On medieval kings and the blogosphere

Has any of my three readers ever been struck by the utter randomness of medieval king-naming conventions? Take the French, for instance. First, we have Charlemagne. Although the "the great" suffix is a classic cliche, it isn't as bad as it could be because they actually incorporate it into his first name. Pretty nifty, if I dare say so myself. Next there's Louis the Pious. He sounds like a nice kind of guy. Then there's my personal favorite, Charles Martel. There are several reasons for this:

1. This is a nice usage of foreign language - "Martel" is french for hammer, which brings me to....
   
2. It's got a historical incident behind it - because of his crushing defeat of the Muslims at Tours, people likened him to the aforesaid tool, and finally,
   
3. How many people have a metaphor in their name? Major points for such inovative creativity.

However, not so many kings were this lucky. Members of the hall of shame would include Pepin the Short, Charles the Bald, Louis the Stammerer and Charles the Fat. Wow, these poor guys' subjects must have had it in for them. How would you like to go down in history with a name like that? They obviously must have had high taxes.

I could go on and on about Viking names, but I think we'd all agree that they were pretty original in that department.



Moving on........I want to mention that my sister, Mary now has a blog. She's a lot funnier/more interesting than I am, so I'm risking losing my meager readership by mentioning it here. On top of that, she has this amazing ability to come up with an entertaining post on an unpromising topic. I wish I knew where she gets that from. Sigh.