L.B. Graham — author of the series "The Binding Of The Blade"

OK, so my apologies for the relative lack of new blogging here in the last month or so. With the preparations for the Fantasy Fiction Tour '08, I've given most of my free time to the Motivat8 website. So, for those who don't pop over there with regularity to see what is going on, I'm copying here one of my posts there on fantasy writing, and I'll post more in days/weeks to come.

Those who read more broadly in Fantasy and Sci-Fi might recognize this title. I took it from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. “The Naming of Names” is the story/chapter that describes how settlers from earth brought “earth names” with them and imposed them on the Martian landscapes & bestowed them on the newly created towns as they quickly spread over the face of the Red Planet. It’s a critical section, in a way, because it subtly suggests that the “earth names” didn’t fit the Martian world, and so it plays into Bradbury’s larger theme, which was a critique of earth society in the atomic era (the book is from about 1950 and like a lot of books from that time, it wrestles with the destructive forces unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) We’ve failed to learn to live at peace with one another and our world, Bradbury implies, and so the narrative questions the wisdom of duplicating that same society on Mars.

So what’s my point? Names matter, is my point. When Herman Melville set out to write a story about a monomaniacal sea captain in search of the great white whale, he didn’t just “coincidentally” name him “Ahab” - a reference to one of the most notoriously wicked Israelite kings. The name had meaning, as do many of the other names in Moby Dick with clear biblical allusions behind them.

Well, what about fantasy? Aren’t all those names just made up? Do they have meaning? Are they arbitrary or intentional? These are the kinds of questions that hopefully some or most of the other authors will address in their own way when they have time this week, so you can get a variety of perspectives. For now, I will give you a glimpse at my own view of selecting names.

In order to be brief, I’ll simplify my “process” for selecting names by dividing them into three basic tiers.

First, there are the names you create & use simply because you think they “sound right.” Think about the orcs and goblins and the like in Tolkien, with their guttural, unpleasant names. Think about how the Elven names flow and are almost musical. Mordor simply sounds like an unhappy place. These can also be the more obviously descriptive terms like “Mount Doom.” Face it, LOTR would read a lot differently if Frodo had spent three books trying to get to Mount Sunshine in The Happy Valley. That just wouldn’t work. (Of course, Tolkien invented his own languages, so you could argue there was more than “sound” at work in his names, but there’s a reason the language of Mordor sounds so nasty & the language of the Elves doesn’t…)

In my stories, this happens with both good and bad characters. Some names sound appealing to me, so I use them for good guys, and others not so much, so I use them for unpleasant ones. For example, I like “J” sounds, so I have names like Joraiem, Aljeron and Benjiah used for heroes.

Second, some names have a specific story or reference behind them, but pushing it for a deeper meaning probably doesn’t take you very far. I like the name “Jean Valjean” from Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and so my wisdom figure in The Binding of the Blade has a name that sounds similar, Valzaan. (If “Valjean” and “Valzaan” don’t sound similar when you say them, you’re not saying one of them right.:) I like Tolkien, so in some places I included allusions to his work, as a tribute so to speak. Further, I called one particularly nasty breed of monsters “Grendolai” as a tribute to the first of the three monsters of Beowulf, Grendel. These are just a few samples of names with specific stories but no really deep meaning.

Third, some names are meant to have symbolic or deeper meaning. When John White wrote The Tower of Geburah, a Christian fantasy work from a generation ago, he named his land “Anthropos” and the king of that land “Kardia.” Anthropos is the Greek word for “man” and Kardia means “heart.” He was making the spiritual layer of his story clear with his transparent name choices.

For me, in BOTB, there are many examples of this as well. I created my own version of the story of “the Fall” and I named my evil Titans who mirror fallen angels after pagan deities referenced in the Old Testament. So I have names like Malek and Charnosh, which are references to Molech and Chemosh. I named the God of Kirthanin “Allfather” as a reference to Norse Mythology. Some Norse tales refer to Odin as Allfather, but others (some say from the time when northern Europe was being Christianized) use Allfather to refer to a God who is the creator and above all the lesser gods of Asgard. I used that term because I saw it as a word others had used long ago in this world to come to grips with a God who rules all things, a sovereign God, not a petty deity.

There are many other names I could use as examples, but this post is long enough. Hopefully you see that names matter, and that in some ways, names in Fantasy they can be especially challenging. They need to sound right (convey pleasant or unpleasant things), be unusual (we can’t have Fred and Darlene as our hero & heroine) but still “work” for the reader. Further, names also provide opportunities to add layers of meaning and depth.

I think readers intuitively grasp the importance of names, in part because I get a lot of questions about them. At this point though, I’ll finish by encouraging the young writers out there not to dismiss too quickly the importance of names. They do matter!