[Kalimac]

I knew a girl in college named Laurelin, and we all thought it was very pretty. I'm not sure about naming kids after LOTR characters, though (at least the really well-known ones like Galadriel and Arwen and so forth - names like Laurelin would be better because they haven't got millions of people thinking of a movie actor when they hear them). I'm not against naming children after literary characters (for a while I was considering naming mine after characters in "Eugene Onegin", pretty sad, eh [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]) but I imagine it could be pretty hard on the child. It's one thing to be named "Catherine" because your mother loved "Wuthering Heights", because Catherine is a name independent of the book, so to speak - it isn't always associated with "Oh, Heathcliff! Heathcliff!". OTOH if your name is Bilbo or Frodo, those names only exist because of LOTR, and inevitably people would think of it, joke about it, think they're the first ones to ask "Hey, where's your ring" etc.

Pets, on the other hand, I'm all for. Our two cats now are Justinian and Theodora, since I've been wanting to use those names for cats since I was 16, but the next one will definitely be an Elvish name - they just seem very appropriate for cats, somehow.