Hi,

I am a fluent Irish Speaker from Australia and I have been writing and producing a fantasy audio drama podcast series for the past year. I have recently hit a stumbling block in my work in that I am unsure what strategy to employ when naming my characters. I have created a mythology behind my fantasy world with various gods and goddesses which bear generic Gaelic names i.e. Muireann, Lír, Daithí etc. but to add a bit of depth and credibility to my work I want to give my human characters surnames, or rename them entirely.

So far, all of the characters I have constructed have Irish names but I am starting to doubt whether simply using Irish names will do the job. I have considered creating my own surnames based on the various royal families and kingdoms and using the Irish surname system i.e. Patronymic + Ancestor/trade, but there is also the challenge that these might sound phoney to a native speaker (Which I am not - English is my primary language).

I have read some Irish novels, mainly translations of classics (Treasure Island, Dracula, the Hobbit etc.) and feel for a fantasy world it would be bland to apply character names using real life naming conventions i.e. calling the main hero Connor McDonald just sounds unimaginative even if the Gaelic version of the name is used. I have been looking for some source material to delve into to try and grasp the etymological roots of Irish surnames so that I can maybe alter these rules slightly to generate a fictional naming system for my fantasy world.

Does anyone have any book recommendations or any other useful resources that could help?

Thanks in advance.

We already have gods and godesses in our mythology, so making up fake god names would look strange to Irish speakers, and the many others who study mythology. And your non-Irish audience probably won't expect gods to have surnames, as in most cultures they don't, as far as I know.

As you are fluent you are aware that patronymic names would have to follow grammar rules, so be careful about that. Nothing wrong with using them.

McDonald is a Scottish surname.

https://www.gaois.ie/ga/surnames

When you decide on names, come back and we will critic them.