"The origins of the names of the Primarchs " Topic

Hi guys,

I've spent the weekend working on a blog post about the real world origins of the Primarchs' names. It was meant to be a quick five minutes but became quite an epic task!

Please take a look here: –

toyznthehood.com/312/primarchs

I hope you like it!

I enjoyed it

Interesting, and some good points. The GW staff have pilfered from all corners of the world, just as Tolkien did in his works. Only GW also pilfered from other creative works from others, and modified it a bit here and there. It's all fun.

So, it's not just bad Latin.

Good job.

Leman Russ, was Russell Mann(sp) who worked their at the time, I think Lionel was as well.

Doc, Sneezy, Dopey, Bashful, Happy, Sleepy and Grumpy?.

Neat blog. Well done.

Very interesting … I've heard some of those explainations before … G/W is nothing if not eclectic on many levels …

Very Cool! There's all kinds of interesting references -mostly literary and religious- in 40k.

The homeworld of the Dark Angels was Caliban…

If you are familiar with the poem "The Dark Angel" and the life of Lionel Johnson. – the whole matter of the chapter and their dark secret becomes quite amusing in a juvenile way.

Also, Lionel was betrayed by Luther. – Fantasy has similar inspiration in it's names too – such as the warrior priest Luther Huss being a mix of Martin Luther and John Huss. The fact that GW pulls from all sorts of influences and mixes them up is sort of what makes it interesting and appealing to me.

I pride myself on my ignorance of the 40K universe. That said, I had one comment.

Lorgar – Word Bearers
Logar is one of the provinces of Afghanistan. The name is a combination of Loy (Great) and Ghar (Mountain). This explanation does have a resonance of biblical stories which would be in keeping with the Word Bearers mission.

I'm with you on the biblical resonance but I would have looked elsewhere for the source. I would have assumed Lorgar is a corruption / derivation of Logos. In Greek philosophy this word originally meant rules and order, but evolved to mean the spiritual principle of reason pervading the universe. The documents that became the Christian bible were originally written in Greek by scholars who were familiar with this term. You know the passages written in English as "In the beginning was the Word" etc? The term "Word" is "Logos" in the original Greek. Over time the Bible was translated into Latin (the Vulgate version, for the common people, who spoke Latin not Greek), but Christian philosophers kept using the Greek word Logos to refer to the Word of God. And also the will of God, personified in the universe, and moral law written in human hearts.

So you can follow it from there: Word Bearers = carriers of the Word => their leader's name is based on the word Logos, which means Word.

"The horror … the horror …"

Cheers guys! I'm glad you enjoyed it. There's certainly a lot of stuff to be going at.

And I seem to be learning lots more too – I didn't get the Logos – Lorgar connection, that does seem pretty convincing.

I have Word Bearers, I like that Logos connection – makes a lot of sense.

Angron was also the name of a Marvel comics bad guy in the 80s (1982 or 1983).

It appeared in a Captain America/Falcon crossover issue.

Angron was an energy creature (like a jellyfish made of lightning) comes from Earth's far future, where the sun has moved into its red giant phase, and the only life left on the Earth are energy creatures like him. I saw this in early High School (which is how I can narrow down the year) so it's not like GW are even original with it.

Oh that's cool! I didn't know that. It seems the guys were quite into their Marvel Comics at that time – Malekith and his Dark Elves were bad guys in the Thor comics in the early eighties.