Use Of Names, Part 1: Worldbuilding

The power of names is an important them in Fantasy literature, one I first became aware when reading Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Similar themes crept into later favourites, such as Patricia McKillip’s The Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy and standalones such as The Forgotten Beast of Eld.

When beginning to write The Heir of Night, the opening novel in my own The Wall Of Night series, I felt—and still feel—that names were an important way to give coherency to c...