Naming the Evil One: Onomastic Strategies in Tolkien and Rowling (Critical Essay‪)‬

WHAT IS A NAME? LINGUISTS, PHILOSOPHERS, GENEALOGISTS, AND LAWYERS will give different answers. Having a name can mean different things to psychologists, folklorists, etymologists, or anthropologists. A personal name is a nexus for many deeply important concepts and feelings about being a person and having a place in the world in relation to other people. There is much more to a name than just what it means--that is, its etymological derivation. Tolkien himself warns against limiting the study of names to this approach as "the spirit of philately," or mere stamp-collecting ("Philology" 58). Leonard Ashley also cautions that literary onomastics "too often means no more than listing the names that appear in some novel (when it should, of course, concern itself with analyzing why and how names function in fiction)" (77). What I want to explore here is one particular function of names: the name as an indicator of the power relationship between the namer and the named. Specifically, I'll examine how people in two fantasy series, The Lord of the Rings and its background legendarium and the Harry Potter books, deal with naming the personifications of evil, and thus indicating their power relationship to these personifications, in their respective universes. Returning to defining the term name for a moment: at a very basic level, a name has three essential components. First, there is the word itself--the name, along with whatever etymological or historical baggage it might carry with it. What does the name mean? Who has held it before? What hearers are likely to understand this background, and what will it mean to them? Then there is the person, entity, or thing being named, which becomes associated with that word--even, as we shall see below, sometimes considered equivalent to it. Behind both of these is the name-giver--the namer. This can mean either the entity that originally connected that particular name with that named person or object; or it can mean the entity that is using an already-given name to refer to that person or object. The name-giver, through giving or using a name, may assert a certain amount of power over the named, or indicate their equality with, neutrality about, subservience to, or admiration for the named entity. To complicate matters further, in many cases it is the named person who gives him or herself a name, thus asserting power over his or her own name and all it indicates.