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

[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.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, don't get me started on inappropriate or mismatched names. Though, to be fair to SRD, 'Kevin' has different cultural baggage in the US to the UK.
And yes on uncommon names. My grandmother was a Hepzibah.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I assumed that 'Kevin' must have been different, as I can't imagine the name going through the whole editorial process without someone mentioning it otherwise.

It still causes a speedbump.

It did have the advantage of being obviously pronounceable. I dislike names where I don't have a handle on a plausible pronunciation - it makes me feel unwanted as a reader, stupid though that may seem. Celtic names are problematic for me because I know enough to know the rules are different, but I don't know those rules. On the other hand, more exotic names may be no problem, simply because although their rules are different, I may just not know it, so in my ignorance I happily use the English rules. Far Eastern names will fall into this category.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I can understand that. Being me, I go and look up the rules.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

I would too. But I seem to have a weird blind spot trying to work out/remember the Celtic rules.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Giggle. That's a fine definition of the difference.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I have an Asenath in my ancestry. (On my mother's side, sadly; has she been Asenath Waite I would have had happy Lovecraftian tingles...)

The world I write about isn't the world outside my door either; it's much simpler and drawn in broader strokes, and most of it is British. But I do try to make the names interesting. (I still have to discover who Nimidulon Kongipongipan is.)

I had problems when I was a member of a Pern-based writing group because I insisted on calling my character C'rleyn. Nobody could pronounce it--they insisted it ought to be C'leyn or at the very least Cr'leyn. Never understood that.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Asenath is lovely.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

C'rleyn is Pernese for Carleen?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I see no problem with C'rleyn. Mind you, I have learnt to pronounce Conchobhair, so I may not be a standard example.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Is that Connor in transliteration? Or whatever it is I mean?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It's the older form of modern Conor -- prrnounced Con-ho-var, more or less (there's some aspiration).

[fearmeforiampink]

I think one issue might be how the names are presented.

I look at 'Conchobhair' and I go "Wait, what?", but when you say "Con-ho-var", I go "Oh, like Connovar in David Gemmell's books" (and I didn't have any pause wondering about pronuciation with those).

There's the issue that whilst we're using something that (may be, I don't really know about the subject enough) be based off the same alphabet as the Celts used, the usage has changed a lot, so spelling things as they did becomes less understandable.

Thus, I think either writing it as it sounds, or having some clue in the book as to the pronunciation would be a good thing.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Writing it as it sounds presumes that everyone who reads it will be working to the same set of pronunciation habits, but there is no guarantee that that is so. I pronounce certain words differently to some of my local friends, for instance, because I'm originally from Coventry and thus use a short -a- in words like bath and path. That's a Midland British thing. The marquis is a Londoner, and says barth and parth. And that's within the southern third of a small island, and two native speakers of the same language. If you're Welsh or Welsh speaking, Machynlleth is pronounced as it's written: different languages assign different sounds to letters. It would be very arrogant of me -- and very entitled -- to declare that my set of pronunciations was the default and 'write things as they sound' in that framework. As far as my own work is concerned, the reader has the right to pronounce the names as she or he chooses. I don't feel that my personal way is the only right one. It's not that I want to confuse people, it's that I don't feel that I own the language.
For the mystery novel I'm writing, I will be including a pronunciation guide, as the names in it are Welsh, and Welsh rules are not something every reader will necessarily know. I won't use the Anglicised spellings, though, because they carry with them a whole history of colonialism and English imperialism and attempt to eradicate Welsh as a language. Even accidentally continuing that would be deeply offensive. Also, I'm about 75% Welsh and I'm a historian of the Celtic speaking countries, so I have a personal attachment to be respectful.

[fearmeforiampink]

Yes, people can pronounce things as they choose, I'm sure how I think of the names of quite a few book characters is quite different to how the author did. However, part of the complaint from people comes from having no idea how to pronounce, rather than the wrong idea. Which seems a reasonable complaint to me.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

The name that gave me most trouble as a child? Alicia. In my head, it was 'Alucinda'. I coped with Egyptian and Indian and Welsh names fine. I think we all have different comfort zones.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

Um. what's the problem with 'Kevin'...?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Ah. It's kind of a nerd name. Not, certainly, heroic-sounding.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I always think of the little boy in Time Bandits