Fantasy Names

[robinturner]

I've posted before about things I think fantasy writers really ought not to do, but one I missed was mangling common names to make them seem more exotic, such as George R.R. Martin's "Ser" for "Sir" (cassielsander picked up on that one). I've just started Robert Jordan's The Eye of the World and nearly put it down twice. The first reason was Shai'tan, who as you probably guessed is some kind of Big Bad Evil. And how, gentle reader, did we guess this? Because it sounds remarkably like some other name … hmmm, let's see, could it possibly be Satan? And, by an amazing etymological coincidence, the Arabic for Satan is Shaitan. An author so lazy that all he can do to is add a gratuitous apostrophe does not endear himself to me. But I waded through the mythological preface to find myself in a reassuringly familiar world of medieval country bumpkins, trundling their apple brandy to sell to the innkeeper in time for the festival. But wait, the festival is called Bel Tine. And it's a Spring festival, complete with Maypole, so could it possibly have anything to do with that other festival called, um, what was it … Beltane?

Still, I've had enough of tech support, getting a new English course off the ground, and trying to fix my broken MP3 player to make me seriously need a fantasy epic, so I'm not taking the book back to the library just yet. But, Mr. Jordan, three strikes and you're out.

Comments

[solri.livejournal.com]

OK, I've just done a little searching and found that Bel Tine is an Irish variant on Beltane. I'm not sure if that makes the sin more or less egregious.

[arya.livejournal.com]

Never fear... he'll get his third strike before you waste too much time on it.

For me, it was the obnoxiously pervasive poor grammar. You'd think they'd hire decent editors for a guy that popular...

[solri.livejournal.com]

he'll get his third strike

He just did: the yokels in the inn are smoking "tabac". So in addition to being Irish with a Chinese/Arabic religion, they have a fondness for the French language.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

"reassuringly familiar" is a kind way of putting it. I gave up on the Wheel of Time stuff because it felt too familiar and retreaded; by the third or fourth book I started the next book and seriously had my doubts about whether I had accidentally restarted somewhere.

I found the series slow and overly telegraphed ; I hadn't considered whether the names were part of it but I think that's there too -- when you're given a character whose name tells you he's a bad guy, do you need to read 800 pages for any plot development? (George Lucas, you're on the hook for this too.)

speaking of a sense of repetition

[trochee.livejournal.com]

I too repeat myself. So maybe Robert Jordan's off the hook in a sort of meta way.

[solri.livejournal.com]

David Brin commented (in "We Hobbits are a Merry Folk" (http://www.kithrup.com/brin/tolkienarticle1.html)) that Dark Lords in fantasy novels must be really stupid to always appear so scary and ugly. If you were seriously involved in taking over the world for your evil purposes, and had untold magical powers to boot, surely you'd make yourself look attractive before starting the job. It's the same with names: if I wanted to subject the world to my evil will, I'd give myself a name like Goldwing Starsinger.

On the other hand, maybe the Dark Lords are just in it for all that evil chic, and actually doing evil is just something that goes along with the cool black clothes and the red eyes.

[eve-prime.livejournal.com]

The Eye of the World is far and away the best of the series (as far as I know, that is; I decided not to bother with the last two or three until I was confident the series would actually be completed). His laziness knows no bounds. His favorite way of creating a new culture seems to be to grab two familiar real-world cultures and mash them together unappealingly. I didn't mind when Feist threw together the Japanese and Aztec imperial cultures, because they fit surprisingly well together, and because he had something of a rationale for doing so, but Jordan's got one culture that's just bits of "Irishness" and "Chineseness" scrambled up willy nilly.

My real problem with Jordan is that his writing is so flat and monotonic. It's as if the inner life of every point-of-view character has exactly the same degree of depth and tempo. Drives me batty. That and all the skirt-smoothing the heroines do.

[solri.livejournal.com]

I think the genre encourages laziness. As Sarah Douglas points out (http://www.saradouglass.com/epic.html), it's pretty daunting to have to create and populate a whole world and then have to write about it in several books of at least 200 pages, so it's not surprising that authors plunder history and each other, changing as little as possible. If it hasn't already been done, I'm sure that soon someone will write an online application that will create a random fantasy world for you, complete with races, languages, history and, of course, a map.

[kristian.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that soon someone will write an online application that will create a random fantasy world for you, complete with races, languages, history and, of course, a map.

Dwarf Fortress. Also; Religions, Wars, Migrations, Kidnapping, Marriage, etc

[solri.livejournal.com]

Interesting—I'll check it out the next time I'm in Windows.

[arya.livejournal.com]

Also, you must *really* hate Guy Gavriel Kay.

[solri.livejournal.com]

Not heard of him, which is probably just as well. It's impossible to keep track of all these fantasy authors these days (apparently it is now the most popular genre of fiction). When I was a kid there was much less around: Tolkien, children's books and a bunch of Conan-style sword and sorcery novels.