Holy shit... "Eragon" is "DRAGON!" I just realized that... Sadly, no, I am not kidding. - Ubercream
That's not why CP named him that anyway. It's supposed to be similar to the phrase "era gone", a reference to the end of the era of fallen dragon riders.
It was originally the first, retconned to the second.
I think that was just coincidence. Arwen/Arya, on the other hand...
Strange. I thought the name Arya came from somewhere else.
Why Sapphira's egg appeared to Eragon. Bad/good luck. No, he was really the son of the one it was supposed to be sent to, and Arya was in a hurry. No, a hundred-ish Eldunari bent the magic to drop the egg off near Eragon!
I'm looking back at the series, and I deeply suspect that Christopher Paolini planned for the huge amount of WMG that Inheritance Cycle has generated. And he definitely left clues. He left so many for the Vault of Souls that people started assuming that the obvious answer was a feint. But Galbatorix's search for the True Name, on the other hand...
When a dragon dies, their rider lives on, but when a rider dies, so does their dragon. That is... honestly, extremely stupid. Dragon Riders were created to cement an alliance/treaty between elves and dragons, right? So including that in the spell that creates them is insanely incompetent, at best. But, remember, the spell was meant to end a war that - if I remember correctly( which I might not) - when on for generations. Obviously, the magician who put together the spell might not have been entirely down with the idea. Especially since they probably regarded dragons as mere animals.
A dragon doesn't necessarily die when their Rider dies.
The idea framed like that was a thing the movie added to make it more dramatic and raise the stakes. Nowhere is rider's life required to last in the books. In fact, we have two examples of a dragon outliving the rider; although Glaedr dies about two minutes because his rider was just killed and the psychic shock of the loss left him open for the dragon he was locked in midair combat with to tear his throat out; he still survived the death of his Rider. The other example: Shruiken. Yep, the black dragon the villain stole by murdering the Rider outlived his Rider's death.
