Bastard, Beloved and the Politics of Naming: Masks and Power in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings

This article examines the politics of naming in Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings, arguing that personal names in this fantasy cycle function not as neutral identificatory tags but as semantic, symbolic, and ethical structures that shape character identity, narrative trajectory, and reader interpretation. Adopting an interdisciplinary framework grounded in literary onomastics and semiotics, with narratological, philosophical, and gender-theoretical perspectives employed as supplementary interpretive lenses, the study focuses on the two central figures of the series, FitzChivalry Farseer and the Fool, whose successive names — FitzChivalry, Fitz, the Bastard, Changer, Tom Badgerlock, Beloved for the former, and the Fool, Amber, Lord Golden, Beloved for the latter — trace parallel arcs of legitimacy, marginality, performance, and transformation. Rather than treating naming as a decorative feature of world-building, the analysis positions it as a structural device through which Hobb negotiates questions of authority, gender, kinship, and selfhood. The study opens by situating Hobb within a broader tradition of onomastic scholarship on fantasy fiction, noting that while naming in Tolkien, Le Guin, and Martin has received sustained critical attention, Hobb’s naming systems remain comparatively underexamined despite their scale and complexity across sixteen novels organized into five interconnected subseries (1995–2017). The theoretical framework combines literary onomastics (Algeo, 1985; Alvarez-Altman, 1981; Ashley, 1979, 1987; Burelbach, 1982; Coates, 2006; Van Langendonck, 2007) with semiotic and narratological tools (Saussure, 1959; Barthes, 1977, 1991; Genette, 1980; Lotman, 1990) and supplementary philosophical accounts of iterability, narrative identity, and relational recognition. Methodologically, the article proceeds through close textual analysis organized in three stages: classification of names by etymology and semantic transparency, contextual interpretation within narrative structure, and relational and contextual interpretation of naming events and name-related transformations, with passages selected for their narrative significance, particularly naming ceremonies, renaming events, acts of address, moments of concealment, and reflections on names. The analysis of Fitz demonstrates how the Anglo-Norman patronymic prefix Fitz- simultaneously grants and withholds legitimacy, producing a name that functions, in Bourdieusian terms, as unevenly distributed symbolic capital. Each subsequent alias — the socially delegitimizing truncation Fitz, the prophetic renaming as Changer, the concealment-oriented Tom Badgerlock, and the intimate, relationally constituted Beloved — is read as a distinct register of identity formation, moving from imposed classification toward self-authored and co-authored selfhood. The analysis of the Fool traces a parallel but distinct trajectory in which the successive names the Fool, Amber, Lord Golden, and Beloved organize different modes of gendered, social, and relational recognition. Butler’s account of gender performativity clarifies how the Amber identity becomes socially intelligible through reiterated forms of embodiment, address, and recognition, while Eco’s concept of the open work is employed analogically to describe the controlled interpretive plurality generated by the Fool’s shifting names. A concluding section defines “dialogic onomastics” as a mode of literary naming in which names acquire social and affective force through acts of address, recognition, repetition, acceptance, and resistance. The relational significance of Beloved is interpreted through Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity as a condensation of shared history rather than as a designation that creates identity independently of its narrative context. The article concludes that Hobb's naming practices depart from the genealogical and dynastic naming logics typical of Tolkien and Martin, proposing instead a model of “dialogic onomastics” in which names function as thresholds rather than endpoints — relational, iterable, and continuously renegotiated through affection, memory, and narrative exchange. As the first installment in a planned multi-part study, the article establishes a theoretical and methodological foundation for subsequent analyses of naming systems across the Rain Wild Traders, Bingtown, the White Prophets, and Elderling/dragon transformation narratives.