The Lion Has a Name!

So, AJD and I have acquired two additional pieces of knowledge.  First, the lion is named Judah Navarre Androcles.  Second, leonine onomastics are reaaaalllly screwed up.  The second fact evidently contributed to our delay in discovering the first.

Apparently all lions have three names.  The third name is the name of their lineage.  Navarre's is particularly august: his family are direct descendants of the lion saved by Androcles, and to show their gratitude (and, further, to satisfy an obscure point of honour which I, frankly, do not understand), they replaced their original lineage name with his name.  Navarre doesn't know what his family's name was before the Androcles episode; it's not clear this is because he's quite young or because it's been forgotten.

The astute reader may be wondering why I am referring to our lion as Navarre rather than Judah?  This is the part where leonine onomastics get rather peculiar: all male lions of the clan to which the Androcles lineage belongs have Judah as their first name.  Every single last one of them.  Just as the lion was the symbol for the tribe of Judah (you know, the Lion of Judah), so the tribe of Judah is evidently the symbol for the lions of Navarre's clan.  Judah of the Lions.  I have no idea where this tradition comes from - neither does Navarre - but there you go.

Lionesses do not take the clan of Judah as their mascot.  They have their own: the Egyptian lion goddess Sekhmet.  Accordingly, all lionesses of Navarre's clan have the first name of Sekhmet.  I will not pretend to understand the rationale, but it makes marginally more sense to me than the male lions using Judah.

So our lion's name-name, the one he actually uses, is his second name, Navarre.  Which is a nature name, kind of sort of.  Apparently lions often use the names of specific geographic features as their given names, and by extension started using the names of regions as well, particularly regions associated with lions.  I told Navarre that this was cheating, which he took as something of an affront; he said that the tradition exists because lions are all uniformly the same colour and it's hard to get many different names out of that and most of the ones that exist are considered feminine.  So they do this funny thing with named geographical features and regions instead.  They do use real nature names, sometimes, though: his own mother's name is Goldenrod, and Sandy, Tawny, and Honey perpetually top the most popular names for lionesses.

I did say that leonine onomastics were pretty crazy, right?

Another thing lions like to do is give all siblings names starting with the same phoneme.  Navarre, for instance, has two older sisters; the elder is Nemea, who is artistic and Goth, and the younger is Nittany (a popular name in the current generation), who talks on the phone a lot and is always whining to their mother about something gross her baby brother has done.  (I asked Navarre if she were telling the truth when she went whining and he ran away and pounced on Flurry, from which I conclude that even really Boy Scout lion cubs aren't above being pesky little brothers.)

All three of them have names associated with lions, sometimes tangentially.  The lion Heracles fought was from Nemea; the Nittany lion is the mascot of Penn State (yes, wrong kind of lion, but we've already noted that they're not very picky about this); and Richard the Lionheart was married to Berengaria of Navarre.  One of Navarre's aunts is named Macedonia, birthplace of Alexander, the new Heracles.  His father's name is Kilimanjaro, which I think is associated with lions only insofar as both lions and Mount Kilimanjaro are African.

So, there you go: they might take their royal responsibilities seriously, but lions aren't above bending rules when it suits them, and they're not above being weirdly pretentious on occasion, either.