The name of Huizinga refers to a place and a lineage. There is nothing uncommon about this, but in the case of Johan Huizinga it is more significant than usual. The Huizingas into which Johan was born can be traced back to the sixteenth century, to the Melkema family farm in the village of Huizinge. He was apparently not particularly proud of his name, describing it on one occasion as ‘extremely common’. The Huizingas also had droves of ‘Johans’; the name was passed on from grandfather to grandson. Johan was the most mundane of names, unless one were to associate it with the asceticism of a camel’s-hair cloak and a voice crying in the wilderness – no arcane association, perhaps, in the Mennonite community.

Huizinga took a curious view of his forename. In a letter to Anna Veth, his best friend's wife, who had remarked that after all those years she still did not know exactly what he wanted to be called, he wrote: ‘Oh yes, my name. I don't really have a name, I’m like Andersen's magician. I was officially registered as Johan, but only distant cousins call me that. Very early on they called me Han, but that too I only half-recognize. My name sits very loosely on me.’

To understand what he meant by that, we must go back to the fairy tale ‘The Drop of Water’, to that exchange between Kribble Krabble and the other magician. For this second magician had no name, ‘and that was the best thing about him,’ added Andersen. This phrase evidently lodged in Huizinga's mind. In Homo Ludens, for instance, he quotes a passage from Plato about the identity of play and ritual that describes Man as God's plaything. ‘And that,’ added Huizinga, ‘was the best thing about him.’

Names play a special part in Huizinga's work. In the earliest treatise he ever published, on the vidûshaka, he demonstrated the character's stereotypical quality by showing that his actual name was never used. In The Waning of the Middle Ages he dwells at length on the primitive anthropomorphic tendency ‘to name everything, even inanimate objects’.