Fantasy author Kit Whitfield has an old post here where she discusses the importance of having a logical system of names: Names from a common culture should sound like they come from the same culture; non-English names should have a non-English sound or spelling too them (and she does not mean spelling William as Wylliam or similar trick); and that it’s awfully easy for one writer naming dozens of characters to make them all sound like they were named by the same parents.
She makes some good points. To which I’d like to add a couple of others:
•Names shouldn’t sound like famous names that readers will recognize. If you have a Chinese (or fantasy-Chinese) character named Confucius, for instance, I’d expect him to have some resemblance to the Confucius; if he’s just a generic wizard, it’s going to bug me.
For example, Marvel’s Tarzan series some years back featured a villain called Abdul Alhazred, the Mad Arab. As a Lovecraft fan, I assumed he’d be the sinister author of the Necronomicon but no, it turns out he’s not Abdul Alhazred the Mad Arab, he’s just Abdul Alhazred a Mad Arab (he was later retconned into being the Mad Arab after all). That was confusing to me and indicates a lazy job by the writer.
Similarly, Marvel’s short lived Golem series in Strange Tales featured a wizard named “Kabbala.” Didn’t bother me in the early seventies when I first read them, but now that I’m old enough to know what the Kabbala is it strikes me as absurd, like calling an evil wizard “Gospel” or “Koran” without a good reason (he didn’t appear to be Jewish or a kabbalist).
Of course, what constitutes a recognizable name is subjective. Robert E. Howard using “Acheron” for an ancient, evil kingdom in Hour of the Dragon sounds right to me, but other Greek-myth fans might be annoyed by his appropriating the name of one of the rivers of the underworld. Fantasy writer/editor Lin Carter disliked John Jakes use of “Nestorianus” for a holy prophet in the Brak the Barbarian books, recognizing it as cribbed from Christianity’s Nestorian heresy; even though I know of the heresy, I’d say that’s reasonably obscure enough to get away with.
•Names should sound right aesthetically.
Whitfield’s article focuses mostly on the cultural logic of names; I think the aesthetics are even more important. As Carter says in his excellent Imaginary Worlds, readers should not be thinking “that’s a funny name for a warrior/deity/creature” even if the linguistics are sound.
There are lots of ways to screw up aesthetics. Cutesy names. Books where all the names are flowing and kind of romantic, as Whitfield notes (though since she doesn’t provide examples, maybe she’d count some that I like—Imryrr, Melnibone, Yu-Atlanchi—in that category). Or the opposite, a mangled mess of consonants that’s meant to sound alien and only sounds ugly (Lovecraft could make Cthulhu work, but we’re not all Lovecraft—even though there was a time I tried to be). Names that just don’t sound right; as Carter puts it, a place like Stonehenge shouldn’t be called “Piccadilly.”
Of course aesthetics are even more subjective than obscure references, so there’s really no hard and fast rule here. Other than to paraphrase Mark Twain: The difference between the right name and the wrong name is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
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Howard’s use of Acheron and other mythological names was a deliberate attempt to tie in the Hyborian Age with recorded history, the idea being that the modern myths were inspired by the real kingdoms of the prehistoric age. It also subtly hints the nature and aesthetics of the people and places through association: the Aesir and Vanir, for instance, are pretty clearly Norse in context, and the two peoples serve as the inspiration for later Norse mythology.
Al, a good point—I should have mentioned that in the post.