Naming conventions in fantasy take lots of forms. My goal in the Triempery series as I wrote it was to create a cohesive framework for names that reflected each character’s origin and culture.
I first began writing what became the Triempery books when I was 13 years old. As is often the case with creators, I threw quite a few inspirations into my blender of a mind. Two of those inspirations, however, led to very definite naming clusters: Greek mythology, which I loved and read voraciously, and a TV show called “The Rat Patrol.” Greek mythology’s influence is immediately evident and I will talk about that. The Rat Patrol, though, requires some explaining.
Shows featuring attractive young men often grab the attention of impressionable young girls. I was no exception. I loved the action of the Rat Patrol—jeeps leaping through the air! pounding music! suspenseful encounters!—but in particular I shipped hard on one character: a German captain named Hans Dietrich. Though the enemy, he was handsome, honorable, and nuanced and my love of antiheroes got off to a running start. In my young mind he deserved a better story than he was getting, and a rich backstory filled with surprises. So I created one for him!
A lot of things changed and mutated and grew into new shapes along the way, but that genesis explains quite a lot about names in the series. For one thing, the name Hans. That’s where it started. Hans was the original character, but I later gave almost all of the antihero characteristics of the inspirational character to someone else: Dorilian. Yep. Dorilian checks all the original boxes of honor, nuanced, conflicted, dangerous, antagonistic and handsome. But Hans, the person not quite in the right world, became a story of his own.
In keeping with the originating idea, teenage me gave my Hans a backstory that was European based, then I skewed it into a secondary world. Explaining that World required much more expansion of ideas, gods, Time, and history. But the names—the very first names created for the series—had two origin points.
All the Hans-related story names retain German or European connections. The originating character was German, so my created character’s family and origin was also German. Fun fact: I even went on to study German as my language in college. Here are some of the very first names of characters and places created for the series:
Stauberg
Stauberg-Randolph
Gustan (originally Gustanberg)
Marc Frederick (father now William, originally Wilhelm)
Jonthan (originally Johann—then Jonathan)
Stefan
Emyli
Arne
Erwan
Frendel
Once I got away from that family, though, I took the story in a different direction. Gods. Powers. Humans tied to gods and powers. Mysterious Cities and other fantastic things.
And that’s why the other earliest names in the series are drawn from my love of mythology. As a teen I was most familiar with Greek myths, the mythology that inspired the Staubaun naming that runs through the series.
Permephedon
Ergeiron
Danae
Kyrbasillon
Enreddon
Dorilian
Halasseon
Ionais
Euden
Pandaros
Quirin
Raphelon
Palimia
Lacenedon
All of the above names, and many more, point directly to love of those ancient tales. So too the series thread that the Aryati race that caused the Devastation traveled into their own pasts, where they could operate as “gods.” The names are clues to a connection between their world and ours.
As I grew older and went through life—and higher education—I delved into other mythologies. Norse and Slavic. Celtic. Egyptian. Sumerian. Aztec and Inca. The Mother Goddess and the Dying God. My deep love of history and mythologies continues to this day. Some of these too have found their way into my naming frameworks and astute readers will see the traces.
Khelds (a people who came late into the Second Creation) brought names from their ancestral world that are based on sounds and words from European languages that are not Greek or Mediterranean and also not Germanic. I sought to make them simple and distinct. Nemenor and Ardaenan names skew Scandinavian. Some Mormantaloran names have Sumerian or other origins, but Nammuor and Daimonaeris are distinctly, consistently, Staubaun by being Greekish.
A few names are purely made up (Sordan, Essera, Kragh) or have been adapted. The Rill is a good example of the latter. I initially called it the Rail because, again, I was a very young writer and this was decades ago—the original inspiration came from monorail systems, which at that time were the height of future transportation tech. That was before I learned enough science to imagine something faster using manipulation of space/time. Or envisioned it as an Entity. Early workshop readers of Sordaneon pointed out how confusing the name was—it was—so I changed it to something similar that didn't call to mind railroads or monorails.
Some names defy naming conventions. They arose from a young author’s adoption of them for a character. Aubrey, for example—when I created her, I loved a song by that name. Thank you, Bread. Later, during the years I was rewriting and revising the books, I thought about changing her name to something more pointedly Kheldish, but I never could find a name that felt right. So I left it. Same with Hans. I tried a hundred other names, looking for one that would sound like him but be a fantasy name, yet nothing ever worked. I really wanted to change his name, too, because the possessive for his character is a pain in the ass—is it Hans’ or Hans’s? I just follow the editors. And I did in the end tie his name to the Malyrdeons through the nomen of (-han). Handurin. Endurin. Elhanan. Han, it turns out, means to foresee or be foreseen.
His name is Hans. Hers is Aubrey. Dorilian could never be any other name. And I don’t care if it’s hard to spell, I like the name Permephedon.
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