York in England, New York (formerly New Amsterdam) in the US, New New York (I think) in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles;
New England and Nova Scotia;
Lancaster City District includes the seaside town of Morecambe - while based in Lancaster but spending three nights each week in Liverpool, I found myself walking past a Lancaster Street and a Morecambe Street;
in Three Hearts And Three Lions, Hugi tells Holger:
"'Avalon lies far, far in the western ocean, a part of the world wha' we've nobbut auld wives' tales aboot here.'" (CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 51)
Poul Anderson's readers have become more familiar with Avalon as a biracial extrasolar colonized planet in his Technic History. The planet is named from the legend so that the entire story of Arthur etc is implicit even though never articulated.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The capital of Aeneas, another extrasolar planet in the Technic stories, was Nova Roma, which is also evocative!
Constantinople, on Earth, was originally renamed New Rome.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
All these names are meaningful.
Also personal names: Pope John Paul II was named after his predecessor who was named after his two predecessors who were named after two authors of the New Testament, one of whom was named after the first King of Israel.
I had a long conversation with a Jehovah's Witness. At the end, we discovered that he was Simon Peter and I was Paul.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Agree, names can be evocative and arouse strong passions.
Agree, what you said about the Popes and the Apostles. Yes, St. Paul was originally named "Saul," the same as Israel's first king. Saul of Tarsus changed his name after meeting Sergius Paulus, the Roman governor of Cyprus.
One name the popes have steadfastly refuse to adopt on election is Peter, out of reverence for the first of the Popes, St. Peter.
Ad astra! Sean
Even more significant: NOT using a particular name.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. At least one man baptized "Peter" was quick to change his name after being elected pope.
Ad astra! Sean
Nova Scotia does resemble parts of Scotland -- and has a lot of descendants of Scottish immigrants!
I take part in a trivia questions event most weeks. Recently I made up a bout of 10 questions. It was 'Places with the same name'. Eg: for one of the question I made a list of places named London.
4) London
England
Ontario
Kiribati
West Australia
Kentucky
Four of them were on the Wikipedia disambiguation page for London, and one was just fictional. The question to be answered was which one is fictional.
I did something similar for 9 other names that are used for multiple places.
Part of my inspiration for this was knowing that a village in Saskatchewan is named Kandahar, but the only other is the original in Afghanistan, so I couldn't use that. But Kandahar comes from change in pronunciation of Alexandria. There were lots of Alexandrias for me to use for that name.
Kaor, Jim!
And that reminded me of how some writers invented fictional nations--a favorite example being Avram Davidson's wonderfully named Triune Monarchy of Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.
Inspired by the real world Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Which Stirling used in "A Slip in Time," where it was the dominant partner in the alliance with Germany. And which was a resentful junior partner of Germany in his BLACK CHAMBER books.
Ad astra! Sean
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