My Names

by Arethinn

Current

Arethinn na'eleth aTinderel - I call this a Sidhe(-ish) name, but I don't have specific memories of an existence where I was called by it. I know the pieces are a personal name, a word possibly signifying birth order or some other kind of status, and a House or family name, but I don't have any clear ideas about what any of them actually signify, if indeed Arethinn and Tinderel have "meanings" in the usual sense. The place currently occupied by na'eleth has been through a couple of stages, including siltheri and ne ruinnas. I have sometimes had a little fun patching together pieces in the way of Eshéarendelári (q.v., below), such as ar(a)- "noble" and -thin(n) "grey" from Sindarin, or involving Irish ard "high" and diminutive ending -in, to mean things like "the noble grey/pale one" or "the little noble one". But in fact I constructed Arethinn sometime in 2007 through early 2008 by feel-listening my way through putting together various bits I liked the sound of and trying to hit on something "right" (sort of similar to how I first came up with Mhirathkia, q.v. below). I started trying it out as an alternate name in 2009, or at least, that's when I have the evidence of billing myself as "Eshari/Arethinn" on that year's MythiCalia workshop schedule.

In the April 2010 post where I talked about finally changing my email address (and quite possibly was when I changed LiveJournal/Dreamwidth usernames as well), I said:

I've been pondering it for a while. Eshari has a lot of inertia as a name and it's not like I won't answer to it, but it's a question of Becoming. I'm trying to open a path here rather than considering it false advertising to not already be Enough of what it describes. I don't have the "OH YEAH that is totally the right thing!" feeling about it, but then I don't have strong reactions to much of anything lately (where "lately" = the past two or three years), so I am kind of blundering around trying to use mental faculties where intuition is lacking.

And in a followup comment on the LJ post (note the use of siltheri as mentioned above, which I just again mistyped as silteri!):

Briefly, something more sidhe-ish, although I don't make the claim that this is My Sidhe Name. It does have a full form, though: Arethinn siltheri aTinderel, Tinderel being a "family" name and siltheri being a word of unknown significance (and capitalization -- and also, I misspelled it twice as silteri trying to type it here, soo...), whether it is another personal name piece or some kind of title/kinship designator (I wonder whether it might mean "small-sidhe", that is, someone essentially insignificant vs. the great Lords-and-Ladies, but I have no proof or even strong inklings on this). It wasn't "given in vision" as Eshari was lo those many years ago; it resulted from playing around with sounds that "seemed right" until I arrived at something that seemed to fit.

A post from January 2017 about an amusing connection with Tinderel in particular, and touching on the "fun patching together of pieces" pastime/technique:

NB that with the below I'm not trying to make any objective statement that the name is Elvish, even assuming it's "real" at all in the first place; just that poking at names in this way to see if they can be made sense of is something of an old pastime we used to engage in on some of the old otherkin lists (ask me about "Eshearendelari" sometime), and can be both fun and poetically illuminating.

I think I've wibbled before that if you were loose about forming the word, "Tinderel" could parse out as having something to do with glint/spark: tin- v. to glint, tinda adj. glinting, silver, tindë n. a glint; cf. Tintallë kindler (fem.), that is, she who causes to sparkle; also cf. Tindomerel or Tindomiel daughter of (starry) twilight. But the reading Tinderiel, "maiden garlanded with glints/sparkles" (cf. Galadriel, maiden garlanded with light/radiance) actually hadn't previously occurred to me. As an individual's personal name eventually applied to a whole House, that could actually make sense. See also caraven's blether about "accents" within this kind of language, basically whereby it might not match up with the Professor's construction in all details of pronunciation, or of course the variation already known to exist between e.g. Valarin, Noldorin, and Telerin. (And of course when we're talking Book of Lost Tales, at least half the bets are off anyway.)

Also, the character we finally know as Melian the Maia, wife of Elu Thingol and mother of Luthien, evolved from two prior figures: Melian < Wendelin (a "fay") < Tindriel.

Mhirathkia - Current in certain contexts, anyway. The internal history of this name is a bit muddled. Its genesis was primarily the thought that I needed a name to go by among these faery and elven people I had discovered and just kind of conjured it whole-cloth for "listening for a name that was right" in that openly spiritual way I was more capable of doing at the time. At the time I sometimes called myself a "sidhedragon", so in a way it was meant to encompass both, although the dragon I had in mind then was black and green and from a totally different world than the silver dragon that I now associate with the name Mhirathkia(I don't have any name for the black and green one). But because a lot of people at that time who used "sidhe" generally meant "Tuatha De Danann", and I knew that wasn't me, I started feeling uncomfortable with or even unworthy of the word "sidhe". In any case Mhirathkia was mostly supplanted by Eshari (q.v., below) when that name came along, but I still use it occasionally on dragon-specific lists/forums.

Past

Eshari (Eshari Starling, Eshéarendelári) - I received this name in a spirit-travel journey in early November 1998 (see below). I was shown a city called Eshari and it was intimated to me that it was "mine" and therefore its name was mine (or possibly vice versa). This "City of Eshari" actually didn't really come up in any important way again, but the name stuck.

Starling was mostly a pun: it referred both to the word star plus the English suffix -(l)ing that can mean kin or descendant of and also sometimes have a diminutizing effect (as goose and gosling); and to the bird, whose plumage can resemble the starry sky, although that is not actually the etymology of its name.

Eshéarendelári, if I remember right, was born spontaneously when I conceived a desire for a long "star-dragon form" of the name that could plausibly contract to Esh'ari, although unfortunately the post to TirNanOc where I first used it (January 19, 2000) that might have had specific evidence about that is missing from my archive and I only see it in followup quotes over the next few days. A fellow listmember named K'Llayna offered an interpretation of "people of the waterfall of light" or "people of the shining/flaming/sparkling waterfall" which was cobbled together from paging through MacBain's Dictionary of Old Gaelic plus a dose of sussing out Feel. (I'm not sure why she thought Old Gaelic was the place to go, whether it was a specific intuition about me personally or just that frequent and not necessarily appropriate idea that "magic faery stuff" means it ought to be "Celtic".) We batted this around for a bit and some stuff about personal celestial associations came in from another list. The upshot is I tuned it to mean "(from) the high place of the sparkling/shining/flaming waterfalls/trails of light", with a visual of shooting stars or comets and such (even though both of those are really just lumps of rock and ice and not stars at all!). I don't attribute a lot of literal "truth" to this, but I still like the definition and it has poetic truth.

Fans of Tolkien and scholars of Old English may notice the infix between Esh- and -ari is earendel, which can be a name for Venus as the morning star or even refer to Christ, and which Tolkien borrowed for his early work The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star that evolved into his legend of Eärendil (the father of Elrond). This was not deliberate on my part; it was just sounds that "seemed right", although I can't rule out that there was something subconscious or intuitive going on. I was aware at the time that earendel could refer to the morning star, although to judge by the way I questioned my spelling and said "Scandinavian? Saxon? I forget, I read it somewhere", it wasn't a firm piece of knowledge in my head the way it is now. Nor did I apparently have a real understanding of the Tolkien connection because my account of trying to look up pieces in an unknown Quenya and/or Sindarin wordlist sure seems to me now like ignorant flailing about; I definitely hadn't yet read The Lord of the Rings at this point and may not yet have read The Silmarillion.

Lirrimirr Anavrin (Tass) - See post below for some background, but actually I never seriously used Lirri as a name for people to call me or that I would sign on posts, more just considered it the name of a particular past life. The same is true of Tass when considered in an otherkin context; although because I did use tass as my LiveJournal name for quite some time, occasionally people who had met me that way would refer to me by it like any internet handle. (No relation to the Russian news agency, which I only heard of many years later!)

vixen, wish Only kinda-sorta serious, more handles than names, although I gave a bit of an excited justification for wish at the time, something about being a "living, breathing wish" which was definitely related to my contemporary concept of being-fae-in-the-world. Whaddya want, I was like 20 years old.

The below is from a post to a now unknown list, October 2004

"Eshari" is actually a name I got on a "shamanic" journey in the late summer / early fall of 1998. [Note: this statement is slightly incorrect as it was actually November. Probably I was thinking of when I got into "shamanism" in the first place.] It was the name of a city I visited, and it was communicated to me that the city was mine, or was me (in some fashion). Whether this has any literal (even literal-non-physical) truth to it I am now very doubtful, but the name itself seems to have stuck. At some point in the past I randomly expanded it into "Eshéarendelári", which a couple friends and I retconned into "from the high place of the sparkling/shining/flaming waterfalls/trails of light." (It's suitable, but again, no claims of literality with regards to "remembering" a language or anything.)

Mhirathkia is the very first name I ever went by among otherkin, way back on wyldefae in 1998. That name was got by attempting to place myself in a kind of trance state and "channel" a right name to use. It has since had several variants (Mhararathkia, Mhirathekrelkira, abbreviations Mhira or Mhi'kia), but generally fallen into disuse. My current conception of it is that it may apply to one of my dragon lives.

Lirrimirr Anavrin (abbrev. Lirri) is a name I attach to a life as some sort of "pixy" which not only tended to change sex at puberty, but also bonded with an animal in some kind of magical ritual that involved ... absorbing... the animal, and gaining physical traits from it. Lirri is actually the mature female (my memory-fragment is of being rather old and grumpy, actually), whereas as a young male I recall, or at least use, the name Tass (which is also my livejournal name, if anyone wondered where, in part, that came from). I don't know how I "got" either of those... just sort of thinking out loud while focusing on the fragment, I think, until the sounds formed what seemed like a name.

Last updated 12/27/2021