Hi there! The kind folks at Goldsboro invited me to write a guest post about anything I wanted for their lovely blog, so I volunteered to talk about the thing I’m always banging on about, which is the names. I think about character names way, way too much, so thank you Goldsboro for indulging me here. For the sake of everyone’s sanity I’ve stuck to just the two protagonists: Aleya Ana-Ulai and Kirby of Wall’s End. Thanks so much & enjoy!
Aleya Ana-Ulai
When I first started plotting out Idolfire, Aleya’s codename was X. Short for Xena. Because she’s a warrior princess, geddit? (Groans and boos from the crowd). Okay, okay. Happily we moved on from that. Aleya is a variant on Alya, a thoroughly ancient name which means exalted in Arabic and ascendant in Hebrew; it’s tied to ideas of high social standing and closeness to Heaven. It also pops up in Greek as Alya, an Arcadian Goddess who ended up merging with the Goddess of Wisdom into ‘Athena Alya’. I knew none of this when I came up with the name – it wasn’t until I started researching that I realized just how much it suited her. Pretty neat, right?
As for Ana-Ulai, these are both references to ancient Mesopotamia, the period of early history that inspired her home city of Ash. Ana comes from Inanna, the Goddess who supposedly stole the secrets of civilization and carried them to her patron city. I love Innana. She’s a real go-getter Goddess, usually found getting away with mischief or exacting revenge. The Mesopotamians loved her too: she appears in more of their myths than any other deity, male or female.
Ulai is Aleya’s star sign. The Ashalites hold the stars in high esteem, just as the Babylonians did, and incorporate star signs into their citizen’s names. All the Ashalite constellations are named after biblical rivers. The Ulai appears in the Book of Daniel, during Daniel’s prophetic vision of the fall of the Persian Empire: ‘I was at Shushan in the palace, which is in the province of Elam; and I saw in a vision, and I was by the river of Ulai.’
The Ulai ran close to the Elamite settlement Susa, which is referenced in Idolfire’s stormy Assyrian epigraph: ‘Susa, the great holy city, abode of their Gods, seat of their mysteries, I conquered… their gods and goddesses I scattered to the winds.’
It also appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh as the sacred river where Endiku and Gilgamesh once travelled. ‘Weep all the paths where we walked together,’ says Gilgamesh, agonised by the loss of his companion. ‘The river along whose banks we used to walk, weeps for you. Ulai of Elam and dear Euphrates, where once we drew water for the water-skins…’
Visions of Empire crumbling, visions of Gods stolen and scattered, bittersweet memories, mourning, loss. In Idolfire we meet Aleya as a slightly bratty twenty-something with a mean right hook and a chip on her shoulder, but she’s burdened with a huge, kind of terrifying destiny, one that will shape the world long after she’s passed on. For more info on that, check out my next book. If I ever finish writing it that is. Har har.
Kirby of Wall’s End
Northumberland's own high fantasy queen, AKA Godkiller author Hannah Kaner, asked me the other day: ‘Do you have a Kirby problem?’
Fair question. The short answer: yes, I have developed a fixation on Kirby the pink Nintendo mascot. But I swear to god, Kirby the character came first. Let me explain.
Like Tiffany, which feels extremely eighties but actually dates back to the early Middle ages, the name Kirby is a lot older than it seems. Originally a Norse word meaning settlement with a church, it was adopted as a surname by settlers in the north of England. Our first recorded Kirby is John of Kirkby who lived in Lancashire in the 13th century. The Irish equivalent is Ó Ciarba, anglicised into Kirby by English invaders. So Kirby has Norse, Gaelic and Anglo-Saxon heritage, and reflects a long, complex history of settlement and colonial conquest across the Hibernian Archipelago. That’s why I chose it. Also: it’s cute. Kirby is cute. She has big dumbo ears and an upbeat attitude and I thought the name suited her. So there!
Not long after we sold Idolfire to Hodderscape, I found myself in a merch shop in Tokyo. Haha, I thought, why don’t I buy a plush of Kirby the pink mascot as a thank you present for my agent and my editor? Oh, what the hell, I’ll throw one in for myself too. So I got the plushies (which were a big hit, by the way). They say the first taste is free.
Over the next year, my Kirby collection gradually grew. Right now we have the original plush, a baseball cap (gift from my wonderful friend and coworker Natalie), handmade ceramic Kirby (my incredibly talented artist friend Alice), a Kirby key ring (my saintly boss Thomas), a Kirby lip balm and massive Etsy Kirby plush (both my Mum, thank you Mum), plus a Kirby in a cowboy hat, crochet Kirby from London queer mart, and a second Japanese plush with a slightly different expression. My bedroom is littered with Idolfire proofs and Kirby merch and to this day I have not played a single Kirby game. Make of that what you will.
As for Wall’s End, that’s a little more obvious to anyone who knows my own home city of Newcastle. Wallsend is a real town east of the city centre, named for Hadrian’s Wall, one of the many Roman ruins which inspired the setting of Idolfire. Like the fictional Wall’s End, Wallsend does not actually sit at the end of the Wall – or at least, it didn’t always. A trace of foundation once stretched from the fort of Segedunum all the way to the sea, but it’s been swallowed up by the urban spread. Imagine how magnificent it must have looked when the Anglo-Saxons stumbled across it in the 700s. Argh! Take me back!
In 2020, when I was a snot-nosed scribbler still polishing the first draft of my debut, I started writing a fantasy story inspired by old roman roads. It was not called Idolfire. It did not feature Aleya, or Nylophon, or a city called Ash. The tone was weird and folklorish. People said egads! I haven’t looked at that draft in almost five years, but I looked at it today, and was shocked to discover that only one thing survived into the final product: Kirby of Wall’s End. I thought I came up with her name during the Hodderscape pitch. But it’s been wrapped up in this story from the beginning, plodding doggedly along in the back of my mind. There’s something very Kirbyish about that.
