Flagging the Fisherfee and Fjordfee

Flagging the Fisherfee and Fjordfee 

Names and Naming Post 6 

When I started writing the Fairy in the Bed series, I dealt with just one kind of fay. As

the series expanded, I brought in more. To justify having them different (they're all fay or fairies, but many of them categorise themselves beyond that) I came up with naming systems to suit each group.

Part of the fun, if not making up the names from scratch, lies in adapting existing names and finding enough that fit recognisably into a culture.

The fisherfee, aka fisherfolk are one of the varieties of seafay. They're related to the seamen and waterfolk, and although they are numerous enough, they don't choose to make themselves evident most of the time. 
So far, only two of these enigmatic folk have popped up in the Fairy in the Bed world. One is the unnamed fisher maid in the short story Feeling the Waves, which appears in the book Sea Shanties. This one declines to give her name when she encounters the old water maid Hula and the three girls Laura, Richenda and Amaryllis. The second appears in Man Overboard. She and Jisinia Peckerdale know one another only well enough to nod to, and when Jisinia wants to ask a favour, the fisher maid declines to reveal her name. A little later, she tells Jin she may call her Divka. This may be her name, but it might also be just a convenient pseudonym. Dívka is a Czech word meaning "girl", which might (or not) be a coincidence.
If this is a placeholder name, it might be that all the fisherfolk use pseudonyms with people outside their secretive society. One thing is certain, fisher folk are most unlikely to come over here. There's no question of them being able to pass and no question of them wanting to.

Fjordfee, as the name implies, are fay who live in the fjord region over there. So far, we haven't encountered them in the series, but they're bound to show up sometime, possibly in Northern Light. They'll be inclined to favour  names with a Scandinavian flavour.

The Fairy in the Bed series is showcased at Larksinger while the books can be purchased from the publisher.

About the Blog

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!