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Friday 22 March 2013

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

"The only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendency to devise names too closely resembling actual names of ancient history -- names which, for us, have a very different set of associations. In many cases he does this designedly- on the theory that familiar names descend from the fabulous realms he describes -- but such a design is invalidated by the fact that we clearly know the etymology of many of the historic terms, hence cannot accept the pedigree he suggests. E. Hoffman Price and I have both argued with Two-Gun on this point, but we make no headway whatsoever. The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry."
That's Lovecraft himself, sui generis creator of an entire mythology, talking in a 1935 letter to my old penpal Donald Wollheim about the work of Robert E Howard (specifically, his invented history of "The Hyborian Age").

I have to agree with HPL. Fantasy novels full of names culled from the author's vague memory of bits of history and myth are the main reason I don't read much fantasy. We can allow Howard to get away with it, as HPL did, because, firstly, he was an exceptional writer and, secondly, he did at least understand the derivation of the names he was using. He would put Aesir in a northern clime, have swarthy barbarian mercenaries waiting for their pay outside the walls of Carthage, and so on. It helped to paint a picture. It was a conscious choice by the writer, it wasn't laziness or ignorance.

But most fantasy writers are not blessed with Bob Howard's vivid imagination or natural storyteller's instincts, and cities called Vishnu in a medieval-ish Western-y setting just come across as witless. Likewise confusing the function and even gender of historical Greek or Roman gods - just make up your own, for Zeus's sake.

Lovecraft was a man who stuck to his guns even more than Two-Gun. Whatever the cost (and it seems to have been huge, in terms of health, finances and happiness) he steered a straight course by the principles of his craft. In his lifetime he enjoyed nothing like Howard's popularity among the readers of Weird Tales, despite the proselytizing efforts of a small and devoted band of followers.

But look, here we are seventy-five years later and the Cthulhu Mythos is one of the great modern IPs. I'm not sure Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola would have careers without it. (That's a joke, by the way, but only just.) The reason it has such power is because it is a pure and complete sub-creation, as Tolkien called it. When Lovecraft needed a name for an invented god, he didn't do the easy thing and reach for Bulfinch's.

The lesson, I guess, is that if you want to create great fantasy (and fantasy, when it is done well, can be great indeed) then take the path less travelled. Dig down into your own imagination. Invent places we've never seen outside of dreams and give them names that resonate on a deeper level than just "Kishapur" or "Ragnarberg". You may die a pauper's death, but your existence will have brought to the world something of true and incomparable value: originality.

13 comments:

  1. Or hire a linguist as, for example, the Language Creation Society proposes...

    Olivier

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  2. It certainly helped Tekumel that Professor Barker was a linguist as well as an anthropologist. The number of people I've seen who half rip off his ideas, with "far future" civilizations populated by Vikings and samurai - yawn.

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  3. I think that a convincing nomenclature requires the author either to have some intuitive gift for crafting names that sound as though they derive from an unknown alien or fantasy language, or to have the linguistic skill to construct at least the phonology of that language. Otherwise the invented names can sound like mere clusters of random syllables plucked from the air, perhaps with a few diacriticals and apostrophes tossed in to create an illusion of the exotic (“Thither I ride on my mighty steed Dô’bbin…”). People are generally quick to start recognising the phonemic inventory of a language that they don’t know, e.g. correctly identifying a phrase as being in German (say) even without having any idea what it means. Thus, the Elvish names in Tolkien’s Middle-earth are convincing because they are underpinned by invented languages that are phonologically and morphologically consistent. The same might well be true for Tekumel, about which I know rather less.

    In fact, Tolkien might sit in a slightly odd category, because the names of people and places in Rohan are deliberately derived from Old English, as translations of the unknown Rohirric forms; I think this is still valid in a fantasy setting because it is done skilfully and consistently and creates an enhanced sense of historical and cultural verisimilitude, though perhaps only for English readers.

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  4. And let's add that Tolkien was a professor of Old Anglo-Saxon, not only did he know the ancient Germanic languages but their literature too. Thus, he could take models from those ancient sagas. For example, according to Ch. Tolkien, "Gandalf" comes from the Icelandic Voluspà (but was the name of a Dwarf...)
    All of this reminds me that I sold, six months ago, a Germanic based conlang to a young US girl who plans to write a fantasy novel...

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    1. That issue of Gandalf's and the dwarfs’ names touches on a good point, pertinent to the subject of Dave’s post. Tolkien himself wrote of The Hobbit, around the time when it was published: “I don’t much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology … with its consistent nomenclature … and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Völuspá … (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes.” That is Tolkien’s frustration, as a linguist, at “coming across as witless” in the wholesale copying of a list of names from the Poetic Edda. He was, however, eventually able to work out a solution that comes across as exactly the opposite of witless – the “translation” conceit, framing The Hobbit, LotR, and The Silmarillion as translations of ancient manuscripts, by which the Common Tongue of north-western Middle-earth in which the stories are supposed to have been written is represented by modern English, and the other Mannish tongues are represented by historical Germanic languages: that of the Rohirrim by Old English and that of the Dwarves (as an “outer” language learned from Men of the north) by Old Norse. So, although I fundamentally agree with what Dave has written, I think you can still draw names (and languages) from real-world myth and history and inject them into a convincing and original fantasy setting *if* you are clever and subtle enough about it.

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  5. The translation argument is a reasonable get-out - or so I tell myself when watching Game of Thrones. And Tolkien was a smart old bird who wouldn't have any truck with careless writing. But the whole linguistics thing is just a symptom of a deeper problem, namely the laziness, unoriginality and incoherent jumbling of cultures that most fantasy writers think is good enough. I applaud original fantasy - Barker, Lovecraft, Vance, Wolfe. See, I don't even have to take my socks off to count 'em :-)

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    1. I agree that originality is often the keystone: the arc of a story may be constructed to stand without it, but reader satisfaction and suspension of disbelief is that much harder to obtain. Although I can become quite shrill and frantic in defending Tolkien’s originality, I will admit that he was looking back in the sense of patterning his mythology with a romanticism that modernism by then had thoroughly discarded; and hence, perhaps, the sniffy reaction of many literary critics. Hence perhaps also his popularity, like Howard’s, whereas Lovecraft could be seen as more “uncomfortable”, for constructing an alien cosmology, terrifying in its indifference to humanity, that served to rupture the continuum of conventional religious and mythological motifs in literature, with a vision that was (to my knowledge) unprecedented, except maybe for Lord Dunsany’s Pegāna stories.

      Incidentally, last year I bought the one-volume edition of H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Complete Fiction", published by Barnes & Noble; a very handsome book, which reminds me of why I still buy books as physical things.

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    2. Even in the subgenre of invented mythologies, HPL stands alone because he didn't start out, as Dunsany did, by creating a whole bunch of humanistic gods and their exploits. He just showed how something unimaginable and alien could, without caring, become the focus of belief. In doing so, he found a deeper truth: if God really exists I bet He's more like Cthulhu than Zeus.

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  6. A confession: I google the name of every character I invent, just to check it doesn't have any connotations I haven't thought of.

    I'll say that any fantasy novel that incorporates characters with 'normal' names immediately wins points with me. Though you've got some fairly bizarrely-named characters in Roger Zelazny's Amber novels, you've also got 'Eric', 'Fiona', 'Dierdre', 'Julian', 'Benedict' (and, okay, 'Oberon', 'Merlin', 'Dworkin'...).

    Stories that try to use characters' names to too-overtly display personality traits are a bit of a turn-off. Names like 'Skywalker', say. Or 'Solo'. Or 'Kenobi'.

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    1. ...Oh, except for 'Beta-Ray Bill' from the Thor comic books. His name is incredibly evocative of what type of character he is. But I think it's great anyway.

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    2. I think we've been here before:
      http://fabledlands.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/worlds-too-alien-to-care.html

      Normally I have a big problem with modern-day names in fantasy - and I'd rather have it explained away as "translation" than some lame pretext like the guy's name not being Edward but Eddard. Bollocks to that.

      Like you, I'll make an exception for Beta Ray Bill because (a) he's great and (b) it's Walt Simonson ferchrissakes. But that's only a pass where comics are concerned. If they put BRB in the next Thor movie I'm walking out.

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  7. Of course, Zelazny's books start out, at least, on contemporary Earth. And when Merlin travels back to Earth, he has the decency to change his name to 'Merle'.

    Anyway.

    Ah, I still like Tim the Enchanter, from Monty Python.

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    1. And then there's Sam in Lord of Light - full name Mahasamatman.

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