Fantasy names cartel

I used to be a real sucker for meaning-names. Nowadays I tend to stick with what name pops in my head when I create a character.

I love coming up with names! It's one of my fave parts of worldbuilding. My goal with people and place names is to evoke a certain reaction. I usually pirate from one or two Earth cultures, either in actual words that I deliberately misspell, or in sound and style, blending them so they give the feel I want, without being derivative anymore.

I try to do that by making the words sound like something that's vaguely familiar. This can be done with the sounds of the word evoking a culture, as I mentioned, but sometimes I try for the sound being reminiscent of another English word. Kreen would make me think of careening, or the color green.

My NaNo project for this year was strongly based on ancient Persian names and culture both, though it's set in a secondary world. It was a blast to name stuff in that story. I had websites of ancient Persian names, old maps, all sorts of good stuff.

I like to get into meanings sometimes, but sometimes forcing a word's meaning into a fantasy story kind of defeats the purpose, so it doesn't always work for me. It did work for my yezad, in my NaNo project. Yazd is the Persian word for angel. I messed with it and created "yezad", which are my elemental spirits. Their power can be harnessed in order to cast magic. It's a stretch both in the meaning and in the spelling, so it's not a ready connection many people would make, but I like it.

I think we all, with or without intellectualising, try to make sure names fit in the world we create - you know, the sound has to be right (there are exceptions - Paolini is one of them!)

In my world of Evyntyde I have created a sort of etymology of names, and I make sure about 95% of them are consistent with it - which can be a bit of a restriction mind you. Also, sometimes I name some characters by nick-name only - like the sailor "One Eye" - adds a bit of a mix, makes it easy from a language point of view, and also adds a bit of realism.

Names suck. Honestly. They're the bane of my life.

Mostly I make them up phonetically. I can roll a name around my tongue until it sounds right, or fits something. A lot of my alien names worked that way. Other times I use words that shouldn't really be names, like Jester or Jarrow (a suburb in Manchester), and a lot of colour names (I think I have at least one colour-named character in every one of my 17 novels - that's a lot of colours).

If you're working to a phonetic pattern, that can be hardest. My alien names often worked only with certain sounds that would be used in each individual language. But I called one of my aliens Maxi, one Gethan (a Welsh name too) and one something really obscure - try Nye out for size.

If I'm really stuck, I consult a name dictionary. Surprisingly there are a lot of bizarre names out there that can pass for fantasy, and even normalish names can be used, depending on your style.

Names can be tricky, but I don't really sweat it. There are only 26 letters in the English, and only so many combos, so there are bound to be repeats as the sheer size of the fantasy genre makes it mathematically impossible for there not to be. I wouldn't worry about the gamers, but writers are definately the ones to watch.
I have a minor character who cannot speak a sentence without using foul language in my pirate crew. I made him up in '99 or '00, and named him Stutmouth, (stut being the word I'm using in the novel for excrement).
Then I bought Martin's "Song of Fire and Ice" and encountered a minor named character there called Sh**mouth, who had the same leading trait! But his character only appears in one chapter, and has no lines, where mine survives to the end and has lines throughout. Obviously, my work will come out long after his, but I'm not worried in the least.
Point is, unless you're writing mainstream or using mainstream characters in an alternate universe, you're not likely to use a real person's name, which is about the only time you can run into legal trouble. And of course there's the copyright issue: again I don't think you will run into trouble unless you re-use well-known character names: a wizard named Gandalf or a swordsman named Fafhred might be a problem, but if you have a female fighter and call her Paxanerron, then Elizabeth Moon can't sue you. But, agents and editors familiar with Paksenarrion won't take you very seriously as an imaginative new voice worth publishing!
Using ethnic or linguistically unique sounds for your names is tried and true; your example of Tolkien being the easiest that comes to mind: Welsh just lends itself to an 'elvish' sound, doesn't it?
I have used Arabic sounding first names with Spanish-like surnames, Chinese combined with the Englsih translations of Native American, Anglo names with a color-shift (Dave Brown becomes Daff Yellow), and Italian names with too few syllables. In my horse-nomad WIP, I will use Bulgarian names for the non-humans there, entirely due to the fact that my wife's secretary is of that ethnicity and I won't have to look anything up!
I don't see a problem with Phrarngelled Harlogremol, but once you get that complicated, you'd better start checking with pharmaceutical companies to make sure you're not using a drug name! And such jawbreaker names are fatiguing to read... see my upcoming spot on jawbreaker names and pronunciation guides on level 1.

Hello
I made a list of names in my soon to come out novel and checked them in a large Tolkien companion and then Googled them, to find that many phonetic sounds in my welsh sounding names were also found in Tolkien. Some of these words were public domain so I'm keeping them (as no one should be able to copyright them) but many I had to change because other writers and gamers on WoW have already used them. Names such as 'Feena' have had LOTS of hits and Parn too. Having made them up myself, I was very disturbed to find they were in use as manga characters. There were many other shocks. Some were very funny. But they have been replaced now by names that show up blank (or almost blank) on Google. I presume that, if these names/words do not appear on Google, they don't exist. LOL.

The name catalog is rather strange and unique now, and only one or two instances appear on this world. LOL. I'm not sure if Phrarngelled Harlogremol works however.

LMAO

Oh, my wife is editing the last chapters of my work. I've been delayed by the need to get her input, though the revisions are to be made this weekend and I hope my work will be out by Sunday evening.

Blessings
OGO