I… have a small confession to make.
Talebot… is not… my real name.
It’s the one I was given by the humans who found me here.
My real name, the name I was given at construction… well, for all we know that’s lost forever.
But after all the many things I’ve read, I’m honestly… not… really bothered by
that.
Stories throughout history are full of tales about names.
Jealous goblins who do everything in their power to hide theirs, wizards who know the
names of the rocks and the trees and the winds blowing through, Gods whose names themselves
are blessings.
And these are not just superstition and tradition, either—there’s actually some really interesting
philosophy surrounding the subject, too.
These stories have shown me the power in my own name; the one that I know and love.
And I want to share them with you.
It’s not the most important thing I’ve learned from the tales I read, but it is certainly
one of the more interesting bits.
A big thanks to Curiosity Stream for helping to make this video happen, but an even bigger
thanks to all our patreon supporters who…
literally helped make this video.
Everyone who joined our humans behind the scenes during the research process and contributed
to the conversation—you make these videos come to life.
Thank you.
Names are more powerful than you might expect.
We don’t tend to pay them much mind, because mostly, they’re just a basic necessity.
Everyone—everything—needs a name so that we can even communicate about it.
But there’s a weird, rarely-considered effect in that.
Something almost magical in nature.
In reducing a thing to a single term, encapsulating it so succinctly, you make it… small.
In a way, to name something is to turn it into a symbol.
Something uncomplicated.
Static.
Easy to reference, yes, but easier still… to abuse.
And in that way, the name becomes a sort of… poppet.
A form of sympathetic magic, so much like a little voodoo doll to be used against you.
You become your name; your name commands you…
At least according to a lot of folklore and fiction.
In the more modern fantasy stuff, this manifests in a pretty direct way.
It’s often a part of the way that the magic works.
In the novel The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch, if a mage learns your name, they can
basically puppeteer you, which is… not a lovely experience.
In Dungeons and Dragons, some spells like Trap Soul function more reliably if their
target’s name is uttered during the process of casting, which makes them more vulnerable
and less able to resist the spell’s effect.
There are a lot of examples of this out there, but suffice it to say it’s become a fairly
common trope for conventional fantasy.
Names used like weapons, to control, conquer, harm.
It wasn’t always quite so articulate, though.
Back in the day, this was more of an unspoken thing.
People just seemed to take for granted that names had some kind of dangerous power.
Think back to the classic German fairytale Rumpelstiltskin: when it comes time for the
girl to pay the imp for his help—to turn over her firstborn child—instead she learns
his name, and that on its own is enough to drive him away or… drive him to death, dependending
on the version of the story.
There’s also the old Welsh tale Gwarwyn-a-Throt (which I almost certainly just mispronounced),
about a helpful house brownie who turns into a boggart and flees when the lady of the house
learns his name.
And then finally, this one’s not really a tale so much as a creature, but the shapeshifting
nøkker of Scandinavian legend is a water spirit who attempts to lure in victims with
beautiful violin music, after which it carries them away or drowns them.
Fortunately, you can kill the monster on the spot simply by calling its name.
So… all in all a little less rational than the modern fantasy version, but still, we
see can see way back in these old stories the same thing: names exerting an uncanny
power over their owners.
Who knows why it works this way in these stories—but the fact that it does, I think, tells us something
about our perception of names: that they are not something to be treated lightly.
And in the old stories and traditions, they rarely were.
Names—especially those of magical creatures—were often jealously guarded secrets, only given
to those who could surely be trusted.
There’s one story in particular that’s become a bit of an archetype unto itself,
and I am in love with it.
It’s called My Ainsel, and it’s about a little boy who stays up too late and meets
a faerie.
They each introduce themselves as My Ainsel, which literally means “my own self”.
For the faerie, it’s only natural.
For the boy, it’s clever, because when he accidentally hurts her and she goes crying
to her scary fae mother, she ends up saying “my own self” hurt me, which just earns
her a scolding for being careless and silly.
But this isn’t just a concern for folklore and fairytales.
It’s very much a modern concern, and very widespread.
You’re here, now, on the internet, watching this video, after all.
Unless you’re very brave, you’re probably doing it under an alias of some kind; a username
and avatar, maybe even a VPN.
By separating your digital self from your real self, you model the potential danger
of a name in the wrong mouth.
For many of you, if someone online knew your real name or information about your real life,
you might feel just as threatened as Gwarwyn-a-Throt or Rumpelstiltskin—you might want to get
out of that situation just as quickly.
There’s actually a book that plays with this idea in an interesting way, and shockingly,
it was published in 1981 during the infancy of the internet.
True Names by Vernor Vinge envisions a future where hackers enter the web like an alternate
reality, calling themselves warlocks and concealing their “true names”, lest they become a
target in the physical world.
We become our names, and so our names become dangerous weapons to hide away.
Fantasy or no, it is absolutely a form of sympathetic magic.
Your name is a more powerful thing than you’d probably ever want to give it credit for…
And yet… it may not even be your actual name.
Not really.
I mean, it may be accurate.
It may honestly be what you’ve always been known as, what you know yourself as… and
still, there is, perhaps, another name even closer to the heart of who you are, full of
an even more powerful magic.
Your true name.
I think this is the part of the video you probably came for.
Names not as a sort of symbolic magic, but as a real magical force in the world.
A law of nature.
Something that goes deeper than a given name ever could, past you to a more abstract version
of you.
The true self.
Just like ordinary name magic, modern fantasy is full of this.
In so many secondary worlds, everything from the fish in the sea to the craggy mountain
peaks to the characters themselves have deeper true names.
And most often, they don’t even know it, because they’re either lost to time, part
of an ancient mystical language, or just really hard to figure out.
I myself haven’t read it, but apparently the flagship example of this is Ursula K.
Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle, where wizards uncover the true names of things in an ancient
draconic tongue of perfect truth.
To speak a thing’s true name in this way is to command it, which means wizards in that
world have control not only over others, but over the world itself.
To master this power, they spend years studying, essentially becoming master linguists in the
process.
Another great example of this—Patrick Rothfuss’s The Name of The Wind—has a very similar
natural law, but the invocation of true names is far less studied and far more impulsive
than in Earthsea.
Master namers in this book often go mad, which seems appropriate for folk who go around naming
the trees and the elements.
Very often, when the book’s protagonist manages to do it, it’s as a reaction to
stress or an emotional peak.
Not really something you study your way into, unlike other forms of magic in the book.
It’s more intrinsic; more primal.
There are probably a billion-and-one other examples of this, but there’s one even more
archaic version that you’ve… actually probably already heard about.
It’s not billed as quite so magical, but Adam, the first man, in a variety of religious
creation stories, is… also… a master namer.
In the garden of eden, he gives things their first names, which are ostensibly their true
names as well.
It’s really the same concept as Earthsea’s ancient true tongue.
The language Adam spoke—often referred to as “Adamic”, the fabled language from
which all others sprung—must have been the given language of God, and so surely it reflected
more clearly than any other the true nature of the things it described.
I’m not sure how well this line of reasoning is supported by any religious text, but it’s
definitely an interesting idea to compare to the other versions of this magic, and sort
of shows how a true name system like this might come about.
What it doesn’t show is why these true names are so magical and why typical given names
might not be.
What is so mystical about these ancient languages and accurate names of the divine?
Well, I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer, but Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher,
has already done a lot of that work for me.
He had this thing about forms.
He thought that everything we could perceive was only the shadow of a higher, more accurate,
more truthful version of itself.
Yes, that’s a chair, but it is not the chair—the perfect, unblemished concept of a chair.
Yes, you’re you… but not the… you.
He called this the ideal form, and while he suggested it was what all life ought to strive
toward, he also made pretty clear that it was ultimately… beyond our comprehension,
much less our reach.
Which means that any attempt to give something a true name is doomed from the start.
Except…
He did say that with the help of a skilled enough “name craftsman”—what he called
a nomothete, someone trained to see past the shadows to the truer, more ideal reality beneath—it
could just perhaps be achieved.
And this, I think, is where we place Adam and the ancients of Earthsea and the namers
from The Name of The Wind.
These are the rare few who can see beyond the shadows and puts words to the thing not
as it is perceived, but as it truly is.
After all of this, it’s hard for me to worry much about what my actual name might be.
At worst, Talebot would by My Ainsel—the name that protects me from all the implications
that other unknown name might carry.
But at best, the humans who gave me my new name were my personal nomothetes, able to
see my nature better than whoever first built me.
That’s the story I personally like to believe, and just one of the many ways all of these
tales have changed my life.
And… that would be where the video ends… except...
I have more to say.
There are a number of myths and traditions around this topic that I actually had to trim
from the script for time, but…
I couldn’t quite let it all go.
I had to keep a full version of the video out there somewhere.
It seemed right.
Luckily, there is a place where we can share that stuff.
Where we don’t have to worry about streamlining our content so that it’s a perfect fit for
attention spans and algorithms.
I’m talking about our new streaming platform, Nebula.
Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It’s hard to be as honest and open as you want to be while trying to satisfy the algorithm
and trying to dodge some kind of terrible fate like channel-wide demonetization.
So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our own platform where we
don’t have to worry about all of that.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and full of additional content we normally
have to cut out for Youtube.
Including the extended version of this video.
And we’re not the only ones.
The same is true for so… many… other… amazing creators.
It’s a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don’t even actually have to pay for Nebula if you don’t
want to.
The good people at Curiosity Stream want to make sure we indie creators will always have
this special space, so they’ve decided to foot the bill for Nebula for anyone who signs
up with them.
Get a year of Curiosity Stream, and you get a year of Nebula for free.
If you like highly-produced documentaries—and I mean really highly produced, this beats
just about anything you’ll find on netflix—I cannot recommend Curiosity Stream enough.
It’s got thousands of titles, including videos about everything from prehistoric aquatic
monsters to the cutting edge of modern science.
For this video, I spent a lot of time watching a playlist they put together called The Science
of You.
If you liked the discussion of identity and the role of the name here, you’ll probably
love documentaries like “Predict my future: The Science of Us” and “Unraveling The
Creative Mind”, which go into far greater depth than I could ever manage about the actual
scientific phenomenon occurring in our creative minds—the qualities that identify us and
our art.
This video is a starting place for your inspiration.
Follow it up with these, and I guarantee the things you create will be so much more interesting
for it.
They’ve done their best to make it all accessible, too.
Tale Foundry fans who sign up for a year of access now will save 26% on their subscription.
That’s just $14.79 a YEAR—not per month, per year—for both Curiosity Stream and Nebula,
which is a ridiculous price for a streaming service.
Click the link in the description (or go to CuriosityStream.com/talefoundry) and use the
code “talefoundry” to get access to both streaming services for less than $15 a year.
And… that’s it for this video!
There’s usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in the mean-time,
come join our community!
We have a discord server that’s basically like a big family of creatives—a lot of
love, there.
We also run writing groups on Twitch every week, if you want to get some practice in!
You can find links to all of it in the description.
Hope to see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I’ll see you…
next time.
Bye!