| The evolution of names and a new place to write. This month has been super productive… just… not in writing. I went on holiday to Portugal and then moved house, so it’s been a little busy and writing has had to take a back seat. Firstly, the shameless plug: The Cambria Trilogy is available here: UK – US – CA – AU |
| How names change with time As I wrote in last month’s newsletter, The Cambria Trilogy is set in a world with significantly higher sea level than ours. It makes my Wales a much smaller place, a string of islands made up of todays higher ground. After the world ended, and Wales was uninhabited for 400 years, until the Kafra repopulated it and created the country of Cambria, which means that everywhere and everything needed new names. So I wondered how the incoming people would decide what to call places. I figured that some villages would just take the name of whatever was there before, hence Llanberis, Capel Curig and of course, Ogmore. I spent a very wet but satisfying afternoon wandering the streets of Ogmore Vale a few years ago, trying to to visualise how it might look as a sleepy, coastal, Cambrian village. Some places, I thought, would end up with altered names, so Rhonda became Ronda, Dolywern became Dolly Wern, and others might have their roots in something else entirely. Brigand’s Inn, for example, the capital of Highland Island in the books, is named after a real pub near modern day Mallwyd, close-ish to where Brigands Inn (the town) is located in the books. Here it is:  Some were just made up, but had some reference or connection to the place that they were naming. East and West Point are obvious examples. Gaelic Goddesses Innismor is the name given to Iceland in my new series, of which 2 books are now drafted. The story is that Innismor is discovered and populated by the Celts rather than the Vikings, so I’ve been doing the same exercise again. Most settlements are usually decided by geography, so my towns are located where the actual towns are in todays Iceland. Reykjavík has become Emain, named after Emain Macha, the ancient Gaelic seat of Ulster and the tribe of Ulaid. The name means “Macha’s twins” or “Macha’s pair”, Macha being a goddess connected to that place (read more about it here if its of interest). We’ve the Irish to thank for virtually everything we know about the Celts. Once, the Celtic people populated the entire British Isles and much of modern day France, but the bloody Romans came along and virtually everything we know about them vanished into oblivion. Thankfully, the Romans didn’t conquer Ireland, and the Celtic people there, the Gaels, flourished for another thousand years. For that reason, we have a whole weath of artifacts and stories that tell us about the culture and values of these interesting and amazing people. That’s it for this month. I haven’t written as much since the house move, but I’ve drafted two whole books this year so far, so a few weeks off isn’t the end of the world 🙂 |
| Thanks for reading. |
Everything that isnt yellow is now underwater, and what remains is what becomes the nation of Cambria. There are three main land masses: 1) The northern area of Snowdonia (named Highland in the books), 2) The middle block, Cambria, roughly todays Cambrian Mountains, and 3) Brecon, which is largely today’s Brecon Beacons.
Apart from the hilly spine in the north of England, pretty much everything else is gone, except the higher locations of todays Dartmoor and Exmoor in the south west.In the story, Peak Island (todays Peak District) is used for raw material extraction and some industry, but everywhere else outside of Cambria is almost entirely wild. Scotland, for example, is completely uninhabited, and reforestation by Cambrians returned it to the coast-to-coast blanket of trees that it was in neolithic times.
