With a rich legendary and literary past, it would be a mistake to give this one over to the Mouse.

Thanks to Jane for suggesting Orlando as Baby Name of the Day.

Back when Central Florida was still swampland, long before Walt Disney ever picked up a pencil, Orlando was the stuff of dreams.

Roland was a medieval hero, celebrated across the continent.  Appropriately enough, his name derives from the Germanic bit hrod – fame, like Roderick and Rodney. La Chanson de Roland claims he was Charlemagne’s nephew.  That’s a matter for the scholars; what’s known is that some of the events in the epic poem did take place, and contemporary accounts placed a real Roland on the scene.

The Normans imported Roland to England.  Centuries later, Shakespeare shared the Italian version, Orlando, in his comedy As You Like It.  His Orlando is in exile – and very much in love with the banished Rosalind.

But Orlando’s romantic hero status predates the Bard.  More than a century before, the Italian poet Matteo Maria Boiardo wrote “Orlando in Love.”  Handel based an opera on this version of the parfait gentil knight.

A few decades later, Ludovico Ariosto picked up the thread in “Orlando Furioso.”  Both Boiardo and Ariosto based their Orlando on the earlier Roland, but Ariosto sent his hero off to Japan, even the moon.  Plus it was Ariosto, not JK Rowling, who invented the hippogriff.  (Ariosto also coined the name Melissa for a good witch who fueled some of Orlando’s adventures.)

The name pops up over the centuries:

• Orlando Gibbons was a Tudor-era composer;
• An English nobleman wore the name in the seventeenth century, and passed it on to a son and eventually a grandson.  The last Orlando in that series faked his own death to escape creditors; he died in debtor’s prison.  Aristocratic Orlandos can be found into the twentieth century;
• In the US, Civil War officer and engineer Orlando Poe turned his talents toward designing lighthouses along the Great Lakes post-war.

Orlando takes on a very different vibe in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography.  While her Orlando starts out male, he’s based on a woman: Vita Sackville-West, a fellow writer and Woolf’s lover.  By the novel’s end, the hero has transformed into a woman.  Tilda Swinton played the title role in the 1993 movie adaptation.

He’s a surname, too, as in pop group Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Given his romantic, gender-bending vibe, perhaps the biggest surprise about Orlando is this: he’s ranked in the US Top 1000 every year except 1896, and in the top 500 every year since 1953.  From the 1960s into the 90s, Orlando floated in the high 200s and low 300s.  He came in at #408 in 2009.

Some of that takes us to Hollywood – and Disney.  Elf prince Legolas and the orphan-turned-swashbuckler Will Turner were both capably played by actor Orlando Bloom.  Starring in two big-at-the-box-office trilogies cemented his career, but as it happened, his unusual first name didn’t need a boost.  (Incidentally, the town that Disney World dwarves was probably named after a real settler named Orlando, though accounts vary.)

There’s also Major League Baseball’s Orlando Cabrera, a shortstop currently with the Cincinnati Reds, and Hall of Famer first baseman Orlando Cepeda, plus others from the sporting world.

Just like Leonardo seemed more accessible post-di Caprio, some parents probably discovered Orlando thanks to the actor or the athletes.  But this is one extravagantly romantic name that has been in surprisingly steady use over the years.