It's hard to come up with good place names, be it for alien worlds in Sci-Fi or in your realms of fantasy. If you were to pick up a book these days and read about the Dark Lord residing in his Dark Tower trying to subjugate the world you'd probably gag. I know I would. So what's a person to do when all the good names (or at least the easy ones) have been taken? The Dark Tower has definitely become clich But I find I can get the same idea across with a little word smithing. I usually come up with a concept, such as Dark Tower, and then try to cast it in some kind of believable similitude. Language has roots, and digging at those roots can often find combinations that just look and sound right. There is a reason the dark forest in The Hobbit was called Mirkwood. Mirk just sounds sinister. So, for Dark Tower I might turn to my Norwegian/English dictionary and find the Norwegian for dark is mork, or morke. I also find the Norwegian for tower is tarn or heve seg. (Not being a Norwegian scholar, I beg forgiveness of any Norwegians in the crowd for butchering your language.) So now I have two root words to work with, Morke and Tarn. Bastardizing these I might come up with Morketarn for a place name. Or with further corruption of the original, Moraktorn. Has sort of a sinister sound to it, I think. But I'm not all that pleased with it, so I go to my Teach Yourself Icelandic book and find myrkur = dark (once again, hints of Mirkwood here). Then on to my Concise Dictionary of Old Icelandic to find myrkr or myrkra for darkness. However I can find no entry for tower (it's an Old Icelandic dictionary not Old Icelandic/English English/Old Icelandic - so it's hard to find just what you want) but I do find some interesting alternatives. By working back and forth between sources I find klettur = rock from the Teach Yourself book, which leads me to klettr in the Old Icelandic Dictionary. So now I have Myrkra Klettur or Myrkeltur, which I think looks and sounds better. Or I can go with the Icelandic for valley, dalur. Myrkkra + dalur gives me Myrkka Dalur or Myrk Dalur, which to my mind sounds positively foreboding. Of course throwing in some diacritics can't hurt, giving me the final place name of Myrk Dalǘr. Placing this all in context with some dialog insures the meaning is not lost upon the reader. The fool! He's wandered into Myrk Dalǘr the ancient valley of death. I fear we will never see him again, the wizard lamented. Sometimes while rooting around in these obscure dictionaries I just come across a word I like the sound and feel of. For example, the Icelandic for evil, ovinur, just jumps out begging to be used. Simply by capitalizing it I get the evil Ovinur, the sinister agents of the dark powers of the world. You'll probably find them lurking in Myrk Dalǘr, so beware. By the way, any root language will do. I'm not trying to pick on Scandinavians here. :-) I've found Old Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon, Turkish, Indonesian, and Hawaiian very useful for different purposes. jon

 
~jon
My Blog - Mad Utopia Writing in a new era.