I am grateful that my parents chose to give both my brother and I names of our own, so that we did not have to be named after other relatives. It was a tradition in previous generations of both sides of my family to give a small set of names generation after generation, such that both my father and his father had the same first names (albeit different middle names) and if that was not enough, my father had the same first and middle names as one of his great-grandfathers. Likewise, my maternal uncle and maternal grandfather ended up with the same first name and one middle name, while my maternal grandfather had an additional middle name. When I visited Pennsylvania for the most recent time, after the death of my paternal grandmother in 2007 (who somehow managed to outlive all of her children and die alone as a widow on a lonely farm with only a couple of friendly black labs for company as she grew so tired that she could not even climb the stairs and had to sleep in a living room, I noted something strange about the name used for my father. Because I have light hair (a little lighter on the top than I would prefer), I closely resemble a somewhat more slender version of my father, albeit with freckles to go along with our shared ruddy skin tone. So, people who did not know me at all were able to tell that I was Johnny’s boy, even though my father (John) had died a year before and I was not particularly well-known among the area. My father had died at 59, and was a hard-working and dutiful kind of man, for all of his flaws, but he was not known as John but rather as Johnny, even though his father had died about twenty years before. My father never got to own his own name, because his father had taken it already. It struck me as a particularly sad moment, as if a funeral was not sad enough.

In the most recent season of “Game of Thrones” there is an episode called “First Of His Name” which looks at the crowning of King Tommen after the horrible poisoning death of his bullying and cowardly older brother Joffrey. What does it mean to be the “first of his name?” His brother too had been “first of his name,” and there is a certain opportunity that one has to establish a reputation and clear a trail that is not present when one has been named after others. Monarchs often have names that are selected from a very small pool, and those names carry with them baggage, a reputation to uphold, that is not present when someone comes along without that context and can establish a reputation for others to follow. Sometimes that reputation can be a good one, and sometimes it can be a bad one. Sometimes names become so notorious that they are never used again because of the dishonor that is brought to them. Hurricanes, for example, have their names retired if they are particularly horrible storms, so that no storm has to be called by that name and summon that sort of fear ever again. Names like Katrina, Andrew, or Wilma will never again be used for hurricanes not because something is wrong with the name, but because the storms were so damaging that their names have become attached with horror and destruction, and no one wants to be consciously reminded of that again when it comes to storms. Likewise, the name Judas, which one had positive connotations among the Jews (for Judas Maccabeus, who helped establish an independent Jewish state against the hated Seleucid Empire), fell rapidly into disfavor after the treachery of Judas Iscariot, leaving even with that as a name to be known as Jude instead.

Earlier today I saw an adorable picture of the son of someone I had known from my graduate school days (the friend of mine, who is a writer himself with interests in military history and speculative fiction) is also a fan of “Game of Thrones.” He has a photo of his toddler and a humorous title that includes the name of the boy as “the first of his name.” He may be small and wearing a cardboard crown today, but he will have the chance someday to make his own name, to establish a reputation for his name among his friends and family and within his community. He may not realize it today, but he owes his parents a debt of gratitude for allowing him to have his own name, and not to be permanently saddled with the name (and reputation) of a father or uncle to live up to. It is hard enough to live up to the reputation in one’s own family by having a family name. It is a much deeper burden to have the first and last name, or all of the names, of someone else to live up to. Sometimes we just want to be the first of our name, and live our own lives to the best of our modest abilities.