On August 10, I explored the use of names as an important aspect of worldbuilding in The Wall of Night series. Last week I took the worldbuilding exploration further, with a look at the inception of Thornspell.

Today, I thought I’d look at how sometimes I do deliberately choose names to convey additional understanding around character or identity. Sometimes this meaning comes through sound, sometimes spelling; often it’s both.

In Thornspell, for example, it is no accident that the arch-villain is the Margravine zu Malvolin. The title of Margravine, like the nobiliary particle “zu”, ties into the Middle-European flavour of the world—but it is no accident that “Malvolin” echoes “malevolent” in particular.

Similarly, the name of another character, Flor, provides a double allusion. At one level, the name is a shortening of Florizel and Florian, romantic fairytale names for princes—but the pronunciatian is “flaw”, a signal that there may be more to this character than first meets the eye.

I note, though, that Thornspell is a story for younger readers and so I feel free to have fun playing with names and their allusions in a way I would not do so overtly in an adult series such as The Wall of Night.

Yet even then, spelling may still comprise an allusion. I could, for example, have spelt the name of a young female knight in The Gathering of the Lost as Jana—but I made it “Jarna”, the echo being to “jarn” or “iron” in modern Swedish, derived from Old Norse (recalling that on August 10 I discussed how some of the names in Emer had Old Norse echoes.)

And of course the symbol for iron in the traditional periodic table of elements is the same symbol often used to denote a man. The allusion is not intended to suggest that Jarna is in any way a man, but she is very much a young woman in a man’s world, that of the heavily amored knights of Emer.

But are there deeper meanings still? Again in The Gathering of the Lost, the prologue to the book opens with a riddle around a name, that of the main character, Malian of Night:

“… a riddle for a riddle, an answer for an answer, a gift for a gift. You know my name already for it is also your name—although you might not recognize it as such […] I would be interested to learn who it was that gave it to you … When you find out, you must return and tell me.”

So although when I began writing The Heir of Night, the first book in the WALL series, names were not part of my vision for its magic system, their power has played a part in the telling of the story from its outset. Now that power has woven its way into the plot as well, with the mystery of Malian’s name having yet to be answered.

What that answer may prove to be, however, remains for the fourth and final book, The Chaos Gate, to reveal.

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This post is adapted from one I wrote for Abhinav Jain's "Names" series, a few years back now.