Ripheus23 Posted July 8, 2025 Posted July 8, 2025 Two fantasy settings that I'm familiar with, which make a lot out of this talk of "True Words" and "True Names": D&D/Planescape, and the Thomas Covenant novels. In D&D, the emphasis is True Words generally, like the Last Word (possibly the "true word for" destruction, due to its apocalyptic ravaging uses), or "whatever the Lady of Pain would speak in if She ever spoke at all." In the Covenant books, the importance of "true names" is mainly a feature of the last three books but the idea is that knowing someone's true name gives you some kind of power over them at times, or if you learn your own true name, it gives you power for/of yourself. In Planescape, the weight of distributed belief can condense into objects of mere belief, now reified, which seems much like many and varied phenomena described in the cosmere. There are also sixteen encircling upper/outer planes of existence with an anomalous 17th in the "center." (The Lady of Pain happens to dwell in the anomalous city at the uppermost center of the 17th plane itself.) So, I assume that it is possible, in the cosmere, that if you and enough other people "merely believed" that you had a "True Name," somehow you would then end up having one via Cognitive shenanigans? Or are the Dawnshards as "Commands" an example, not of True Names, but of True Words? I'm reminded of the Power of Command yielded by the Blood of the Earth in the Covenant books. This was used to awful effect in one book, a threat to awfully use it was made in another, and in yet another, it, as the mere Blood, was the fuel source for the final apocalypse. The equivalent of True Words in that world was a phrase starting with the word "Melenkurion," and this word was also applied to the name of the mountain of the Earth's Blood. So, the Power of Command uses the raw symbolic energy of the concept of true words/names, to accomplish its task. How it works is you choose some non-divine entity to Command, you drink the Blood, and then you issue the Command you have in mind. (The "non-divine" qualifier is fudging some, because there is an effectively divine monster at the center of the final plot to destroy the world, which is susceptible to the Blood and the Command.) This is very much like what we are shown can be gained by knowing someone's true name, there: you can command them a priori, or you gain divine power that you lost (if you learn your own true name). But the Blood is so purely concentrated out of the essence of the Earth and its life that it embodies the sheer general possibility of "truly naming" things, and dominating their will thereby. Likewise, the Dawnshards are apex-tier objects if anything of such an instrumental character is in the cosmere, and they are Commands, used by Adonalsium no less, as well as the future first Vessels of the Shards, and apparently people in the Rosharan star system. But so they are Commands in the sense of falling under a certain category of Intent dynamics. There is also Commandment in Awakening, for example. Has Sanderson variated over the "classical" fantasy concepts of true words/names in the sense of "replacing" those concepts, in this environment, with the more refined/precise conception of Commands under Intent, modulo the cosmere as a world susceptible to belief-based concrete fluctuations in reality? Or is there still a more "exact" counterpart to "knowing the true word for something" in the cosmere? P.S. Not sure how to interpolate the Latter-day Saint background element, here. I think they credit the word "Elohim" with being the proper name for God the Father, whereas they reserve "Jehovah"/YHWH for the Son of God, who is both a god but not the Most High God, there. (On the other hand, it is still the godly Son who Atones for the sin of the world and is the living keystone of salvation as such, so they might not really be claiming that the Son is at all less exalted than the Father is.) But I know not whether they think that the word "Elohim" is a "default" name for the Father, even as a personal name, or if they conceive Him as having chosen it (at least relative to us) from among unknowably many possibilities. I think there's a major strand of Christian metaphysics throughout the ages, going back to "new names" mentioned in the Book of Revelation, which is a huge part of where the modern classical fantasy theme of "true names" might have even come from, after all, though.
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