The word Elarra is actually a name-title and is central to the theme, meaning, and plot of the series. The word also has meaning that goes back a couple decades in my writing life.
As a young reader and writer in high school, I devoured Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. I was inspired to imagine and write my own stories. The appendix in The Silmarillion especially intrigued me as it contained a dictionary of sorts of roots and elements of Elven names in the Quenya and Sindarin languages that Tolkien invented and infused into his works. I spent a lot of my writing/reading time putting various roots together that had special meanings and, hopefully, a good phonetic aesthetic.
The name Elarra comes from the combination of Tolkien’s root el (meaning star, coming from the primitive Elvish exclamation of wonder, ele, when they first beheld the stars) and ara (meant to be a prefix denoting “high, noble, royal”). So the combination of the two, including a bit of customization by adding the extra r, yields the word Elarra which means “noble star”, connoting a noble bringer of light. The meaning of the name should come through to the reader in the prophesied role that Elarra will play at the Solstice of Time.
Interestingly enough, as I was preparing to purchase domains as the first manuscript approached completion, I found that www.elarra.com was already taken. How could my original word not be original? (Question asked tongue in cheek of course.) I soon discovered that “elarra” is also an Australian aboriginal word that means “Valley of the Moon.” And Elarra happens to be a “private reserve above Sonoma Valley in the Mayacamas Mountains” in California (see here). I haven’t contacted this resort yet, but once Book 1 gets published I’m sure we can make some sort of mutually beneficial arrangements. It would be great, for example, if that resort came to be for my readers what Forks, Washington, is to Stephenie Meyer’s. I found it quite serendipitous that the Australian meaning of elarra has similar meaning/connotation as what Elarra connotes in The Elarra Solstice.