A swamp witch's name should sound like it's been left out in the damp: a homely first name, a surname full of mud and roots, and maybe a title nobody dares drop. This swamp witch name generator has names for hags, bayou witches, English fen witches and gothic ones, with an epithet if you want one.
Witches of the water in folklore
- Jenny Greenteeth haunted the ponds and rivers of Lancashire, pulling children under if they went too near the edge. Peg Powler did the same on the River Tees.
- Will-o'-the-wisps, the ghostly lights seen over marshes, were said to lead travellers off the path and into the bog.
- Baba Yaga, of Slavic folklore, lives deep in the forest in a hut on chicken legs: not a swamp witch, but the model for every witch who lives where the path ends.
Hags in D&D
In D&D, the green hag lives in swamps and forests, and hags often gather in covens of three. Published hags have names that are half homely, half horrible, like the coven in The Wild Beyond the Witchlight.
The "Hag" style here follows that pattern: a title like Granny or Auntie, a herb or a hedge plant for a first name, and a surname from the bottom of the bog. Granny Nettle Bogwort sounds friendly until you meet her.
Four kinds of swamp witch
- Hag: herb names (Nettle, Henbane, Wormwood) and a title. Choose this for a D&D hag or a fairy-tale witch.
- Bayou: French Creole first names from the Louisiana bayous, for Southern Gothic stories.
- English fen: old country names like Maud and Agnes, for the flat, misty fens of eastern England.
- Gothic: names from Romantic poetry and tragedy. Ophelia drowns in Hamlet; Lenore and Ligeia are Poe's.