truepenny | Apr. 6th, 2005

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Finished with Chapter 8 just before bed last night. Names this time. Normally, I don't have any trouble with names--at least, not in the sense of not being able to come up with them. As

matociquala can attest, I do have prima donna tendencies in the other direction and will refuse to be mollified if the names are incorrect. But Chapter 8 seems to have been a rough patch, onomatologically speaking.

Le Guin's system of magic has always made sense to me, that if you know something's true name, you have power over it. I do a lot of world-building with the names I pick, and one thing guaranteed to throw me out of any book is evidence that the author has a tin ear for names and their meanings. Too many fantasy authors seem to make up names by picking Scrabble tiles out of a hat--and, what's worse, to combine that with an unsystematic scavenging from naming conventions in various real-world cultures (mostly western European).

The names in Mélusine are a mélange of (depending on culture) English, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, German, and Russian, and the people of the city of Mélusine itself have a tendency to appropriate common nouns as parts of names (a madwoman in the first book is named Jeanne-Chatte; a theater impresario in the third is named Jean-Soleil). But there is method to my madness, and I can actually explain what a given character's name says about his or her ethnic and cultural heritage. It matters that of two wizards from the same country, one is named Thaddeus de Lalage, and the other is named Gideon Thraxios.

I inclue with names. Hell, I obsess about names. If I get the name right, the rest of the character tends to follow. If I get the name wrong, we ain't going nowhere and ain't nobody happy.