Naming characters is hard

[00:00:00]In December of 1937, after the massive success of The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien sat down and began writing The Lord of the Rings.

[00:00:07]This wasn't the tale of a fun-loving hobbit anymore. This was a serious story for serious adults with a serious main character by the name of Bingo. I am not kidding you. Frodo's name was almost Bingo in the original version of The Lord of the Rings. Yes, I know what you're thinking.

[00:00:24]That means this scene in the movie where Aragorn is getting ready to go fight and he turns around to the rest of the group, he would have said, "For Bingo."

[00:00:32]For Bingo? Are you kidding me?

[00:00:35]Luckily, Tolkien scratched this on account of it being too silly of a name for the serious tone of The Lord of the Rings. Yet, Bingo still resides in your copy of The Lord of the Rings in the genealogies of Bilbo. It's actually one of his distant uncles.

[00:00:49]But man, did we dodge a bullet with that one. And through all of this, it got me thinking about character names in books, specifically in the four books that I am reading at the moment, and why J.R.R.

[00:01:00]Tolkien just seems to nail his names more than the rest. The four that I am currently reading are Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings, Frank Herbert's Dune, George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones, and then The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.

[00:01:14]And for The Hobbit, it's actually starkly different from The Lord of the Rings, too. So, I'm going to talk about The Lord of the Rings a bit more here because Tolkien is very unspecific in almost every name that he gives except for the dwarves' names, and the names of the characters are just kind of ancient versions of things like Beorn. But strangely, the word Erebor is never mentioned in the books. The word that it's always the word the Lonely Mountain. The same thing is true of the Shire. It's never mentioned. It's Hobbiton. And then Thranduil goes by the Elven King. He doesn't ever go by name.

[00:01:42]So, Tolkien, he didn't have less care with The Hobbit, but it's much more a story that's a fairy tale focused on the telling to children. So, he didn't go as deep as he did with The Lord of the Rings, and perhaps arguably didn't even have some of the concepts and names thought up quite yet.

[00:01:55]But I was thinking about this as I first started reading the work of Brandon Sanderson. On the first page of the prologue, there is a paragraph of The Way of Kings that says, "As he walked, Seth was forced to step around Dalinar Kholin, the king's own brother, who slumped drunken at the table."

[00:02:10]The aging but powerfully built man kept waving away those who tried to encourage him to bed. Where was Jasnah, the king's daughter? Elhokar, the king's son and heir?

[00:02:22]And in the margins of my book, I wrote, "Naming is hard."

[00:02:25]It is. I find that Brandon Sanderson's names are almost like he just kind of found them in his alphabet cereal in the morning.

[00:02:31]And while those names make sense to me now, there are more and more paragraphs that pop up in Sanderson's work with minor character lists that I just think this guy is just trying with names, but he's not quite there.

[00:02:43]Maybe this is because I don't know the fantasy genre all that well because I'm kind of just starting out, and I just don't understand the names yet, but there are just same some names that are lacking for me. Like, I want some names to have at least accent marks.

[00:02:56]Frank Herbert is a little bit better, but his names he The way he names certain characters like Duncan Idaho. In a galaxy far away, there are people called the Lisanal Gaib and the Kwisatz Haderach, and then you have next to the Reverend Mother, Duncan Idaho.

[00:03:11]Something about that is almost a little too jarring. It's like if Bingo was in The Lord of the Rings. It just doesn't fit. And then you have George R.R.

[00:03:18]Martin, who's pretty dang good, but trips himself all the time because he just jokes, and he puts like Grover and Kermit and Elmo. And there there's a character, I'm not kidding, called Dickon Manwoody. Dickon Manwoody. That's almost as bad as Charles Dickens naming a character Mr. Bates, and then also calling him master in certain settings.

[00:03:38]I'll let you add two and two together on that one.

[00:03:40]But, it's been plaguing me all day about what exactly it is that J.R.R. Tolkien why he's so good at naming characters.

[00:03:47]And then it hit me. Oh, he's a linguist.

[00:03:50]Essay over. That's really all we need to know about him to understand why he's so good at creating believable names for his characters. So, I'll see you guys in the next one. I'm just kidding. You're not getting away that easily. Well, honestly, this is the real reason, but I wanted to break down why him being a linguist and understanding languages helps his characters have more believable names that as readers we aren't just a little off-put by or we struggle with. Because Aragorn, son of Arathorn, just rolls off the tongue.

[00:04:17]Mithrandir, also called Gandalf the Great, just tastes so lovely in the mouth. Heck, even the names that I struggled to pronounce for the kings of Númenor are just still so beautiful and fit into the story perfectly. I have never had a Duncan Idaho moment with Tolkien. And Tolkien has plenty of Duncan Idaho characters, too.

[00:04:37]I mean, Tolkien named a tree who has a beard Treebeard. He named a woman spider Shelob, lob being the archaic form of spider. He named Mordor something close to murder. He named a wood that has been poisoned and merked with poison Mirkwood. And then a mountain that is a centerpiece of all the doom of Middle-earth Mount Doom.

[00:04:56]Oh, and Teleporno, the Quenya name of Galadriel's husband. Not kidding, Teleporno.

[00:05:02]But [laughter] heck, my thesis still stands. Teleporno somehow just still works in the narrative of Tolkien. And I never once am going, "Hey, that name just doesn't quite fit." On the contrary, really Teleporno is exactly the name that Celeborn should have been given in the Quenya language.

[00:05:17]How dare that I doubt that? And I want to attribute Tolkien's ability with naming to coming down with essentially just one thing, at least for how I see it.

[00:05:25]Mainly because Tolkien was a good linguist. Tolkien's names feel more believably because he is the only one of these four writers who gave his world a real history and a language instead of the flavor of one. That sounds really boring, so let me break it down to you maybe even more boring linguistical terms. Sanderson, Herbert, Martin, and all of these guys, they built their work as they build it. They write stories that distinction matters more than it sounds. Every other kind of invented name in Sanderson's, Herbert's, and Martin's work, most of the fantasy is actually built in a system called synchronically linguistical systems, but Tolkien built one called diachronically. If you're still watching the video at this point, bless your heart. Let me give you a quick analysis of what this means. And I learned this from literary criticism a few years ago and then forgot all about it until I was researching the for this video and I go, "Oh, I kind of remember that." But I had to give myself a refresher on Wikipedia, of course.

[00:06:17]>> [laughter] >> Wikipedia says, "Diachrony and synchrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistical analysis. A diachronic, from dia through across and chronos meaning time, approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history. In contrast, a synchronic approach, from ancient soon, meaning together and chronos meaning time, consider a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account."

[00:06:45]Did you get why this is important?

[00:06:47]Tolkien was a linguist, yes, but he still could have created a synchronically built language and a synchronically built world. But that wasn't his style. This is how some people create worlds who are watching this video. They create it just like Tolkien in a diachronic way. Some people in this community are linguists and they essentially are making up languages and they form their entire cultures around the languages and then they create the worlds around these cultures and these are prone to change just like languages.

[00:07:13]And so the cultures and the worlds change, too.

[00:07:16]Tolkien invented languages. He ran sound changes and he made rules for them over these thousands of years and these are thousands of imagined years, really, then split them into these other two daughter languages, just like Latin splits into French and Spanish and Italian.

[00:07:30]My sixth grade Latin teacher would be thrilled that I remember that. Very proud of me. But Quenya and Sindarin are cousin languages. They're not just two flavors of elf sounding. It's not like Australian and English. That's why a name like Celeborn has like an etymological ancestor in Teleporno, which means silver. And it has this because this is the way the actual words work in a real language. You have ancestors. I love Sanderson, Herbert, and and Martin, but they are not doing this. They're designing surface texture.

[00:07:57]Tolkien is doing these real historical linguistics and then reporting the results in fiction. So, you might like the worlds of some of these authors more. You might like what Sanderson can create. You might like, you know, what Martin can make in his worlds, but you cannot deny that Tolkien understands language a whole heck of a lot more than they do.

[00:08:14]And it almost makes his world more believable because of it. Just this alone, too, is why, you know, his names come stacked in layers, which is the second piece of this answer. Real places and people accumulate names across, you know, time. Istanbul was once Constantinople, which was once Byzantium.

[00:08:30]And Tolkien's world does the same thing for the same reason. Minas Morgul was once Minas Ithil. Gandalf has an Elvish name from before time, which is Olórin.

[00:08:39]And then he has a name that the elves of Middle-earth gave him, Mithrandir. Then he has a dwarvish name, which is Tharkûn. And aliases he picked up along the way, which like was Stormcrow and Greyhame.

[00:08:49]Kind of like where I'm John and Johnny and Jonathan and the coolest guy who ever made YouTube videos.

[00:08:54]Okay, okay, okay. That one's still up for debate and I haven't gotten that one yet. But Tolkien is doing this from a He's not really doing this from like a decoration perspective like a lot of writers might. This is just what happens when a person lives a life, especially a person who's lived thousands of years.

[00:09:06]Their name would never just be one thing. And so Tolkien builds that out for everything that he writes. But another component onto this is that he just built languages. Go into the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and read appendix E. It's like 20 to 30 pages on pronunciation and spelling.

[00:09:21]Nerd alert. But this is why we love Tolkien. He is the nerd. He dedicated his whole life to this, and I wish more authors would take their work as seriously as J. R. R. Tolkien did. He built a translation concept, and he built rules for the language, and he just stuck to it.

[00:09:35]The whole book itself is a translation from the Westron. And heck, even the names Bilbo and Frodo aren't their actual names. In the translated text, Tolkien mentions the names are actually Bilba and Maura.

[00:09:48]Maura almost sounds better than Frodo if I'm being completely honest. Why didn't he stick with that one?

[00:09:53]And then, on top of all this, Dwight Schrute would be really proud of me because they wouldn't call it Mock Duck and they don't call it Mock Duck. They call it Murder because >> R is among the most menacing of sounds.

[00:10:04]>> It's not Mock Duck. It's Mordor.

[00:10:06]The place just kind of sounds like the name linguistically does. It's just delicious. Brutal places are called brutal things. Mor- Mordor, Isengard, or Rhudaur.

[00:10:16]Brutal people are called brutal things.

[00:10:18]Sauron, Saruman, which kind of sounds like something Voldemort would say in Parseltongue. And even names like Shagrat and Gorbag, who I affectionately refer to Shagrat as Shagrat.

[00:10:28]But these are Orcs and I didn't even need to tell you that these are Orcs for you to have guessed that these are Orcs.

[00:10:33]But you also have Lothlórien and Rivendell and Hobbiton. These peaceful places that kind of just flow off the tongue. And I don't think he ever called Hobbiton something like Newark. He would never do that. Slight knock on the city in New Jersey and I'm also from New Jersey, so I'm actually allowed to knock that city. But that's a harsh name for something that does doesn't really feel harsh. Like Hobbiton just kind of flows off the tongue. The Shire just flows off the tongue. This is kind of like the Kiki and Bouba thing that people bring up all the time and you've heard it, so let's just move on from this.

[00:11:00]Tolkien does not make the names just sound good and pleasing, which on eye test just works. Like if I never read any part of the genealogies and appendices and read one chapter of The Lord of the Rings, names would still fit. Éowyn and Théoden and Éomer and Théodred all sound like they're from Rohan. Aragorn, Boromir, Faramir, and Denethor all sound like they're from Gondor. Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Bilbo obviously are from the Shire. The names just fit the sound.

[00:11:30]The other authors, Sanderson, Martin, Herbert, sometimes Herbert, still the jury is out on Duncan Idaho, but these authors all still do this. Tolkien just takes it a step further and creates a whole diachronic history for his languages.

[00:11:43]So, the moral of the story, if you want to be good at naming characters, just become an Oxford professor who knows linguistics like the back of their hand.

[00:11:51]Well, you don't really need to go to Oxford for that, but you do need to have a good understanding of linguistics.

[00:11:56]That's how Tolkien creates believable character names for his characters. Not only names that just fit the story, because any schmuck can do that. His names feel like they are embedded in stone, like there is no other possibility that this character can be named anything else.

[00:12:11]Because remember, >> fresh bingo.

[00:12:16]>> That's all I got for you. Make sure you subscribe if you made it this far in the video. You can also like the video, too.

[00:12:20]If you want, you can become a member for some members-only content and early access to videos. I actually made a prior video of this video, and I hated the way that I scripted it out and wrote it out, and I scrapped it, but I'm making that for members-only. So, if you want to become a member and, you know, watch my process of how I thought through this at first, and then how I thought of it later, it works, because my writing kind of forms like that, where I had a idea about these four authors, and I was trying to ask all sorts of questions, and my thesis is really bland, and it didn't make any sense, and I made a whole video, and I wrote five pages on that, and it didn't work, and then I go, oh, really the question I'm asking is, why was Tolkien better at naming characters than the other four, or the other three? So, that was a long explanation, but you can go become a member if you want to go see that video.

[00:12:58]Also, if you want, you can support the channel by getting some merch. I just made some more merch, so you can go check out the store in the link in the description below. And as always, remember to look to Arnumenor that was, and beyond to Elvenhome that is, and to that which is beyond Elvenhome, and will ever be. I'll see you in the next one.