Ostiant or Chalenduin

(click to enlarge)

The Guinness Book of Names (6th Ed) by Leslie Alan Dunkling (1993)

You have a name and one thing after another happens to you, and you behave in various ways and do things, so that soon the name begins to have a meaning. Things have accumulated around your name. (Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding)

I always judge a young author by the names he bestows on his characters. If the names seem to me to be weak, or to be unsuitable to the people who bear them, I put the author down as a man of little talent, and am no longer greatly interested in his book. . . . It is one of the first rules of the novelist’s art. Bad authors choose bad names. (Emil Zola, Dr Pascal)

This, however, started my fascination with all the other ways and means and types of naming things. I originally bought the (I think) 2nd edition, and traded up at least twice in the eighties and nineties, and it covers a huge range of topics: of course, first names (etymology, history, changing fashions in, reasons for choices), and surnames (history, psychology of, common and rarer, changing them) but also ( deep breath... )