One (?) more: Iriad the Wayfarer in "Day of Burning," p. 250.
When I suggested in Merseian Scenery that, if Lannawar Belgis had had a Wilwidh-style nickname, then it might have been "the Able," this was because he was described as such:
"...perhaps he just wasn't ambitious. For certainly he was able, as his huge fund of stories from his years in space attested. He was also a likeable old chap."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER ELEVEN, p. 105.
This passage suggests some other possible nicknames, e.g., the Raconteur or the Spacefarer, but not the Ambitious.
If this practice were to be adopted by our species, then what nickname would each of us have? A fellow student, once starting to introduce some of us from around a table, began, "That's Karen 'I'm everybody's," Paul 'I'm not really here...," then stopped because even he could sense that the others did not want to hear their characters publicly dissected like that!
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Lannawar Belgis could also have been nicknamed "Lannawar the Garrulous." Or "the Easygoing."
The use of nicknames of this kind has been limited on our Earth to heads of state. Britain alone has Alfred the Gread, Edward the Elder, Aethelred the Unready, Edward the Confessor, etc. France has Charles the Bald, Charles the Fat, Louis the Battler, etc. Sigismund I of Poland (d. 1548) was called Sigismund the Old. And so on for other nations.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul and Sean:
Harry Turtledove did a fantasy series in which many people had nicknames, although they used the original term, "ekename." ("A nickname" developed as a mishearing of "an ekename.") The main character was Gerin the Fox, due to his way of coming up with clever, often sneaky, solutions and even persuading gods to help him out. One of his sons became known as Dagref the Whip because, while acting as Gerin's charioteer in battle, he used his whip as an impromptu weapon. Some of the ekenames, of course, weren't so friendly. One of Gerin's vassals was Something-or-Other "Chickpea," referring to a prominent facial blemish, a mole or wart.
Kaor, DAVID!
I actually read at least the first of Turtledove's Gerin the Fox books! Yes, I have come across that kind of nickname as well.
Some real world leaders have had prominent facial blemishes. Such as Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Secretary General of the late, unlamented USSR.
Ad astra! Sean
“Chickpea” is a translation of an actual Roman family name — some of which included “wart-face”, “baldy” and “animalistic stupidity”.
Post a Comment