Answer: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Wife

Creator of The Legend of Zelda game franchise, Shigeru Miyamoto, named the iconic princess after the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. Zelda was an iconic figure in the 1920s, surrounded by controversy and intrigue, and stunningly beautiful. In an interview with ‘In The Game’, Miyamoto explained how a 1920s socialite inspired the name of a 1980s video game character:

“Zelda was the name of the wife of the famous novelist Francis Scott Fitzgerald. She was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title.”

There’s one more layer of trivia to Zelda’s name. The name itself is derived from Griselda, which in turn is derived from the older German “gris hild”, which translates to “dark battle”—a rather fitting name for the princess that rules over the troubled Kingdom of Hyrule.