How To Think Up Fantasy Names

William asks:

Is there any particular method to the madness when you pick names? Like Tarlion, Nighmar or Milwaukee?

Well, for Milwaukee, I didn’t make that one up. 🙂 If you go to the Milwaukee County Historical Society and museum in downtown Milwaukee, you can see an excellent little video that will tell youthe name Milwaukee came from words in two different Native American languages – in Algonquian “millioke” apparently meant “pleasant land”, and in Potawatomi “minwaking” meant “gathering place by the water.”

But that’s real life. Fantasy is a bit different. 🙂

Basically, for fantasy names I try to pick something that sounds right. Sometimes what sounds right can come by accident, and I go through several different iterations before I get there. For example, the chief villain of the DRAGONSKULL series, Azalmora, was originally named Azermera. I wasn’t quite happy with that when I was writing THE FIRST SORCERESS, but I happened to try to type “Azermera” only to totally button mash the keyboard and came out with Azalmora instead. I liked that a lot better, and so that’s how I came up with the name Azalmora.

However, one cannot rely upon typos for creating fantasy names.

Usually, what I do instead is pick a base language or culture to use as a source of names. Like, Andomhaim in FROSTBORN/DRAGONSKULL was founded by the survivors of King Arthur’s court fleeing to a new world. That meant they came from the historical period known as sub-Roman Britain, so I can use Latin-sounding or Celtic-sounding names for anyone in Andomhaim, or take any name from Arthurian mythology. For example, the name “Gareth” features prominently in Arthurian legend, and so does “Accolon”, and both of those names went to major characters in the Andomhaim books. By contrast, Owyllain sort of chose the Aeneid as their founding myth – just as Aeneas led the survivors of Troy to found Rome, so did Connmar Pendragon believe himself leading the survivors of Andomhaim to found the new realm of Owyllain. (Of course, his descendants would find out five centuries later that Andomhaim didn’t fall to the urdmordar.) So in Owyllain, I used a mixture of Latin-sounding and Greek-sounding names, like Hektor, Justin, Zenobia, Krastikon, and Parmenio, though some Celtic ones like Tamlin were still in there.

Andomhaim and Owyllain are supposed to be descendants of ancient Earth cultures, though, so it makes sense they would use names from those cultures. But what about completely invented cultures like the orcs of Andomhaim? For the orcs in the FROSTBORN setting, I basically thought up a list of the name of their old blood gods – Kha, Mhor, Qazalask, Shalask, and so forth – and then most of the orcs had names based around one or more of their old gods. Even the baptized orcish kingdoms still use the that naming convention, which may sound strange, until you remember that many contemporary Christians celebrate Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, on a day named in honor of the Germanic/Norse god Wotan or Odin. However, since Odin is unlikely to charge licensing fees, demand royalties, or issue DMCA takedowns, there’s no harm in naming things after him.

Though if you use the version of Odin from the Thor movies, you’ll get used by Disney Corporation.

Names can even have a stranger origin, and we can often see that names have a very tenuous relationship to the thing they end up naming. “America’s” name is derived from an Italian guy named Amerigo Vespucci, who died like 275 years before the Revolutionary War. Despite the fact he has practically nothing to do with American history, the United States of America is still named after him today. “England” gets its name from “Land of the Angles”, since the Angles happened to be one of the barbarian tribes that conquered Britain after the collapse of the Roman Empire, and their name stuck. The name of “Spain” came from the Roman term “Hispania”, which apparently came from a Phoenician term that meant either “land where metals are forged” or “land of rabbits.”

Which leads to the surreal possibility that one of the reasons that about 600 million people speak a language called “Spanish” today is because three thousand years ago a Phoenician dude happened to see a rabbit the first time he visited Spain.

When things and people get named in Real Life, there’s a lot of that kind of linguistic drift – Milwaukee’s name being a mishmash of two Native American languages, the Christian festival of Ash Wednesday getting part of its name from Odin, half of Western Europe getting its place names from the Romans, people getting their surnames from clerical errors at Ellis Island in the 19th century – and so forth. So when I think up names for fantasy novels, I try to use that sort of linguistic drift whenever possible – the original name for Tarlion was Cathair Tarlias. However, from a writing point of view, too much of that sort of thing can be the equivalent of brushing the cat and a distraction from writing the story, so it’s important to only use it in the service of advancing the story or providing just enough verisimilitude to the worldbuilding.

Sometimes you just come across a name that feels right for the character. I first came across the name “Caina” in Dante’s INFERNO, where it describes the portion of hell where traitors reside. It sounds both hard and feminine, making it a good name for the character of Caina. Tyrcamber came about when I was playing with syllables, and decided it would be a good name for Tyrcamber Rigamond in MALISON and DRAGONTIARNA.

I sometimes change around a few letters or vowels to make a name sound better or more “fantastical.”

A couple more things – don’t dump a bunch of random apostrophes in a name and decide it sounds like a fantasy name. Like, Philadelphia does not become the name of a fantasy Elven city when you call it Ph’ilad’elphia. It just looks stupid and is annoying to spell, like Ph’ilad’elphia isn’t the home of the High Elves or the Dark Elves but the Poseur Elves.

Also, if you plan to do an audiobook, think about how the name sounds when spoken aloud. I never used to do this before 2017 when I started with audio, but you’ll probably want to avoid names that sound similar. Two names can look different on the page but sound the same. Additionally, you might want to avoid really long names – and I say this as someone who’s had literally three different narrators have to use the name “Agrimnalazur” in multiple books.

Finally, before I commit to a character name, I always Google it first. This is partly to avoid the risk of litigation in case I stumbled onto someone’s real name, though that’s a small risk. The bigger danger for fantasy writers is that you might find a word that sounds cool only to realize it means something offensive in a foreign language, like the famous stories of people who get Chinese character tattoos only to realize it means something different than what they were told, usually something unflattering. You don’t want to be four books into your fantasy epic when you realize that your main character’s name is also the term in a foreign language for “he who has unnatural knowledge of sheep.”

So, to sum up, ancient and medieval history are good sources for names, avoid apostrophes, and always Google first!

-JM