Awesome Names

When I started 1st grade there was a girl in my class named Sheila. I immediately (and successfully) set out to become her best friend, because although I had never heard that name before, it sounded so much like She-Ra that I just knew I had to get in on that action.

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Many, many years later I met someone named Angharad. At that point in my life I like to think I had moved beyond setting out to become someone's friend solely because I liked her name, so I'm pretty sure that when we became good friends it had more to do with the usual set of reasons people become friends than her many totally kick-ass fantasy-novel namesakes:

* Harry/Harimad-Sol/Angharad from Robin McKinley's "The Blue Sword"
* Angharad from Anne McCaffery's "Rowan" series
* Angharad, mother of Princess Eilonwy in Lloyd Alexander's "The Book of Three" series.

...but honestly, those namesakes didn't hurt.