# Good and bad names



## Rivendell_librarian (Jul 26, 2020)

I watched the Covent Garden free showing of Tchaikovsky's _The Sleeping Beauty _on Friday (available on Youtube for next 14 days from last Friday) and was struck by the name of the evil fairy: Carabosse, It struck me that's a lot like Caderousse - one of the baddies in _The Count of Monte Cristo - _a novel I've been asking the BBC to put on again.

Elf, dwarf, Gandalf all end vowel/{l,r}/f
(Alfred is derived from elf counsel!)

Balrog, goblin they seem to share a lot of letters and feature the voiced plosives b and g (p is unvoiced)

Sauron/Saruman/satan

Faramir/Boromir Boromir starts with a plosive. Also Frodo/Bilbo.

This goes further than Tolkien of course but there is the danger of numerology - seeing patterns that are there simply as a matter of chance

So are there some names that sound intrinsically good or bad or do they seem that way to us because of the names we already know?


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## Olorgando (Jul 27, 2020)

Rivendell_librarian said:


> ...
> So are there some names that sound intrinsically good or bad or do they seem that way to us because of the names we already know?


Off the cuff, my impression is that JRRT worked this though "closed" vowels - Ugluk, Udun, Utumno and the like.
And on the consonant side (the dialect of Franconia, where I live, has in practice abolished the hard consonants K, P and T, replacing them with G, B and D) favoring the hard consonants - and combinations that make the western European tongues stumble - just think of the Ring-inscription that Gandalf spoke in the original Black Speech at Rivendell, at the council.


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## Rivendell_librarian (Jul 28, 2020)

Yes that's a good point about the language of Mordor/Black Speech. The ring inscription (which I won't repeat here!) has plenty of b,g,k plosives.


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## Olorgando (Jul 28, 2020)

Not that JRRT is entirely consistent with this hypothetical vowel typifying. Otho and Lotho *could* be considered ambivalent characters, or as evil as Hobbits can get (not very), very much so the latter. But then there's Frodo ... but then again the Baggins clan did have quite a few people with two-O names. So perhaps more strongly with those hard consonants, especially in tongue-twister combinations - nazg = ring etc.


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