Something that’s almost never covered in fantasy mediums is common names.
Like we all know fantasy names are unusual, but any name to a foreign culture is considered unusual English names to Indian people are very unusual for example. But naturally, given that it’s an entire culture, there will be some common names, it’d be refreshing to at one point here this exchange.
“So I was talking to Vicnae and-”
“Wait which Vicnae? You can’t just say Vicnae. There are ten Vicnae’s in my village alone.”
This has 100 notes yesterday and 300 this morning what the fuck happened.
People understand the truly important things.
DSA (a German fantasy P&P RPG) actually has the name Alrik, which is hugely popular in the universe. Everyone is Alrik.
This is also a great excuse to use “X the Y” or “X of Y” type names without being pretentious. Calling someone “Thognor The Stout” goes from pomposity to practicality if he lives down the road from Thognor The Small.
This! Some names are more common than others, and there’s always been a need to differentiate one Thognor from the other Thognor(s). Without inherited surnames, this means bynames, and let me tell you, bynames are much more interesting than the average fantasy novel would lead you to believe.
Disclaimer first: my knowledge of this doesn’t extend much outside medieval England, because it all came from research for an original fic I wrote a few years ago (Robin Hood with lesbians, as my wife likes to call it). I wouldn’t be surprised if this all holds true in other countries, but I can’t swear to it.
Anyway…
We’re all familiar with occupational bynames (Cooper or Smith) and patronymics (Johnson or Wilson), because medieval fantasy makes extensive use of these, but sometimes bynames came from other sources. You might be identified by your mother rather than your father, though, alas, few metronymics survived the transition to inherited surnames. (And ironically, Chrome’s spell-check asks if I meant “patronymic” when I type “metronymic,” but that’s a rant for another time.) A byname could also come from your siblings or your spouse, if there was something especially notable about them.
But enough about that! I think we’re all familiar with the idea of bynames based on other people’s names. Where it starts to get interesting (at least to me) is once we get into things like locative bynames. These are bynames based on where you’re from, but that’s not quite as straightforward as it sounds. If everyone lives in the same town, then saying “John of Bedford” is kind of meaningless. But “John, the one who lives by the woods” (or Atwood) makes perfect sense. So if you had a locative byname and you moved, then your byname almost certainly changed, too. You might have been John Atwood when you lived in Bedford, but when you moved to York, you became John of Bedford (or, more likely, just John Bedford).
And here’s another thing you rarely see in medieval fantasy: “of” wasn’t actually all that common. “In” or “over” or “by” or “at” were vastly more common. So
John in the field, or John over the hill, or John by the brook, or John at the wood. If you’re going to give someone a locative byname, think carefully about what would make sense given their history and where they are now.
So now we get to my favorite part: nicknames, like “the Stout” that identifies poor Thognor. Who might not have been all that stout, since there’s a decent chance a nickname was either outright uncomplimentary or intended ironically. Little John in the stories of Robin Hood isn’t little at all, and that kind of nickname isn’t unique to the character.
Of course, some nicknames were just straight-up descriptions (Sherlock is from shirloc, or “bright lock”), but few of these were names you’d give yourself. They were just like nicknames today, really, and you rarely get to pick your own nickname. Thognor the Stout or Little John wasn’t the worst they might do to you, either. You could end up as Thognor Little-worth or John Always-Drunk.
You know how, in small towns, everyone always remembers the stupid shit you did as a kid? Yeah. If we were still using bynames instead of inherited surnames, you could spend the rest of your life as John Ran-over-his-mother’s-new-boss’s-mailbox-her-second-day-on-the-job. Fun, right?
Oh, and the nicknames could be obscene, too. How about Robert Clevecunt or Bele Wydecunthe? Yes, those are actual names of actual people from 14th century England, though it’s important to note that the word cunt wasn’t considered shocking until several centuries later.
All of which is my long-winded and rambling way of saying…when it comes time to name the characters in your twenty-book epic fantasy saga? Be creative! Don’t just go for the standard “John of Medieval Town,” especially if John still lives in Ye* Olde Medievale Towne.
* ”Ye” is its own rant, but we’ll leave that one for another day, too…