Old English, Germanic and Indo-European parallels in fantasy poetonyms

Abstract

The article is devoted to the question of poetonymy etymology in the literary fantasy works. Fantasy literature is characterised by its relative detachment from real events, since authors working with it build their own new worlds, which are not similar to the surrounding and reality we live in. Therefore, such literary works require nominations for everything that is newly created by the author. The enumerated features of fantasy fiction demand from the authors to enhance their own onomastic pursuit and to employ the best of their imagination. Eventually, it results in a large variety of author's neologisms and proper names referring to the characters, places and events described in the work. Thus, poetic innovation used by the author often involves diverse combinations of various morphemes, parts of words and borrowings from different languages. It is preconditioned by the author’s vision of the text, the cultural design of the work, melodiousness, the necessary word-formation pattern of a particular poetonym, characteristics of its referent, etc. Proper names are considered to be lexical units that gain additional functions, special semantic load, symbolic content and unique structural features in the context of a literary work. Studying the sources of the borrowings as well as the primary author's vision of the poetonymosphere in the literary work allows us to shed light on his unconventional idiolect, linguistic picture of the world and complex representation of the invented world. Moreover, this process helps to determine naming trends in the selected literary genre. The abovementioned facts prove the relevance of the conducted scientific research, devoted to the study of the poetonymy origin and its roots on the example of the fantasy cycle «The Chronicles of Narnia» by C.S. Lewis. The results obtained in the course of the analysis enable us to conclude that the poetonymy of the literary fantasy has its own etymological features with the active use of Old English, Germanic, and Indo-European forms and elements in the naming process.