On the Recurrence of Andor
I recently finished watching the second season of Andor. If you don't know it, it's a TV show prequel to the Star Wars movie Rogue One, which takes place right before the events of A New Hope and focuses on the less-heralded members of the rebellion who put the pieces in place for Luke, Leia, Han, and crew to have their big victory. One of those characters is Cassian Andor, whose complete backstory is revealed over the two seasons of the show.
It took me a little bit to get into Andor, but once I did it's shot up my list of favorite Star Wars stories. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't watched it—but this post isn't about Andor as a show. I'm about to get way more pedantic and nerdy, because the first thing I thought of when I heard the name Cassian Andor was a different series I've loved since childhood: the Wheel of Time. In that world, Andor is a country, in fact the largest nation in the Wetlands and where most of the series' main characters were raised.
Now, there are only so many combinations of letters to go around, and with all of the many names fantasy and sci-fi writers have to come up with, I understand that coincidences can happen. But those aren't the only two major franchises to use the word. Andor is also a planet in Star Trek. Specifically, it's a gas giant in the Andoria system, one of whose moons (also called Andoria) is home to the Andorians and Aenar. The Andorians were among the founding four members of the Federation and an OG alien in the media universe, too, first appearing in the Original Series episode “Journey to Babel”, so we're not talking about some kind of obscure “alien of the week” species here.
Topping it off, Andor is also a place in Middle Earth—or, at least, what the Elves call a place. Andor in Elvish means “Land of the Gift” and it's the name they gave to Númenor, the fallen island kingdom that was once the greatest civilization of Men. Númenor was Tolkien's nod to Atlantis, a prosperous kingdom that was destroyed after starting a war with the Valar (its capital, Armenelos, is a recurring setting in the TV show The Rings of Power).
It's possible there are other Andors I don't even know about, but it's already enough to make me wonder: How and why did four of the best-known SFF worlds end up using this one word?
What's the original source of Andor?
A quick dig on Google reveals that Andor is an actual human name, though a less common one today than it was in the past. Various baby name dictionaries attribute it to Greek, Hungarian, or Scandinavian origin. In Greek, it derives from Andréas, which was anglicized into the name Andrew and means something akin to “many, courageous warrior”. The Hungarian version has a similar meaning of “brave” or “manly”.
The Scandinavian origin is of more interest for answering this particular question. The root “And” refers to the god Thor, while “or” means eagle. That makes Andor's rough translation “Thor's eagle” and gives it some hefty Norse mythological implications. When it was used as a name in ancient times, it would've been a direct reference to Thor and intended to convey his attributes like strength, nobility, and courage—so very similar to the Greek and Hungarian meanings, just takes a different trip to get there.
Tolkien drew heavily on Norse mythology, so this Scandinavian connection almost certainly explains how Andor ended up as a name in Lord of the Rings. I'd also guess that the Wheel of Time use is a link in this same chain. The country of Andor is Jordan's analog to England in the middle ages, so it would have made sense if his name for it was inspired by one of the Kingdoms of Men (especially considering Lord of the Rings is clearly an inspiration for other aspects of the world). The name Númenor is too distinctive and well-known, but Andor is more obscure, giving Jordan more freedom to port it over. It's also possible that Jordan himself was directly inspired by Norse mythology. The underpinning time structure of recurring ages lends itself to slant references to past Earth cultures, though there are fewer overt Norse references in the Wheel of Time's worldbuilding than in Tolkien's.
Andor's leap into sci-fi
One of the tricky things about sleuthing out name origins in Star Trek is that the original creators often just picked things or made them up on the fly then retconned it into the logic of the world down the line. This is especially the case with things from the Original Series. Not only was a lot about the universe still in flux, but a good number of decisions were made out of necessity or expediency more than creative intent.
Andor is one of those elements whose history across the original series and the movies is messy. The name and identity of the planet shifted a few times—sometimes Andor was the name of the moon itself and Andoria was just the star, or sometimes they were both Andoria, or sometimes there was no moon and Andoria was the planet. It was around the time of Enterprise that the writers clarified Andor is the planet and Andoria its moon.
In the current canon, Andoria is an icy moon where the temperature only goes above freezing a few weeks a year. The Andorians and Aenar live in underground cities connected by elaborate tunnels. This icy landscape is very different from the island paradise of Númenor, so it seems unlikely that was a direct inspiration.
In her original description of the Andorians, “Journey to Babel” script writer D.C. Fontana describes the Andorians as a “fierce warrior breed” (she also has the hilarious line: “Andorians are pale blue. Because.”). This doesn't directly address where they got their name, but it does align with the typical meanings of Andor as a human name. D.C. Fontana wasn't a one-off—she wrote more than 30 episodes of the show and is credited, not just with helping to develop Spock, but with the creation of the whole Vulcan race. That's relevant here mainly because that's another mythology connection. To a different mythology, sure, but seems logical (as her creations might say) that the name of the Andorians comes, not through Toklien, but straight from the Norse source.
So what about Cassian Andor from Star Wars? Within the universe, he got that name from his adoptive parents, Clem and Maarva Andor; when they rescued him from Kenari, his name was Kassa. Clem Andor was a human from Ferrix who worked as a scavenger and a smuggler. The worldbuilding on the family tree stops there.
None of the creators have directly addressed how they named the show's characters that I can find. They might have been big fans of one of the other series that used the name and got took conscious or subconscious inspiration from it, or they might've dipped back into the same mythological well that it's likely Tolkien and Fontana drew from, or they might've just thought Andor sounded cool.
I wrote this post mostly as an excuse to satisfy my own curiosity, but I do think that there is a bit of wisdom to be gleaned here for fantasy and sci-fi writers: the names you give to the characters and places in your world can convey a lot, not just about the thing you’re naming, but about your inspirations and references as a writer. It's also a reminder that, whatever type of worlds we create, we are all human writers living on Earth, drawing from the same set of cultural touchstones and references.
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