Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1038387-20150506104254

Last night's episode of The Flash mentioned the fact that weirdass name Eobard is a future name. They did the same in The Flashpoint Paradox, and probably elsewhere. Aaargh no.

To demonstrate that I didn't take an elective in Old Germanic for nothing:

Eobard is a perfectly normal English name.

The name is composed of two elements: eo and bard.


 * Éo is an old word, meaning (war)horse. You may remember this from Lord of the Rings: Éomer and Éowyn. Old English for Horse-fame and Horse-joy. It comes from *h₁éḱwos. It's not used in any Germanic language anymore, but the Latin word for horse, Equus, is derived from the same root.
 * Bard can mean a couple of things. In this sense, it's not a) - that word is of Celtic origin, or b), from Old French. In Germanic, it comes from from  *bardoz. It either means beard or... beard. The beard of an axe that is, so synecdochically, an axe. It survives in the word halberd and the name.

So yeah. Eobard. Not a future name. Horse-axe. Or Horse-beard. Make of it what you will. Before you think too much into it: except for some literary characters like Beowulf, the names were never meant to convey anything, or even mean anything ("having the beard of a horse"?!), that's just a characteristic people given to it because Greek, Latin and Hebrew names usually did. They're just a couple of name elements that run in the family (or sound like ones that run in the family), slapped together. 