Fantasy names: a rant.

[la_marquise]

So, one of the charges often levelled at fantasy is that it's full of polysyllabic names and that that's totally unrealistic. Because, y'know, in the Real World (TM), everyone is called Bob or Sue. Just everyone.
This, with respect (okay, with minimal respect) is nonsense. The Real World is full of all sorts of names and naming customs. And, frankly, as a complaint, it's riddled with entitlement. I, the reader, want everything to be easy for me and familiar to me. I don't want to face difference. It's scary.
Bollocks to that. Language -- language in its widest sense, meaning all those wonderful, contradictory, baffling, eloquent, elegant, fluid, magical, changeable, ways in which we communicate and miscommunicate with one another -- is one of our greatest gifts and challenges and tools. Languages are rich and nuanced and redolent and textured. Language is one of our greatest adventures.
And I, for one, want to go on those adventures. I don't want to read about worlds that are exactly like mine, to see only my own practices and expectations and ideas mirrored. I want to be shocked and scared, challenged and surprised, baffled, frustrated, delighted, awakened, expanded. I want to learn.
And I don't learn in a landscape where everyone is limited by one set of rules, where it's only 'realistic' for characters to be called Boyon and Girla (or, for daring writing, Boyol and Girlie). That isn't the world I live in now, for heaven's sake.
Reality check. Not everyone has a name like Bob or Sue. Even within my own white British culture, I know or know of Elizabeths and Bartholemews, Susannahs and Benedicts, Annabels and Julians. Not all of them are Liz or Bart, Sue or Ben, Anne or Jules, either. And if we lift those cultural blinkers, the wider world has and uses proudly, happily, longer names every single day. Saraswati. Paradorn. Ssima Be-Ping. Hideyoshi. Hitomi. Bronislav. Go and look at Thai names, or Indian ones, or even Irish. Conchubhair. Mael-Sechlainn. Derbhorgaill. We are not all white and Germanic. We are not all uniform, nor should we be.
And I won't fit my characters with the strait-jacket of lazy (culturally privileged?) reader expectation. Most of the names I use derive from Old French, Middle English and Welsh. Some of those are short -- Aude, Jehan. Some of them aren't -- Thiercelin, Gracielis.
Name vary, people. Names and naming conventions differ with time, with culture. Some times and cultures allow for abbreviations or pet names -- Thierry, Sue, Pinky. Some add syllables to indicate intimacy or respect -- Ryouga-kun, Mo-Colum. My characters don't live in a world defined by my junior school, which was in a white-bread small village. They don't have to end with the suffixes that make my culture-mates feel comforted. They aren't me. They aren't Jane-from-Basingstoke or Jack-from-Poughkeepsie, either. If I want to read about Jane and Jack, Ill buy a book set in those sort of places. If I find Jane in Fantasyland, her writer needs to convince me that Jane is a natural fit in that place -- and that that place is real in itself and not just Basingstoke with dragons. (Actually, Basingstoke with dragons might be an improvement. But you know what I mean.)
When William Morris made his translations of Old Norse sagas, he adapted the female names he found in them so that they ended in -a, enforcing Latin grammatical practice and (in part) naming practices on 12th century Scandinavia. It looks and sounds wrong. Like 19th century contemporaries who, following the fashion for Anglo-Saxon revivals, gave their daughters Old English names (Ethelberta), he was blinkered by his own cultural expectations.
Fantasy needs to be bigger than that. So, don't go telling me I have to stick to Boyon and Girla. This world I write about is not the world right outside your door. The Real World is bigger than your street. And so should fantasy be.

Comments

[caffeine-fairy.livejournal.com]

I received an email today from a Malika Ackbaraly. The world is indeed wider and more fun than is dreamt of.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

I agree entirely.

Yet, at Milford a couple of years back, the main complaint about the first two chapters (now chapters 1 and 3) of the current project, was that my hero was named Gscalir (Calir for short) and they didn't know how they were supposed to pronounce it. I was advised to change it. I haven't yet, but it is under consideration...

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Donaldson's Lord Kevin?

In yesterday's BBC article about uncommon 'Christian' names (which went on about the Biblical names one doesn't come across), one of the 10 examples listed was that of my sister. So even in a small Oxfordshire village in the early 1960s, one might have come across names you might not expect.

[aliettedb.livejournal.com]

Thank you.
This world I write about is not the world right outside your door.
Oh yes, so totally with you here.

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a reader, I find that it's the little things which snag annoyingly and prevent suspension of disbelief.

I have no problem with FTL travel but struggle with an alian called Janet who wears a girdle under her space suit and has the aspirations of a 1950s housewife .

Magic and dragons are no problem but what is a brothel keeper called Deejay doing in the middle?

Again, please feel free to replace Queen Victoria by an immortal cyborg ruling 1996 Britain- that's inventive and fun. But why make your poor Holmesian hero eat griddled eggs and hash browns for breakfast, put modern American slang in his mouth and hang "drapes" at his windows?

A lot of the charm in reading about other people's worlds is in puzzling out the details and clues as to how the world works.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I've never been to Basingstoke but I'm fairly sure dragons would be an improvement.

The names thing is an interesting one. Here in Toronto, sometimes said to be the world's most multicultural city, people with names that are difficult for English speakers routinely shorten them or just adopt a different name when speaking English.

[woolymonkey.livejournal.com]

It's not just fantasy! In Surrey, I used to get sick of primary school mums complaining about characters in the learn-to-read books with foreign names (Aneena and Nadim, so nice and phonetic). "It's so hard and why would they need to know names like that?" Um, well, because maybe they might leave the village one day and meet new people? (Or even go to the village post office, actually.)

As someone who grew up with a 'difficult' foreign name, I can't get enough of people being encouraged to go beyond the safe and familiar, not just for adventures, but because it's a normal part of life to encounter things you might not have met before. At least, I hope it is.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Yes. Well said!

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I wonder whether you are arguing against a straw man. Do people really complain about fantasy names because they are foreign to them? Or is it more because they are impossible to pronounce, remember or recognise.

With movies I rarely remember character's names - going mostly by their appearance and role. I cope fine with the visuals.

With fiction books I usually just remember the shape of the name rather than the strict pronounciation. I might not even care whether I can pronounce a name. I am reasonably multicultural in that I am familiar with some foreign culture's names being different to my "home" culture. (eg I find greek names easy to understand and remember: "Mavropoulous" is "blackbird" for example. )



I have thought about this issue recently reading a specific form of fantasy : the Megatokyo web comic. The setting is a blend of real life Tokyo and a fantasy anime/manga inspired one.

Firstly we have honorifics: "-san" and such like to signify the relationship between characters. You might want to do something similar in your fantasy world but for god's sake be careful. I am not a member of your culture so it is going to be difficult for me as a western reader to understand.

There are hardly any western christian names in the whole thing. The token American (who can't speak any Japanese) is called "Largo". The other Americans (I assume) are called "Ed" and "Dom". Everyone else has their own Japanese names which sound authentic.

HOWEVER authenticism can go too far. The writer of Megatokyo often uses multiple names for characters - nicknames, formal names, stage names, short names and so on. This may be realistic but I find it bloody confusing.

So, my vote is, by all means make up a culture which has (a number of) variant naming styles different to our own, but please remember your readers are only human. If they find it too difficult to follow your books then they will put them down unfinished.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Boy is that for sure!

And also, Sue can be Susan to her mom, Sue to her friends, Susu to her little sister, Honey to her significant other, Blake to her co-workers, and so on.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

Hear, hear! *claps*

[saare-snowqueen.livejournal.com]

I once had one of my Good Bishop Probus stories rejected because of the silly names.
Ahem, Probus was a real general in the Roman army who was elected Emperor of the empire by his troops, albeit, in the period when the empire was crumbling, still........... Sometimes you can't win

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I've ranted about this before, but my rule of thumb is that if your names are less varied than the homecounties village I live in, I cannot keep up my suspension of disbelief.

As a rule of thumb, putting down books in which the characters are named Karl, Tom, or Fred works for me; a paucity of imagination and research in respect to names tends to spread to history and technology and a lack of consideration of consequences. (If this changes... what else is different about their world?)

I have one character named Val (short for Valendon, he's male), and a Kira (short for Askira)- once you start shortening names, you'll arrive at familiar ones at some point; but that should be the exception, not the rule.

[stina-leicht.livejournal.com]

yes. definitely. i agree with you about naming and the privilege of culture implied when bob and sue are demanded. i agree that the names should fit the culture one creates. but i also feel character names should be easily recognizable and distinct. i prefer names with some sort of cultural (even if it's fictional) consistency. names are important. character names are an aspect of world-building. i don't like it when it's apparent that there was no thought involved in a character's name--that the author just burped up some syllables spaced with random apostrophes to look foreign and then went on writing, however. it just seems lazy. (i never got that feeling from you.)

i once heard an author say that SFF in its core is about other. i like that thought.

[shweta-narayan.livejournal.com]

*cheers*

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

For the record, I would read a story about Basingstoke with dragons if you wrote it. :)

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if you really want to write about Bob and Sue, and you already have some Cwyllns and Thaddoluses and Pvotrs, don't let anybody stop you. A wide-enough variety of names is probably going to include a few that are familiar, in addition to many that aren't. (And if you're worried about suspension of disbelief, lampshade it by throwing in a mention that all the other kids laughed at Sue for having a silly name, when she was growing up.)

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

Tolkien did a little bobbing and trimming himself. The original of Frodo is Froda, but he was afraid readers would see that as a female name no matter what else he did.

I once had someone ask me to make sure that all the names of my characters began with different letters, because that was all she remembered fictional characters with "funny" names by, the first letter. I told her that I had more than 26 characters. :-)

Then there is the whole Pronunciation Guide flap. I've seen professional writers complain about having to look at such things rather than just "getting on with the story." "Why can't the author just spell names like they were English?" is the common complaint -- by people who apparently have no idea of just how iffy "English" spelling is, and of how many dialects of English there are in the literate world.

Off subject

[aberwyn.livejournal.com]

There should be a children's book for the title A DRAGON FOR BASINGSTOKE.

[zaan.livejournal.com]

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.

I've always believed that naming your characters is as important as naming your cat. It always has taken me up to 3 weeks to find a name for each of my cats. The current pair are called Ramesses and Bast - Ramesses is a dark ginger huge tom, with a scarab beetle on his head. Bast is the soft gray and peach with watered stripes barely visible of the original Egyptian wild cats that are on their friezes.
I occasionally get a little flak, but not from my Editor, over my alien names for my SF novels, and I am also known for not having exactly usual Human names either... I love the Celtic ones too - Conner and Rydderch, Gwenhyfer and Gwenheffer were only 4 unusual ones this time around. :)
Dammit, it is up to ME to choose the names! I bring them to life, they are my creations and my Kusac could NOT be called Bob or Fred! As a writer of fiction both SF and Fantasy, I expect my readers, and as a reader of those fictions, to exercise that gray mush between their ears and not quibble over a name. Bah, humbug, I say!

[naath.livejournal.com]

It can be hard to get right (and often I have to look it up) but that doesn't mean it's impossible. Anyway I think that part of the FUN is knowing that this is a strange new world... Cherryh may have gone A Bit Far in "Voyager in Night" though (characters with names like {{/}}... hurt my head). And sometimes you'll get it "wrong" and not know (I did for years and years with WoT names) but you can still get it good enough to be able to recognise the same name next time.

And when Sam is Sammy and Sam-san and Mr Smith and Smith and Sam Smith and Sir and "the investigator" and darling and daddy... I'll damn well figure that out too. Just like I'll figure out what a reverse-splotsny-oojamaflibble is and how dragons don't like cheese but must have milk or whatever. To me a large part of the FUN of SF/F is figuring out what the rules are of this strange new world.

[ci5rod.livejournal.com]

Belated but thunderous applause.

[cianthecat.livejournal.com]

The weird names of fantasy don't bother me at all as a reader (I have been reading fantasy for a long time, now, and have also worked internationally). Life is colourful and I like my books to challenge me and be a 'realistic' alternate reality.

It doesn't matter if I can't pronounce it, either. I will pronounce it in my own way in my head (probably wrong) and remember the pattern, so reading odd names is not a problem at all.

Sometimes a name doesn't have to be weird to fit, it just has to have a reason. Jill, from the Deverry books, comes to mind.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

I'm behind the day by a good bit here, but. Damn.

I am reminded of a review I read of Sarah Monette's books, which complained about range of names she used--the person writing that seemed to be under the impression that a bad conglomeration of Celtic names was supposed to be the default for fantasy.

The best I can come up with for these folks is something like "Get over yourself".

[ardys-the-ghoul.livejournal.com]

*sneaks in the back door*

I'm writing a book that I guess is closest to "Urban Fantasy" in genre, and takes place somewhere near Chicago--so, the characters all have names that people in the US would be familiar with: there's a minotaur named Katrina and a satyr named Earl (but it's supposed to be a little bit funny that these non-human characters have very human-sounding names). And then there's a Tammy, a Laura, an Andrew, and a Joe (who's actually a woman). There are a couple of less common names, but you get the idea.

But if a story is epic fantasy, or science fiction with non-human characters, I expect there to be unfamiliar, and perhaps difficult to pronounce (for me) names.

It's a little silly to expect characters who live in a place that isn't the US, on a planet that isn't Earth, to have American-sounding names. I think that would bug me more than a really long name with umpteen consonants in a row that I couldn't for the life of me pronounce--there are people in Africa whose language includes a series of clicks that no Westerner could possibly pronounce, so why wouldn't it be the same on another planet? People need to get out of their box already.