Behind the scenes I’ve been working on a project that has to do with Germanic word origins of modern English words. It has been very interesting to see old Germanic words for battle and how close a lot of words are to modern English. With that background I had the good fortune of stumbling into a conversation on the origin of words and fantasy creatures. To boot, I’ve even recently made a video about Fairy houses. That inspires an article about modern fantasy words.

Elves, Orcs, Dwarves, Faeries, Trolls, Goblins… We have a mental picture for every one of these. Elves are fair, graceful, and magical. Trolls are big, and regenerate. Goblins are small and green. Orcs are big and pig faced. Dwarves live under the mountain mining and carving great mazes. Where did we get these pictures.

Rewind a little over a hundred years and trolls live under bridges and eat goats. They are not huge, they do not regenerate. Rewind another hundred years and elves and goblins may even be the same thing, and neither like people. However, neither will kill you, they just want to hide your socks and make scary noises in the woods. What we have is an epoch of modern fantasy. A point in time when our sense of what these words mean changed, and solidified to the modern understanding.

What is that point in time?

Clearly J.R.R. Tolkien is the biggest influence. All of the list above are tropes we’ve adapted from his works. However, it goes a little further back. Lewis Carroll is the influence that brought children’s fantasy books to life as a serious cultural force. With additional contributions from J. M. Barre, Emma Orczy, and George MacDonald. There are more, but the idea of a fantasy world with a medieval twist. Swords and swashbucklers and danger.

This literary distinction is important because fantasy crossed paths with science fiction, which also bloomed in the 20th century. You had characters taken from their own world and thrown into a fantasy world. Whether falling asleep and entering through a mirror, or entering a giant cannon and being shot to mars, there is not a significant difference between aliens and magical beings in the fantasy of the time. What matters most is how it gave birth to new distinct literary genres.

This is the point of change. Over time the fantasy genre grew from Tolkien’s work to what we know today, informed mostly by table top RPG elements. Remember, in the Hobbit, trolls still talk to their food, opportunistically eat passersby, and turn to stone in sunlight. The move from children’s fantasy stories to magical effects in heavy melee combat was not completed until war gaming was combined.

What followed is building fantasy tropes on top of terminology, so that words like Goblin and Elf have their distinct meanings, separated entirely from their origins. Droll means giant. It was transliterated to Troll. We use its new meaning with absolutely no connection with its origin. However, we go a step further. We choose names we can get away with.

TSR famously had to stop using the word Hobbit and instead went with Halfling. In that decision, they believed that generic names like Elf, Dwarf, and Orc would not violate any kind of copyright. Even the name Drow was taken from Droll to simply imply monster. This is just another rung in the ladder that came before and continued to follow. Mythical monster names are safe from copyright.

You can have centaurs, sphinxes, goblins, pixies, draugr, wendigos, oni, and everything in between. The words and concepts are perpetuated through an almost oral tradition of things you can use freely without infringing on another IP. Their mythos is barely related to their word origins, and related entirely on what fantasy tropes fall within public domain.

They also have one more aspect that is literally an oral tradition. Words that sound like their concepts are valued above all else. This gives life to Germanic words because the harsh sounds mimic the danger intended in the monster. That’s not even considering that English, being a Germanic based language, flows better with their sounds. Try to make Nergal, the Sumerian god of death, or Shinigami, Japanese demons of death, sound scary. Even in history, would you fear an attack from Ha-shoe-air-is or Xerxes? We place great value in their sound in English.

So when you think through naming in your fantasy world, keep in mind how the names came to be. The generic, public domain, fantasy tropes run deep in people’s minds, and the traditions are fleeting. It adds wonderful depth to dive into history and apply traditional meanings, but it is more familiar to audiences to stick with the new fantasy. Just don’t be afraid to embrace the mythos built on evading copyright.