Name Headcanon: 2p England
It's convenient having a human name if you look and act like a human.
All of the personifications have had their own human name. It's only natural, and it keeps them from using any given name at random and definitely sounding like they're using a pseudonym.
Except names change as people change and as nations change. Many personifications have altered their names over the years, at least to some degree.
Oliver Kirkland is certainly no exception.
See, Oliver is a name that was introduced to the English by the French in the mid to late 11th century. It's not native to English.
Which is a bit of a problem for 2p England, considering he's has been alive since well before the Norman Conquest.
But if you traveled to before the Normans conquered England, before England was a thought in anyone's mind, Oliver had no name. He had no country as we think of it today, though you might have called him Albion. He represented a loose collection of different peoples all united by two things.
He represented the Britons, and back then they lived under the Roman Empire.
At this time, he didn't represent all the Britons, mind you. His mother takes credit for that. But Oliver was undoubtedly British himself, albeit with a healthy helping of Roman influence.
So if he did have a given name it probably would have been Brythonic, and it definitely wouldn't have been Oliver. Not yet anyway.
But he had no name, only Albion.
Britannia was always a bit of a free spirit, something she wanted to instill in her sons in spite of Rome's meddling meticulous nature. She liked the idea of waiting until her boys were old enough to choose their own names, just as she had done.
But Rome didn't like that very much. He was a strict man, never approving of such fanciful ideas. Having a bunch of unruly Celtic boys all respond to variations of Albion and Alba was too much of a hassle.
And so Quintus was the first human name to be bestowed upon 2p England.
It was plain and simple, and easy enough to remember. He was Britannia's fifth son, so you couldn't say it wasn't fitting.
But it was so dreadfully dull.
Even back then, Oliver liked celebrating his individuality. Such a plain, common name like Quintus just wouldn't do! It wasn't even that he minded having a Latin name, but he didn't want a boring Latin name at all.
To anyone who lent a sympathetic ear and to anyone who didn't. Rome got so sick of hearing his complaints that he eventually asked the boy if he had any better ideas.
One of Rome's grandsons, a charming boy who went by Flavius at the time, suggested Marinus for young Albion. It was fitting but it had character, meaning of the sea.
Rome rolled his eyes at that and offered his own suggestion: Spurius. Albion didn't like it as much but it wasn't that bad, right? At least it was better than plain old Quintus.
Until Rome's youngest grandson, Lucius, gleefully informed him that the name implied he was of an illegitimate birth. A bastard.
So then Albion chose Laelius as his new name. He didn't know what it meant but it did sound so much nicer than Quintus.
And it wasn't a low-reaching insult.
It didn't last long though.
Not long into young Albion's existence, the Roman Empire fell apart. Rome and his grandsons no longer came by. It meant he was free to spend the days with his mother and all his brothers again, right?
Maybe so, if Britannia hadn't disappeared around the same time Rome did.
Suddenly Laelius didn't feel like such a good fit. Albion didn't want to honor the Romans who split his family. He wanted to honor his mother.
And so Ailill became his new name.
It was a foreign name, an Irish one. But that was okay; the way Britannia spoke of Ireland made it seem like a magical place that her spirit could happily rest in, just like how King Arthur was resting in Avalon.
To add insult to injury, Albion never did get to spend so much time with his siblings again. The loss of their mother should have brought them together but instead it may have driven them further apart.
Coincidentally, his identity as Ailill didn't last long either.
New peoples with new cultures were looking to build new lives for themselves on his island home.
They were the perfect excuse. As he grew apart from his brothers, he blamed the new settlers. They were the ones driving the Celts- and his family -further north and west.
The Angles and the Saxons built a myriad of kingdoms in the place they called Engelond. Ailill was drawn to them more and more; where else was he to turn?
But as his sense of identity changed yet again, this time from Britannic to Germanic, his Celtic name no longer felt fitting.
Unbeknownst to his family, he was thinking of them when he changed it. Ailill meant elf, and so, feeling lonely, guilty and abandoned after the loss of his mother, he still wanted to acknowledge her as he learned to embrace his newfound Germanic indentity.
This time he was Alfher, meaning elf lord.
The Anglo-Saxons were ever so terribly fond of compound names like that.
It's hard to say which of the new kingdoms he felt most drawn to. There were seemingly countless, but there were seven big players which later consolidated into four: Mercia, Northumbria, Wessex and East Anglia.
It didn't really matter which one he felt the strongest ties to. A boy with few obligations, Alfher was free to travel between kingdoms, and he often did. They all felt so familiar; his Anglo-Saxon identity had lasted about as long as his Romano-British identity.
Albion was a figment of the mythical past. He was Engelond now. And Engelond was him.
So when the raids began and a new threat started lurking around English shores, Alfher felt defensive of the four kingdoms. Of the people who felt so decidedly his.
But he was wildly outnumbered, and he faced conquest once again. It wasn't all bad; his new Germanic status meant that these northern raiders (who often wanted to build their own towns just like the Anglo-Saxons) weren't so foreign after all. Just pushy.
In fact, if circumstances were different he may have befriended the boys who visited him during the raids, the ones who called themselves descendants of Germania.
Germania. The man who dealt the final blow to Rome. History best not repeat itself.
The northerners continued to invade, and soon they annexed most of Engelond under an arrangement they called the Danelaw. Alfher made his new home in Wessex, the sole independent kingdom.
We won't go into the details of how the only English king to earn the epithet "the great" made peace with the Danes and made great progress for the English. But before long, Alfher was able to call a united England his proud home.
But it was a tumultuous time in history, and he and England both were about to go through another radical change. One that would alter his identity yet again.
Of everyone outside his family, Alfher probably had the most in common with this instigator. They were both born Celts, both formerly Roman, and both faced a lot of conflict from the northern seafarers.
That said, people change a lot in a thousand years. Or so you'd think. He touted himself as one of Rome's grandsons and was called France instead of Gaul, but other than that he was just as grumpy as he was the first time Alfher had ever met him.
But he was older and a little more grown up now, and England wondered if he had been this interesting when they first met. Why, Alfher couldn't even bring himself to correct him when he mispronounced his name as Olivier!
Long story short, the name stuck. Even when Alfher did work up the nerve to correct France, the familiar stranger assured him that Alfher was an ugly name anyway and Olivier was far more refined.
Looks like he was French now...
It was hard to argue. After the Norman Conquest, French culture permeated just about every aspect of English life. Well more so for the nobility, but the change affected everyone to a significant degree. There were even English kings that spoke no English!
Maybe he wanted to curry favor, maybe it was just time for the change he so craves, but the English personification was only too happy to become Olivier.
It was another few hundred years before the English were well and truly English again, but Olivier never sought out another major name change. French maintained a firm grip on high society, and over the centuries England himself never knew if he was going to use the French Olivier or the English Oliver.
Funnily enough he wasn't formally decided until the 19th century, although he had been leaning towards Oliver for a number of years. It was only after the publishing of a certain book that he truly made up his mind.
Admittedly he was fond of Dickens at the time, something that's still true to today.