If you ever wondered why the names of inns, alehouses, pubs and taverns in fantasy fiction are always like that, consider that the genre builds a lot on the culture of the British Isles. So why are those pubs etc like that?
Because even a small village would have at two of them in walking distance and ten more in the market town. You’d need to know which one people meant to meet at, set directions to/from, and discuss in conversation. And not many people could read.
So pub signs are often imaginative and a little improbable. You commission an illustrator to paint the sign, hang it up and everyone knows you mean The Green Dragon. It’s immediate different from The Red Dragon, which could be on the same street. It’s distinctive, memorable, and anyone looking at the sign for the first time knows exactly what the pub is called.
In olden times you could apparently indicate it just by putting any representation of the name, like The Bunch of Grapes or The Ball and Castle or The Hatchet would have actual grapes or an actual hatchet, but I think that got stupid, or possibly too difficult in some cases (The World’s End, The Dandy Lion, The Unicorn.)
That’s why ye olde fantasy taverns are called stuff like The Dashing Bear, The Pig and Fiddle, Seven Stars. It’s based on the real life historical nomenclature which is based on what makes an easy sign.
(Why does it say Wadworth? That’s the brewery that licenses the pub. British people narrowing their eyes can geoguessr which pub this is.)
One of the best fantasy worldbuilding resources I ever found, which I now pass on to the world at large, is the wikipedia entry for ‘Pub Names’. You wouldn’t think that would be a stable enough category for wikipedia to have an entry for it, but it absolutely is and it absolutely does.
Also fascinating is the way context can shift around a common pub-name or pub-sign context, or both.
“The Man In The Moon” is a pub name you’ll run into moderately often in the UK. The oldest ones might have had signs based on one or another concept of what face or figure people thought they saw when they looked at the Moon. One imagery that sometimes used to turn up on “Man In The Moon” pub signs refers to a legend in which people thought they were seeing the figure of a man with a bundle of brushwood, often followed by a little dog.
…This obviously isn’t an actual sign: pub signs calling back to this very old concept are hard to find these days, as the story is largely forgotten.
Far more common are images based on the heraldic imagery associated with the Moon, especially when full. (The proper terminology, man or no man, actually being “the Moon in her plenitude”.)
But then in 1969 something unusual happened. As a result, some of those pub signs changed… and sometimes the names of the pubs as well.
…The very best of these that I’ve seen (some years back) was based on the famous close shot in which Neil Armstrong, taking the photo, can be seen reflected in Buzz Aldrin’s faceplate: but I can’t seem to find any pics of that sign. Must go hunting some other time…
Aaaaaa awesome!!
(and OH THATS WHERE the “lanthorn, dog and bush of thorns” in the Midsummer Night’s Dream quote came from. Wow some people are seeing things in the moon that I gotta look harder for)
