Good swamp names sound wet, old and a little unwelcoming: Sedgeslough, Gloammere, the Fen of Cold Candles. Every good fantasy map has a stretch of marsh nobody wants to cross. This swamp name generator gives you fantasy marshes, haunted bogs, real-sounding British fens, carrs and mosses, Louisiana bayous and witchy mires, with a short description if you want one.
Eight good swamp names
All eight came from the generator, across its five styles:
- Gloammere: a fantasy marsh named for the dusk light over still water.
- Newtmarsh: short, damp and full of small creatures.
- The Fen of Cold Candles: a haunted fen with lights you shouldn't follow.
- Will-o'-Wisp Fen: named after the marsh lights of English folklore.
- Wytheley Carr: a British fen name built from real place-name parts.
- Black Drove Mire: a drove is an old track across the fens.
- Pirogue Bayou: a bayou named after the flat-bottomed boats used there.
- Bog Myrtle Slough: a witchy marsh named after a real bog plant.
Fens, carrs, mosses and bayous
English has a word for almost every kind of wet ground, and most of them are old:
- Fen comes from Old English. The Fens of East Anglia were mostly drained for farming from the 1600s, and their drained fields still carry names like -drove and -ings (from the Norse for meadow).
- Carr, from Old Norse, is wet woodland, usually alder and willow.
- Moss is the northern English and Scots word for a peat bog, as in Chat Moss near Manchester.
- Levels are low, flat land by the sea or a river, like the Somerset Levels.
- Bayou is Louisiana French, borrowed from the Choctaw word for a slow stream, and the Bayou style uses Cajun French surnames and swamp wildlife.
Fiction has its own famous swamps: Tolkien's Dead Marshes are the template for a marsh full of something you shouldn't look at. The Haunted style borrows from folklore instead: a hinkypunk is an old West Country name for a will-o'-the-wisp, and a gytrash is a northern English spirit of lonely roads.
Using swamps on your map
- Put them where water gathers: at a river mouth, behind a sand bar, or in a valley with nowhere to drain.
- Give them a reason to cross. A causeway, a ferry or a shortcut makes a marsh a place for adventures, not just a blank space.
- Choose With a description for a ready-made hook, like Lilymarsh, where travellers follow the glow-moths or get lost.
Someone has to live there: try the Swamp Witch Name Generator. For the water around it, there's the River and Lake name generators, and for drier ground, Forest and Mountain.
For more, see all the world-building name generators.