Leading on nicely from yesterday’s topic (Myrthin) is the theme of No-Names.
Myrthin is by no means the only No-Name in the novel, Hyth, Yarrow, Philomena and Garic are all introduced as No-Names, and Enayd chooses to become a No-Name, rejecting all claims of ownership.
Names have power in the clanlands. They do not necessarily follow traditional patriarchal lines, for it is the House with the strongest claim and not automatically the Husband’s family, which holds precedence. Therefore, anyone who married a Tywel daughter would become a Tywel, because their house is one of the strongest in the land. Outwardly, this seems to be an equalising factor between the genders in the clanlands, but it still shores up patriarchal power lines, albeit in more subtle ways. It protects the inheritance of the fathers, ensuring, for instance, that Mias Tywel’s legacy will be protected despite his only having female children living. Mias Tywel can confidently look forward to the next Tywel chieftain in his grandson, knowing that his name will always be Tywel. (As an aside, this is an example of the way that small victories, whilst they should be celebrated, are not enough to combat the cause, not the symptoms, of social oppression.)
The concepts of No-Names then, reinforce this patriarchal privilege. They penalise both the mother and the child who remains unclaimed by man. The child is not allowed to take the name of the mother, they are not allowed to take any name until they are fastened when they will take the name of their partner, having been readopted back into conventional and normative practices of society. Thus, society regulates its expected behaviours by penalising, not the perpetrators, but the victims of its transgressions.
That being said, Myrthin and Hyth both reclaim the use of their ‘No-Name’; Myrthin as a badge of his fairy-blood and the supernatural power which goes with it, and Hyth as an icon of his rebellious nature in the Broidir, which attracts a large swathe of No-Names. By choosing to be a No-Name, rather than be connected to her past, Enayd also rewrites the meaning of this namelessness, and throughout this novel, we see the way in which names, and the lack of them, emblematise identity. Society labels No-Names as identity-less, but Myrthin, Hyth and Enayd all use it as an opportunity instead to write their own identities on a black page.
Enayd No-Name (yes, she is literally called ‘No-Name’, it’s a whole thing, don’t worry about it.)
Enayd is in many ways the protagonist of the novel, though the story is split between three key women. She is the catalyst of the action, the first - and only - first-person voice we meet, and she represents the struggle to find the balance between home and identity.
Wrapped up in the character of Enayd (whose name literally means ‘soul’ in the Old Tongue) is the idea of forging your own identity - whether you ever truly can, or whether your identity will always, in part, be created by the people around you and how they react to you.
The ability to decide her own name, and reject the concepts of names as a form of identity ownership (literally becoming a No-Name in a world where names are the crux of patriarchal power lines) is crucial to the development of her character arc and the desire to be freed from the life she cannot remember, but which nonetheless haunts her.
