This is my 4th entry in the 30 days of WarCraft series of articles.
Why the name, Garwulf…?
I wanted a name that sounded authentic to me in a fantasy roleplaying game sort of way. I also wanted it to sound huntery. As I’d mentioned earlier, although I’m not into roleplaying in-game, I definitely have some role player in me. For my character, I wanted a classic name that would have been carried by an old saxon or norseman.
The wulf part immediately came to mind. It seemed fitting given my lone wolf style of play, plus I had already decided to keep a wolf as my companion pet, as soon as I could get one anyway. I went with the wulf spelling because it sounded very German, plus it was obviously much cooler looking than Garwolf.
I am of German descent, with a very german last name, so I thought that a saxon name would be fitting for a WoW character. I cycled a few first syllable ideas through my head, then put Gar and wulf together — resulting in hunter naming nirvana. I then pulled up a website full of saxon names, seeing if anything struck my fancy more than Garwulf. I saw nothing I liked nearly as much, so I went with it.
So there ya have it… not the most interesting or personal naming story, but that’s where my name came from.
Naming my characters appropriately is very important to me, and I have to say, I nailed it with Garwulf. His identity is very cemented in-game. I’ve never even considered a haircut for him, let alone a race change.
So, what’s your story..? Where did your names come from. I want to know.
I have named Juneper after the tree sort juniper. I saw it used as a name somewhere and thought is sounded sort of cheerful. Juniper with an i was taken so I went for Juneper with an e. I am called June by my guildies, and quite like that abbreviation, better than Juni which it would have been if the name would not have been taken 🙂
I’ve a main on two servers, Malanade on my normal server, and Inkk on my RP server.
Right when BC came out, I got the free trial for Warcraft. I already knew I wanted to try out a hunter(Because I’m a real pet addict), and the Night Elf looked the most appeal to me.
The name, at the time, was me seeing a generated named starting with Mal, and I really liked that, and, as a silly type of thing, I added Lemonade to it.
Three years later I find out Lady Malnade is a Boss in the Black Temple(something I’ve only recently ran)
Inkk is a very special name to me, however. I’m an artist/pitiful story writer, and Inkk was the name of one of my first creations; it was a sort of memorial towards the first act of storyboards I had ever tried. Now he’s just an incubus :\
No real significance to my name. I always try to check the Armory before I name a character to try and have a totally unique name. At the time I made Oz I don’t think there were any other characters on there with the name. But it’s just a name that popped in my head. I like that fact you can shorten it. People call me Oz, Ozzie, etc. I like that. I never had a nickname irl really.
Mine’s pretty obvious I guess. In another game I was Crimson_Wolf, which was soon shortened by all my friends to Crim. Crimson came from being a life long, die hard, Alabama fan, Wolf was just because I liked wolves. Crim was originally Trons though, that came from a childhood nickname. My younger sister once had a slumber party after one of my high school football games. The next morning her friends described me as coming through the house snorting, so I became snort spelled backwards. When Crimson_Wolf died of natural causes in the other game, I name changed Trons to Crim.
My original name was a play on my real name. This I used for quite a while until I did a server change. By then I wanted to start over but couldn’t really think of a “real” name replacement. I tried many names after that but noticed that all my hardwork in finding and deciding on a name becomes wasted when it usually gets truncated in in-game chat (ie. Quelrassal became just Q). So one day, I just played with initials: AN for my ol’ server Azjol Nerub, and J for the first letter of my RL name :). Anj however, was initially a female orc — so she would look color-coordinated with King Krush and would look badass at the same time (I love how female orcs stand!). Also, Anj has been pronounced Ahnj, Ainge (as in Danny), and Hunter…
(My other non-official name backstory came from a student of mine. “I figured out your name. It came from “A and J”, right? You and your wife!) Cool.
Google translate… Jaeger means “hunter” in Polish. Most of my pet names are from various languages (living and dead)…
My alts are derivates of Jaeger:
Worgen druid: Jaegen
Draenei DK: Jaegnar
Gnome rogue: Jaegerdac
Once I lvl my other alts up I’ll probably rename the ones that I play frequently since they have silly names like my mage is named Jaegerwench… She was originally a bank alt…
My real life last name is Jaeger. My great grandparents came over here from the Czech Republic.
In danish we have a word that, in old times, was spelled that way:
Jæger (Jaeger), which is a direct translate to Hunter in english 😀
I forget the exact way Sunrift came to be named, however I remember at the time Burning Crusade was still new and just like everyone and their mother’s I wanted to try the Blood Elves. I picked a hunter because my friend had a Night Elf hunter that he wouldn’t shut up about, so I figured I’d give it a shot.
I wanted a name that seemed to fit with the Blood Elf theme, so I found a list on WoWWiki containing a list of Bloof Elf NPCs and started mixing and matching different surnames. Sunrift was born.
Later when I transferred realms to be with real life friends, I felt the name was a little childish and changed to Bigah, a nickname I was given by my friends when I was a bit younger.
Wish I could say there was some sort of meaning behind the name, but Takaas came from the random name generator at the character creation screen. When I was troll, full name was Takaas Darkaxe. Darkaxe being my clan name. When was switched to goblin, Darkaxe was dropped as Takaas was kicked from his clan because he was no longer a troll. At this point he has not adopted a “last name”.
My Paladin on the other hand has a unique name, Darrtanus. A lot of people assume it comes from “The Three Muskateers” where there is a character with a similar name. It does not however. It is actually a combination of two names. “Darr” comes from the tv series “The Beasmster” where the main character is named Darr. “Tanus” comes from a book series, “Dragonlance”. In it, one of the main heroes is a half-elf ranger named Tanis. I merely switched the “i” to a “u” because it looked and sounded better to me.
My main’s name (and the name I chose for my WHU baby hunter) is Jakinz. It is a tribute to my littlest brother who is about 8 years younger than me. We grew up through the golden age of NES and have shared our absolute passion for great gaming. Surprisingly I had never noticed that he always gave his video game toons/files the name Jakinz. He explained it to me, actually, shortly before I started playing WoW and he was using the name again (I think naming ANOTHER Zelda file =P ) when I asked him what that name meant. “I don’t know…it just sounds really cool….Jakinz.” So I adopted the name to keep my gaming history with him tied in to what I do.
As I am know to be subject to excess, I have taken the name and run with it. I am leveling a Gnome of every class to 85 and they all have names that end with “kinz” except for my Death Knight (I named him Todwicht because one of these on-line translation sites gave me that as German for “dead Gnome”. The other Gnomes are named Jerkinz (85 rogue), Dorkinz (85 priest), Sparkinz (45 mage) and Lockinz (1 warlock).