No, you are assuming that I am going out of my way to misspell them. Something I am most certainly not doing.
I haven’t read the books, I read or take part in nothing related to this show outside of these threads because I have no interest in getting spoiled. If you have an issue with the way I fail to spell some names that were misspelled in the first place much of the time then ignore me.
I’ve seen Hodor’s real name spelled Willis, Wyllis, Willys, and probably other y-centric variations, and that’s not even on this board.
Personally, I find it much more obnoxious that you keep pointing it out. It’s really really really trivial. I really wish you would cut it out. It really serves no purpose.
Wynter is coming.
Medieval societies in our world had variant spellings for names. Why should their society be different?
Not just medieval. The Bard’s name appears as Shakespeare, Shakespere, Shakespear, Shakspeare, Shackspeare, and Shakspere. He himself even signed his name differently on different documents.
In any case, Martin’s names seem very arbitrary to me. The noble houses of Westeros originated from at least four different ethnic groups, including the First Men, Andals, Rhoynish (Dorne), and Valyrians. Yet I haven’t seen clear differences in the names from different regions, maybe except for the Valyrians. You would expect names in the North to differ from those in the south the way Scottish or Welsh names differ from those derived from Anglo Saxon. Maybe there are patterns, but they are not obvious to me.
From my understanding, many of the big names in Westeros are First Men names, even if the Andals later dominated the area and culture – the Lannisters, for example, are considered Andals but descend from the First Man (and the founder of the Kings of the Hills) Lann the Clever, even if the Andals married in later.
On the other hand, the Arryns were an exclusively Andal name IIRC. The Baratheons descend from Aegon (the Conqueror) Targaryen’s best friend (and possible bastard half-brother) Orys Baratheon, which sounds just a tiny bit Valyrian. I don’t know if the Martells are Andal or First Man in origin – they have strong Rhoynish descent, but the Martells existed before the arrival of the Rhoynish (IIRC).
Probably an interesting topic for a paper!
I’m going to use this as a thesis topic for my degree in Imaginary History.
This is a bit off topic, but you reminded me of something that I had been thinking of that probably doesn’t warrant its own thread.
Did G.R.R.M invent languages out of whole cloth for the Dothraki, Valerians, etc…? If so, why didn’t he (and Tolkien) simply use existent languages? He used English as “The Common Language”, so he could have used a Germanic language for the (basically Barbarian) Dothraki and an ancient language like Latin or Greek for Valerian. Not only would this save him time, but the uber-nerds who spend time learning these languages would actually be learning something useful.
I recall an interview where Martin explained that names that have survived since the First Men tend to be simpler (e.g., Stark). Subsequent rounds of immigration and the passage of time brought more complex names (e.g., Lannister). And Valyrian names more often have the “ae” and “y” sorts of exotica.
It’s a separate question as to how well that holds up in practice.
That’s more or less what he did with the names, to be honest.
Lannister
Stark
Tyrell
Martell
Valyria
And so on. You don’t have to look too hard to find his inspiration for some things.
I agree. Especially since we have…
I think he is the one who wants the actress dead. We even see him pissed at her for criticizing his writing, and he seemed quick to anger on that point. Perhaps he’s heard similar comments from her before. I don’t think you hire someone like Grant for a throwaway role.
Just had a funny thought waking up : NEXT WEEK, on Game of Thrones, find out how Bran mucking up with time travel powers messed up cousin Orson ! Smash the beetles, kuh, kuh, kuh !
Found this picture of The Waif (Faye Marsay) online. I assume it’s from the show but we haven’t see it yet so I’m spoiler boxing it. Nothing specific revealed.
Sorry, that link doesn’t seem to work and it may be that that picture was from a BBC series called The White Queen.
Copy and paste this link into a browser address bar:
Hmm…I’m getting a referal denied message for both links.
Sorry I didn’t disable link parsing. Right click on the link, copy the link address and paste it into the address bar. Clicking the link won’t work because the hosting website is rejecting referrals.
Tolkien did use Old English or maybe older roots to represent words used by the Hobbits and the Rohirrim. But the idea was he was representing archaic forms of a completely different language.
