Hello to everyone, i'm brand new to this site, as well as to the Deryni series, having just read 'my first trilogy' The Legends of Camber of Culdi. (I do own a copy of the Codex).
Names, names, names. There is no shortage of names.
And here is my question:
Yorke Lord Farnham and Maia Lady Campbell gives birth to Megan Lady de Cameron. What is first name, what is last name (family name?), is there a middle name and why doesn't Megan share a name with one of her parents? What am I missing?
Cronanbor
If you look up her father in codex, he is Yorke de Cameron, Lord Farnam so she does have her father's surname. She was her father's only surviving child
That's starting to make more sense. Thanks.
First Name Yorke. Last Name de Cameron. Farnam is the region or area or county or estate.
And welcome to the castle. You will find lots to read and talk about as well as a great group of people all of whom love Katherine's work and can discuss it endlessly.I know you will enjoy it. DFK
Note, too, that if Gwynedd follows the English medieval system, being Lord Farnam may or may not mean that the lord has any actual physical connection with wherever Farnam is-- i.e., he may not live there at all and may visit seldom. He'd keep the title even if he sold every square foot of land he owned there.
VERY good to know. Thanks for that addendum.
(to DerynifanK: Thanks. I appreciate it)
This seems to be a good thread for this question:
I've been long curious about the origin of many of the names used in the series.
Are they of Welsh origin? Or Celtic or Scottish? Obviously, Rhys is Welsh, for example, but there also seems to be some Danish influence (Haldane...). Is there an article with a deep dive into the names of the series?
Note: Almost named my son Cathan. The husband nixed it. :)
Quote from: Cory on April 17, 2023, 12:42:09 PMThis seems to be a good thread for this question:
I've been long curious about the origin of many of the names used in the series.
Are they of Welsh origin? Or Celtic or Scottish? Obviously, Rhys is Welsh, for example, but there also seems to be some Danish influence (Haldane...). Is there an article with a deep dive into the names of the series?
Note: Almost named my son Cathan. The husband nixed it. :)
Most of the names in Gwynedd seem to be of our world's English/Welsh/Scots/Irish origin, although a few names (surnames in particular) seem to come from other areas. That could reflect that character's birth country or that of their ancestors. (Some examples would be the surnames Cardiel and Nivard, although we learn from the Codex that Thomas Cardiel was originally from Bremagne, or at least went to seminary there.) In Torenth, the names seem to be mostly a mixture of Russian/German/Hungarian, with maybe some other Slavic languages tossed in, and the occasional Celtic name, though given that the border of Torenth adjoins that of Gwynedd for many miles and there were some intermarriages across that border over the centuries (not to mention that the Torenthi lords who joined the Festils in occupying Gwynedd also intermarried with local people), that's not much of a surprise. Even the Gwyneddan surname MacRorie is distantly related to the Makrory branch of the family in Torenth. And other kingdoms have their own place names that are reminiscent of French, Italian, Spanish, and possibly the Middle East or North Africa (Morocco area), and names of people from those regions would likely correspond with names from those cultures.
It just struck me a day or two ago (being sometimes a bit oblivious to things) that MacRorie and Makrory had to be related.
I've always seen the names of people/places/things in the Eleven Kingdom as having a core vocabulary from the British Isles, with the East being filled with more exotic and imaginative names-- Russian, Hungarian, German, hints of Scandinavian --and the South being Mediterranean (Bremagne = French, say, with the Forcinn states having Spanish/Catalan/Italian flavors)
I do grin at the Hort of Orsal, mind you, since I know the story of the real Horthy family in Hungary-- look up Miklos Horthy, the "admiral without a fleet, in a kingdom without a king", who was Regent of Hungary in the 1920s and 1930s.
I was surprised to discover that Gwynedd is an actual 'real-world' Kingdom. If I'm not mistaken, so is The Connait, spelled Connacht.
Now I have a hypothesis...The MacRorie / MacTyre family certainly seems like there is a correspondence between them and 'real-world' Celtic people. And House MacTyre was one of the first to rule Kheldour.
And if you say Kheldour real fast, it sounds like Celt Door. Which could be phonetic ambiguity of the "Door of the Celts". The place where the Celts entered. Perhaps.