Put a tiny fishing hamlet and a fortified capital on the same map, and they should not sound like they belong to the same category. The Norse had different words for different scales of settlement — a farmstead, a village, a fortified town, a great hall, a kingdom — and using the right one is what makes a fantasy map feel inhabited rather than randomly generated. Here's how to match the settlement-word to the size, and why -by, -borg, and -ríki tell completely different stories.
Start with the three scales
Before you reach for a Norse suffix, decide what you're actually naming. Is it a place where a handful of families live, a place where hundreds gather, or a place that rules over other places? Those three categories — hamlet, city, kingdom — require different roots, and mixing them is one of the fastest ways to make a map read as though nobody thought about what the names meant.
- A hamlet or village: small, humble, named for what the settlers could see when they arrived. The settlement-words are -by (village, farm), -tún (enclosed farm), -setr (seat, dwelling), -bær (farm). Think Oakby, Coldtún, Stonesetr.
- A city or stronghold: larger, often fortified, named for what it defends or commands. The settlement-words are -borg (fortress, stronghold), -staðr (place, town), -höfn (harbour). Think Ironborg, Seaport (Seahöfn), Highstaðr.
- A kingdom or realm: a political entity, named for the people who hold it, the ruler who commands it, or the land itself. The realm-words are -ríki (realm, rule), -heimr (home, world), -land (land, country), -mǫrk (march, borderland). Think Northríki, Valheimr, Frostland.
The small places: -by, -tún, -setr, -bær
These are the settlement-words for places that started as one farm or a cluster of farms. They're humble, transparent, and they should stay that way — a village named "Birch-farm" (Birkby) or "Cold-homestead" (Coldsetr) reads as a place people actually settled, because it's named for something they could point at. The feature is usually mundane: a stand of trees, a stream, a hill, a patch of good soil. That's the whole point — real villages are named for real geography, not for drama.
The mistake to avoid: giving a hamlet a grand settlement-word. If your tiny fishing village is called "Stormborg" (storm-fortress), the name is doing too much work — it sounds like a place that should have walls, a garrison, and political weight. A fortress-scale name on a village-scale place breaks the illusion. Keep the small places small: -by for a village, -tún for a farm, -setr for a dwelling, -bær for a farmstead. If it's not fortified and it's not ruling anything, don't name it like it is.
Generate Norse town & village names →The fortified places: -borg, -staðr, -höfn
These are the settlement-words for places that grew into something defensible or politically important. A -borg is a fortress or stronghold — the kind of place that has walls, a garrison, and maybe a jarl's hall. A -staðr is a town or significant settlement, larger and more established than a village. A -höfn is a harbor, which in Norse society meant trade, ships, and external connections — not a small anchorage, but a place where fleets gathered.
The scale test: can you picture walls, a market, or a hundred people living there? If not, the place is too small for -borg or -höfn. A fortified stronghold can carry a heavy name — Ironborg, Ravenborg, Seaborg — because the settlement-word itself already signals weight. A harbor town can be named for what it commands — Easthöfn, Whale-harbour, Stormshelter — because harbors are inherently strategic. But don't use these roots for a place that's just a cluster of houses. The name makes a promise about what the place is, and if the place can't deliver, the name is lying.
Generate Norse city & stronghold names →The kingdoms: -ríki, -heimr, -land, -mǫrk
A kingdom is not a big city. It's a political idea with a border, and it's named for one of three things: the people who hold it, the ruler who commands it, or the land itself. These are the realm-words, and they operate at a completely different scale than settlement-words. A -ríki is a realm or dominion, and the word carries rulership with it — Northríki is "the northern realm," and the name tells you it's governed as one entity. A -heimr is a home or world, and it reads as a homeland rather than a conquest — Valheimr is "the home of the chosen," and the name carries belonging rather than borders.
A -land is straightforward: the land, named for its location or its people. Northland. Woodland. Valland (the land of the Valir, an old term for parts of Scandinavia and later for foreign lands). A -mǫrk is a march or borderland, often forested, and the term carries the sense of a frontier — a place defined by what it sits between rather than what it rules. These four realm-words are not interchangeable with settlement-words, and using one in place of the other is a category error. A village cannot be a -ríki, because a -ríki is a kingdom. A kingdom should not be a -borg, because a -borg is a fortress. The scale is built into the word.
Generate Norse kingdom & realm names →Why you can't just pick the one that sounds coolest
The temptation is to choose a suffix based on which one has the best sound or the most imposing weight, but that's designing for your own ear instead of for the world's internal logic. A settlement-word is not decoration — it's a claim about what kind of place this is, and if the claim doesn't match the reality, the name reads as either a mistake or a joke. A hamlet called Ravenmǫrk (raven-march) sounds like it should be a frontier kingdom, not a place where three families farm barley. A capital city called Oakby (oak-village) sounds like it should be a rural hamlet, not the seat of a king.
The rule is simple: match the suffix to the function. If it's a place people farm, use a village-word. If it's a place people defend, use a stronghold-word. If it's a place that rules other places, use a realm-word. Get the match right and the name does quiet, invisible work — it tells the reader what they're looking at before you've written a sentence of description. Get it wrong and the name is noise.
Keeping a region consistent without making it repetitive
If every town in a region ends in -by, the map reads as cohesive but also as monotonous. The fix is to vary the settlement-words within the same scale: one village is a -by, the next is a -tún, the third is a -setr. They're all hamlet-scale, so they read as part of the same culture, but the variation keeps them from sounding like a template. The same applies to cities: one stronghold is a -borg, another is a -staðr, a third is a harbor (-höfn). The scale stays consistent, but the words shift enough to feel lived-in rather than generated.
The one place where you should not vary is across scales. A hamlet and a kingdom should never share a settlement-word, because that would flatten the hierarchy the names are supposed to signal. Keep the small places in the village register, the fortified places in the stronghold register, and the kingdoms in the realm register, and your map will have a structure readers can feel even if they never consciously notice it.
A quick checklist before you name the map
- Does the settlement-word match the scale? Village-words for hamlets, stronghold-words for cities, realm-words for kingdoms.
- Can you picture the place doing what the name claims? A -borg should be defensible, a -höfn should see ships, a -ríki should rule territory.
- Are you varying the words within each scale, or is every village a -by? Mix the synonyms to avoid monotony.
- Are you keeping the scales separate, or does a village sound like a kingdom? Don't let a hamlet borrow a realm-word.
If you'd rather start from names that already follow these rules, the [town generator](/town), [city generator](/city), and [kingdom generator](/kingdom) each work from the right scale of settlement-words, and every name comes with its meaning so you can see what you're actually saying. A village-word builds a village. A stronghold-word builds a stronghold. A realm-word builds a realm. Match the tool to the job, and the name will do the rest.
Generate village & hamlet names →Generate city & fortress names →Generate realm & kingdom names →