word “bear” simply means “brown”. The Norse god Odin also has a long list of alternate names, from well known kennings like “All-father” to bizarre ones like “Dangler” or “Wagon god”. Germanic peoples not only believed in the power of names, but held that the written word was literally a form of magic. The Germanic alphabet consisted of symbols called “runes”, which is etymologically linked to “secret” and “mystery”. The very act of writing was considered to be a magic act, thus we “spell” words in English thanks to the beliefs of our Anglo-Saxon ancestors. Imagine now, if a name, particularly one of a god or powerful being, was written down. That written name serves as a permanent invocation, a spell calling on the true name of something powerful.
Patrick Rothfuss explores the concept of names in his Kingkiller Chronicles, where knowing the true name of something grants one power over it. This concept extends even to people, so that wizards must be careful to avoid revealing too much about themselves lest an enemy guess their true name. It’s a fascinating concept and well-executed by Rothfuss; the Kingkiller Chronicles are some of my favorite modern fantasy books and are worth a read.
J.R.R. Tolkien knew the value of a name more than most. As a philologist, Tolkien spent a large amount of time studying place names and the names of characters in ancient sagas. As a fantasy writer, he devoted considerable thought to the development of names within Middle Earth. He understood how languages evolve over time, how the original meaning of a place name can become hidden beneath a new layer of pronunciation by different people with their own linguistic traditions. Tolkien used his specialist knowledge to create a world with place names as layered as they often are in real life. In fact, it was sometimes the names which were first created, while the story followed as an explanation of the word. In this regard, Tolkien was not so dissimilar from the ancient scholars who often fabricated stories to explain the peculiar names assigned to the landscape around them.
All these thoughts swirl in my own head when creating names for my fantasy worlds. I do not like to be careless with my names, but try to give each creation its due process of thought. For place names, I first consider which people are assigning the name, and in which period. In my world of Purovus, this a primarily a question of whether I should rely on Sensiahd, the language of the elves, or Auroran, the tongue of men. In places and times when the two language families might overlap, I must consider to what degree that will affect the place name. The name “Epalathor Hills”, is a combination of “Epalathor”, an Elvish word, and “Hills”, a word within the Auroran language family. Since the hills lie geographically between the domains of men and elves, the language overlap makes sense.
My second consideration is that the place name must have some meaning, whether it be historical or descriptive. In the case of “Epalathor Hills”, “Epalathor” means “Horse Hill”, which is both descriptive and historical. The wild horses of the Grass Sea will venture into the Epalathor Hills, but the hills are also the place where the tribes of men have historically traded horses with the elves. The repetition of the “hill” meaning within the name “Epalathor Hills” is a result of the humans adopting an Elvish name word knowing its full meaning, a plausible enough origin for a name.
My final consideration when constructing fantasy place names is the sound of the name itself. I generally shy away from words that are too complex or difficult to pronounce, partially to spare my readers and partially to maintain a certain aesthetic appeal. The word must be in line with the trends of its parent language; each language has a unique flow, and preferences for certain consonants and vowels. Additionally, I try to create a word that feels indicative of its meaning. A place of danger and dread should have hard consonants and gutturals in its name, so that the very sound brings a feeling of unease to mind. There are more subtle versions of this auditory quality that are more difficult for me to explain except to say that some words sound noble, others tragic, feminine, hard, liquid, or divine. For whatever reason, I can assign nearly any feeling to a word. The Elvish word for “green” is “shaftas”, which just sounds green to me, like spring, and I can’t articulate why. However, most of my created words are founded in real language families, so the names naturally recall words with which we are familiar. The word “Auroran” itself is a prime example. This is the name of a people and a language that is immensely important to my books. The root of the word is “aurora”, which is a direct descendant from the Proto-IndoEuropean word for “dawn”, and thus “east”. The Aurorans were a people that came to Purovus from the east, carrying an artifact called the Last Light with them as they made the weary journey. Along with these obvious connections, there are other connotations that the word carries. A new dawn brings hope, light to a world of darkness, conquest over death, and the establishment of a new order. Not all my created names are so ripe with meaning, but I do endeavor to make a word with sounds that recall to meaning to mind. With so much consideration going into a name, it is no wonder the process takes me so long, but the time is well spent. Names, after all, are magic.