Elend is likely a rare modern literary-style name with Germanic sound patterns rather than a widely used traditional given-name root.
Elend is a name most vividly brought to life in the imagination of Brandon Sanderson, the American fantasy author whose Mistborn series introduced the character Elend Venture — a bookish nobleman who becomes an unlikely revolutionary emperor in a world of ash and oppression. Published beginning in 2006, the Mistborn trilogy gave Elend a complex arc from idealistic intellectual to decisive leader, and the name has since accrued devoted following among readers of epic fantasy. Sanderson has acknowledged drawing on his own invented naming conventions, though the form has precedents in older European tongues.
In Old High German and Middle Dutch, elend carried the meaning of 'foreign land' and by extension 'exile' or 'misery' — the alienation of being far from home. The English word 'alien' shares its Indo-European root. That shadow of meaning — bearing hardship and displacement — adds an unexpected poignancy to a character who spends much of his story navigating an empire in crisis, always slightly outside the power he nominally holds.
Whether Sanderson intended this resonance or discovered it afterward is unclear, but it has become part of the name's literary texture. As a given name in the real world, Elend is almost entirely a literary choice — a name for the children of readers who found something in Venture's story worth carrying forward. It occupies the same cultural space as Arwen, Eowyn, or Kvothe: names that exist because stories made them real. Spare, strong, and unusual, it ages gracefully across every stage of life.