The truth of faeries and names according to folklore:
The Internet has lead to many people thinking that faeries stealing names has always been a part of the lore. It’s actually not that common at all except in recent pop culture. The popularization of the idea of faeries wanting to steal names partly came about because of the same cross-pollination of lore that lead to the memes that perpetuate the idea. Anime like Spirited Away and modern fantasy literature stewed together with meme culture to perpetuate this idea.
In traditional Gaelic lore faeries don’t usually want to steal your name. They’re not out to get a credit card in your name while you sit there trying to remember your own birth certificate name but are drawing a blank. What they want, in most of the stories, is to *learn* your True Name. Not necessarily your given name, nickname, or even what everyone calls you. It’s not necessarily your legal name or what’s on your birth certificate. (But it can be any of those things). What they want is your TRUE name with a capital T. Your True name is NOT necessarily your legal name though that is a possibility. And no, it’s not necessarily the name you take during confirmation if you are Catholic. It’s the name that you carry deep inside. It might even be a secret name that no one knows but it IS the name you identify as deep inside, a name you associate with who and what you truly are. Everyone has a true name, whether they realize it or not.
I’ll give an example from pop culture. In Batman Beyond you see Bruce Wayne beint tornented by the villain, Vertigo. Vertigo tries to pass himself off as Brue’s subconscious but Bruce figures out it’s not his own mind because Vertigo is not calling him by his TRUE name. And in his mind Bruce’s True name, even in old age, is Batman. Terry tries telling Bruce later “You know you’re not Batman anymore, right?” and Bruce responds with “Tell that to my subconsicous.”
Bruce sees himself utterly as Batman, not as Bruce Wayne. In The Sandman: The Wake Clark Kent (Superman), and Martian Manhunter appear at The Wake but Bruce Wayne is there as Batman because that’s who he sees himself as deep down inside.
In the 1985 film Fright Night we meet has-been horror actor and TV horror host, Peter Vincent. The character Charlie Brewster has discovered that his neighbor is a real vampire and he seeks Peter’s help. When Peter finally comes to realize that Charlie is actually right and that Jerry Dandridge is, in fact, a vampire, he’s terrified. He protests that Peter Vincent is only a character and not even his real name. However, after some soul searching and character growth, and circumstances force Peter Vicent to kill a boy who recently was turned into a vampire, Peter Vincent comes to embrace his persona. He realizes that Peter Vincent isn’t merely a character. He is the hero he always secretly wanted to be, the hero he NEEDS to be. And so he repeats to himself “I am Peter Vincent, the Great vampire Killer!” until he finally accepts that yes, this is who he is. This is who he must be now. He finally becomes the character he had played, the persona of who he had always secretly longed to be but was afraid of. By the end of the film he was, indeed, Peter Vincent. You never even learn his “real” name in the movie because that does not matter. It’s not who he truly is. He IS Peter Vincent.
In Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman the main character (who is the living embodiment of dreams) is over ten-billion-years-old but he seems to consider the relatively recent (only a few thousand years old) name of Morpheus to be his true name. He can be summoned by calling out this name. This is why it annoyed me that G. Willow Wilson (In The Dreaming: Waking Hours comic) depicted Heather After (who is trans) as having her deadname being her true name and the story tried to make it empowering that she determined that true names have no real power. I think it would have been more satisfying if her chosen name of Heather After turned out to be her true name. Heather is a great character but that was a terrible plot point. Her Deadname should NEVER be perceived as her true name even if true names hold no power in the story. Heather After (her chosen name) should have been her True Name and it would have been a confirmation of this if there was power in it. A True Name is not necessarily a legal name or birth name or even the most well known name that you answer to though it can be any of those things. What matters is that it is the name you consider yourself. Sometimes you, yourself, may not even know your own true name but if someone calls it, you’ll know it, your very soul will feel it. One could even surmise that the historic Vlad (Vladislaus) the Third of Wallachia AKA Vlad Tepes (The impaler), known as Kazıklı Bey by the Ottomans, had chosen his own true name when he chose the patronymic of Dracula (with various archaic spellings) to honor his father and his membership to the Order of the Dragon (Dracul). Dracula means Son of the Dragon.
And yes, a True Name can change over time but it is not common and does not happen often. Some people take years trying to find out their own True Name.
So why do faeries want to learn someone’s true name? Well, it’s simple. Knowledge has power and this is a particular type of power. In occult practices if you know a magical entity’s true name you can invoke them, summon them to you, banish them or bind and enslave them. This is why faeries want to know your true name. It’s much more potent than stealing the knowledge of a legal name. It is to gain utter power of you by knowing your truest self, the name by which you could be conjured and can pull at your essence.
To me this is far more interesting than the idea of a faery stealing your name. They can, through knowing your true name, lay claim to YOU!
(Faerie art by Brian Froud from his book Good Faeries / Bad Faeries).
