Origins
Colfer has said that he based Artemis on his younger brother Donal, who as a child was "a mischievous mastermind who could get out of any trouble he got into". A childhood picture of his brother in his first communion suit caused Colfer to think of how much Colfer's brother resembled "a little James Bond villain" and "how funny...a twelve-year-old James Bond villain" would be, inspiring Colfer's creation of Artemis.
Colfer planned for Artemis to have been called Archimedes but changed the name due to an interest in using a “classic Greek name” and trepidation that “people would think was about Archimedes". Artemis is a notable choice for a name because while it is traditionally a female name, it “was sometimes…given to boys as a kind of honorific if their fathers were great hunters”. Fowl was derived from the Irish name Fowler as a play on words to convey the characterization that Artemis was a nasty or foul individual at the beginning of the series.
Read more about this topic: Artemis Fowl II
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)
“Lucretius
Sings his great theory of natural origins and of wise conduct; Plato
smiling carves dreams, bright cells
Of incorruptible wax to hive the Greek honey.”
—Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)