Naming Characters in a Fantasy Setting

I'm working on a fantasy series, and I'm going crazy trying to figure out how to name all of the characters. The setting is your typical quasi-medieval, quasi-European country, with humans, elves, dwarves, and goblins. I know I want the names of all the elf characters to sound different from those of the dwarf characters and so on. But the only way I can think to do that is to assign each race a real world counterpart (e.g., all the dwarves have Scottish names and all the elves have Welsh names). Considering that the setting has no connection to the real world, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Am I over thinking this? What have other people done?

I always start here and see what I can come up with. It helps that the names are already organized according to place of origin and that some places have sections devoted to names absorbed from other cultures.

Personally I take real world names and play around with them and end up coming up with names that follow the same construction as the real ones while being made up. I wouldn't say you're over-thinking it unless worrying about the names is paralyzing you to the point that you aren't doing any actual writing. Names are important and a culture that has names that sound radically different from one another is poor world building - unless there's a reason for it like multiple cultures invading a single land or people adopting names from the cultures they've visited or something.

I know it's a lot of work and I have more patience for it than most because of my interest in linguistics, but it's not particularly difficult to make a couple of naming languages.

Well, you could pick a couple of letters and/or common traits for names. That's what I usually do.

For example, maybe elvish names like the letters T, L, M and N, while dwarvish ones prefer F, G, H, and P. One culture's names always end in a vowel, another rarely has names with more than three syllables.

I'm no linguist, so that's the sort of thing I usually do.

That makes me think — one can invent several sets of endings and syllables and mix them variously. As an example, Asterix played it for laughs: all Gaulish names end in -ix, and so on.

That's similar to what I did with one of the races in my world. Worked for me.

The other thing to keep in mind is that names can also be based on common words from that race's native tongue. What I usually do is decide how names are given in that society, first. It helps to have some sort of language or accent in mind for a certain group, but you don't necessarily need that to make it work. Are names chosen by parents? Does a respected member of society give them? What about the child, himself? D&D elves, for example, have a "child name," given at birth and used as a sign of affection, and an "adult name," which they choose upon reaching adulthood. After that, rely on backstory. Is there a reason that character would have that name? It may seem like a lot of tedious work but, later on, you'll thank yourself for putting thought into it. Also remember that names in fantasy tend to work best when they have the right mix of "foreign-sounding" and "easy-to-pronounce."

edited 31st May '12 6:46:53 AM by ZigtarXamos

Also decide whether you're translating names. A lot of fantasy settings give characters names like 'Grom Stonedigger' or 'Climbs-Many-Trees', where the name itself would normally be pronounced in the native tongue.

Presumably that's more in cultures where names still retain their meanings relative to the common tongue as above, rather than having been passed around until they're just sounds. Nobody's going to translate 'John Smith' as 'Graced-by-Yahweh Metalstriker', even if that's the etymological root.

Although saying it like that does make it a lot more awesome. I think I might start calling my friends by their name roots, at least until they start hitting me.

edited 31st May '12 7:35:59 AM by Kesteven