Thursday 17 July 2014

In Loving Memory of a Name

The Hobbit is, I think, the most widely liked of Tolkien's books. This is partly because it's a kid's book, and although fantasy is becoming sort-of trendy these days, it's still easier for an adult to admit they like kid's fantasy books (The Hobbit, the Harry Potter books, His Dark Materials, etc.) than grown-up ones. 

That said, I think Tolkien had a way of hitting on deep profundities in his work - this is why his books have such great appeal decades after his death - and a very simple example of this comes in The Hobbit in its genius for names. 

Think about the places where the action happens in The Hobbit. The Misty Mountains. Mirkwood. The Lonely Mountain. Lake-town. The Long Lake. River Running. Notice anything? The names actually mean something. Tolkien, of course, had other words for these places, the names in his own invented languages. But he refrained from using them. This may have been simply to avoid putting off young readers, but it gives the places a concrete, real feeling: The Lonely Mountain is an incredibly evocative name because the name itself gives you a visualisation - a mountain, all on its own, in the middle of a wilderness. Likewise Mirkwood; it hardly needs a description once you've read the name. It's a dark forest. A murky wood. Lake-town: it's a town on a lake (literally). 

I prefer this approach to fantasy naming. Compare The Lonely Mountain to Hespereth Strait. Lake-town to Sargava. Mirkwood to the Mwangi Jungle. I may be being slightly unfair picking on some deeply unevocative names I stumbled across in the Pathfinder wiki. But you get my drift.

Strangeness is at its most effective when there is something anchoring the person experiencing it, and sometimes the best way of doing this is simply through the use of language. Tolkien seems to have understood this well, if only implicitly: the concreteness and simplicity of the place names in The Hobbit give the reader something to hold on to - you don't have to struggle with imagining the Hespereth Strait and fumbling over the pronunciation of 'Mwangi' in your mind, and can devote your full attention to the story against the images which the words 'The Lonely Mountain' naturally bring up in your mind. 

25 comments:

  1. Agreed. You can continue the flow of reading and not stop and try to figure out how to pronounce some weird word. And because you know who to pronounce it and the words have some imagery to them, it's easier to remember.

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    1. The fantasy apostrophe is the worst example of this ("Tanar'ri").

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    2. I wonder if that practice started as an attempt to sound Arabic?

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  2. Fantasy location names often seem to be nonsense made up to sound impressive and exotic, like Varisia or Magnimar (from Pathfinder). However, in the real world names are often simple constructions like the ones used in The Hobbit... we just usually encounter them as non-native speakers of the language being used.

    For example, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania means either "mountain of greatness" or "mountain of caravans" (quick check on Wikipedia indicates the etymology is unclear).

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    1. Yep, absolutely. I learned that living in Japan, where most names have a reasonably obvious meaning once you know the language.

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  3. "Mirkwood" sounds to me like a somewhat different sort of place than "Mwangi." While I don't think that's the best pseudo-African name I've ever seen, I think a setting that's going to be a whole world needs to have places that are exotic sounding, maybe even a little off-putting. Not ever place needs to sound cool at first encountering them to wind up being cool.

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  4. Finally getting around to reading Donaldson's Thomas Covenant books, and the Tolkein naming influence is pretty heavy-handed. He does the combo of descriptive names (Stonedown) and exotic/fantastical (lillianrill) although the bad guys are a bit over the top - Drool Rockworm?!?
    In my pathetic writing efforts, I typically use a random name generator and try to find something evocative. "This place needs lots of consonants. This guy should have a random apostrophe. Hmmm. Not metal enough. Better add umlauts...."

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    1. Drool Rockworm is only a step away from General Greivous, isn't it?

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  5. My favorite onomastic words are those that are semantic but obscure. The agricultural town of Swage. The Italianate faerie border settlement of Famorgane (from Fata Morgana). Gene Wolfe never makes up terms and words when he can find them in the OED.

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  6. Hmm... I like this idea, but so often I'm taking real-world placenames and hack-translating them into foreign languages in order to conceal their provenance; besides trying to conceal the landforms I'm riffing on from the players, I've always liked the bit of linguistic verisimilitude it lets me add. I suspect it's one of those things that's fun for worldbuilding but not actually useful in play. :(

    It's hard to think of Dwarven settlements using ski resort names in English, when translating them into Old Norse sounds so much more dwarfish.

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    1. I think that's a nice idea. Human languages are better than made-up languages in every respect - because they're real and people use them.

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  7. Greg Stafford is currently undertaking an overhaul of the place names in his version of Arthurian Britain that is quite close to what you're talking about here. Basically, except for names that are just too resonant or bound up in the setting (like Salisbury or Camelot), he's trying to find the oldest iteration of the name, and then translate it into English if possible, which results usually in rather literal place names. Mostly this involves back-translating names supplanted by Saxon or French sources. This results in places like Somerset getting renamed Summerland or the Forest of Dean getting renamed Greatvale, stuff like that.

    He calls it the Pendragon Naming System. It's an interesting exercise, and your post helps illuminate why he's doing it. (Handily, the alternate French, Saxon, or modern names are still listed for those who prefer to go with the more commonly-accepted versions.)

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    1. Do you have a link to info about that? It is relevant to my interests.

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    2. There's not a whole lot out on the topic just now. The Book of the Estate has a small section at the front introducing the concept and explaining the whys and wherefores, and its Appendix A has a list of new names introduced in that book. There's also a thread over on the Pendragon message boards:

      http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=1999.0;nowap

      Obviously, once the Pendragon Atlas is out, that'll be the one-stop source.

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  8. You might like the Atlas of True Names, which translates every place name into English (although some people have criticised its accuracy). I used 'Great Island of the Tattooed' in my fantasy world.

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  9. Anyone ever see any versions of the Atlas of True Names? It seems it would be a great way to get names like Lonely Mountain and Mirkwood.
    http://www.kalimedia.com/Atlas_of_True_Names.html

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  10. You have to be careful, though, because that same idea underlies the terrible names of 4th edition D&D.

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    1. The difference might be in whether the name sounds like it could be real. To me, 'Underdark' sounds like a possible word or place (perhaps German), while 'Feywild' doesn't.

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    2. "Feywild" is just a poor mix of words - "fey" means sort of mysterious and unworldly and vague, whereas "wild" means, you know, wild. Putting the two words together doesn't result in any sort of image: how are you supposed to imagine what a wild yet mysterious and unworldly place is supposed to look like?

      "Underdark" is genius because putting those two words together results in an image so obvious and evocative it needs no other description.

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  11. I would amend your thesis, if I may.

    It's not that Tolkien used simple English words for his English-language readers but that Tolkien followed real world habits of naming.

    For example, San Francisco isn't simply sounds strung together but the Spanish for Saint Francis. Baton Rouge is French for "red stick". No one will have trouble realizing the English translation of the Grand Tetones.

    Similarly, Gondor is Sindarin for "land of stone" and Rohan evolved from the Sindarin for "land of the horse-lords" -- but although neither Gondor or Rohan is in English or any other real world tongue, their linguistic authenticity gives them a verisimilitude that a simple casting together of letters would not.

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    1. I know, but in The Hobbit, which is what I'm specifically talking about in this entry, Tolkien didn't use Sindarin names - he used English ones. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head is Rivendell, which itself even sounds English (like a combination of "River" and "dell").

      The idea that Tolkien's non-English place names have linguistic authenticity because they have actual meanings (albeit in made-up languages) is an interesting one and I'm prepared to accept it at face value. But in this entry I'm focusing on his deliberate use of English place names. For an English audience they have poetic power which fantasy names (even ones which "mean something" like Gondor or Rohan) don't have.

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    2. Honestly, I've always thought that whatever Tolkien may have backfitted the name to in Sindarin, the actual etymology behind Rivendell was "riven" (torn) + "dell" (valley) due to the fact that the gorge it sat in was cut in half by river Bruinen.

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