In ​“The Arch and the Keystone,” Mythlore 38:1 (Fall/​Winter 2019), 5 – 17, Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger argues that the conflicts and contradictions she sees in Tolkien’s essays and fiction do not call for harmonization but rather should be embraced for what they are: ​“two opposing and conflicting sides of one person, whose contention makes him who he is as well as what he is, the keystone that creates the arch” of The Lord of the Rings out of the friction of the two sides (16). Unfortunately, the alleged contradictions, e.g. between the despair of the Beowulf essay and the hope for eucatastrophe in the essay ​“On Fairy-Stories,” reflected by light and darkness in The Lord of the Rings, are created by her failure to understand Tolkien’s biblical worldview, where the impossibility of salvation in this life does not contradict, but is the logical setting for, the hope of a redemption not fully realized until the next. Thus an understanding of Tolkien’s biblical eschatology dissolves the alleged tension and lets us replace Flieger’s keystone with the cornerstone of faith in Iluvatar and the true hope of Middle-earth.

Names are, in one sense, the outward indication of a power negotiation. The namer, the one who bestows a new name or uses an already-given name, reveals, through the choice of name they give or use, their relationship to that which they name. The act may indicate a more or less equal relationship; it may be an attempt to exert power over someone or something by imposing a name on it or by using a name that will influence those who hear it; or it may be a signal of submission and subordination, using a name to flatter or placate someone or something more powerful.

In Genesis 2, naming is the first officially delegated sub-creational task, for God does not name the animals, but brings them before Adam to see what he will call them. All humans have the power to name, to rename, to take a new name, to give a nickname, to deny a name, to deadname … and Good Omens, book and show alike, is rife with significant acts of naming by both humans and other powers, from Crawley renaming himself Crowley to the constantly changing self-claimed sobriquets of the Four Other Horsemen. Adam Young, though, has this power in spades. Reality bends to his will, and his acts of naming stick and change what he names. While other name stories will be examined in this paper, the naming acts I will concentrate on will be the naming of Adam himself, Adam’s naming of the hell-hound as he comes into his power, and his climactic act (in the show) of naming Satan to be not his father, and thereby making it so.