World-Building: Place Names

I'm a few hundred pages into A Feast for Crows, the fourth of George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, and I've been thinking about place names. Martin has a great ability to come up with evocative, informative place names; the name always tells us something about the place, and sometimes something about the people who live there.

There are a few main ways in which places get their names, both in the real world and in fantasy worlds. Many places are named for their physical features: Martin's the Fingers, the Bay of Ice, the Frozen Shore, or the Trident-- or Long Island or the Green Mountains, to name two from around where I grew up. Other places are named for people and events: King's Landing and Torrhen's Square remind me of Washington Crossing and Martha's Vineyard. Finally, some place names remain from civilizations now gone. I honestly can't put my finger on an example from Martin at the moment but they abound in America, where we often memorialized the displaced Native Americans with names like Utah and South Dakota, and in Britain, places like Sussex, Wessex and Essex-- or even "England" itself.

Martin's Iron Islands remind me of the Calendar Islands in Casco Bay, Maine, where I spent summers as a kid-- or at least, how I imagine the islands of Maine are for year-rounders, a tough, harsh place peopled with leathery survivors for whom the ocean is both life and death. The place names have a bit in common: the Great Wyk and Old Wyk of the Iron Islands remind me of the Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague of my youth, and one can imagine that both island pairs were named by a no-nonsense folk.

Many names are like this: people took a look around and called 'em like they saw 'em. Martin's continent of Westeros is full of this, and looking out into Casco Bay from the porch, I'd see Long Island, Little Chebeague, Inner Green and Outer Green, Deer Point, Crow Island... Not one of the names holds any mystery as to where it came from, not even Junk-of-Pork: "Junk" is an old Maineism for a piece of something, a variation on "hunk". Presumably the little spit of rock looked like a hunk of meat to some old sea captain. Even the "Chebeague" that mystifies so many visitors' pronunciation organs is no mystery: it means "land of many springs" in the language of the Native Americans who used to live in the area. (My memory wants me to say it was the Abenaki tribe, but I'm not sure of that. And by the way, it's pronounced "shuh-BEEG" by we normals and "shuh-BIG" by true Mainers.)

"King's Landing" is probably my favorite of Martin's place names. The city stands on the spot where Aegon the Conqueror landed in Westeros and began kicking ass and taking kingdoms. Awesome? Yes. Fantastical? Nope. Up in Pennsylvania they have a little town called Washington Crossing, at the spot where George Washington crossed the Delaware River and began kicking Hessians and fathering nations.

Places named for famous people are more common, though. There are tons of US states named for people; Wikipedia does a better job with this than I ever could: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_name_etymologies

The US states example reminds us of an important fact: it's usually the powerful who do the naming. Just as history is written by the victors, so are names. Apparently King Charles II named a lot of our states. Why? He was king when England was exploring the New World, so he got to name everything. It's good to be the king.

Some of the most evocative names come from those who went before. Fully half of US states (25, sez Wikipedia) have names derived from Native American languages (counting Hawaiian). To pick a few, Massachusetts comes from the Algonquian for "at the great hill," Kentucky from the Iroquoian for "on the prairie," and Mississippi from the Ojibwe for "great river." Of course, back in the day these were just physical description names, but now they're remnants of a culture all but destroyed. Similarly, in England we have Essex, Wessex, and Sussex, which basically mean East Saxon, West Saxon, and South Saxon, for the Germanic invaders who ruled during the Dark Ages. "England" itself means "land of the Angles," the dudes who shared invading duties with the Saxons.

In America, we get double-duty names-- Essex, Connecticut is named for the English county. Westchester County, New York is named for Chester, England (as New York is from the town of York)-- but "chester," a common part of place names in England, comes from "castra," a Latin word meaning "camp." Back and back we go. Names repeat. You can even hike the Green Mountains of Vermont, which is French for "green mountain."

So what has this to do with roleplaying games? I think it's obvious, but if not: you can do a lot with names. You can show us how your townsfolk view the world, tell us whom an old king wished to honor, or give us glimpses of an ancient language. Names are an extremely important tool of world-building, and should always be crafted to give depth to your campaign setting.