A recent BBC documentary about the artist Hans Holbein, who painted so many of Henry VIII's court, was fascinating, and not only for the insights his work provided into the sitters' personalities. He had written Anne Boleyn's name as 'Anne Bollein'. Spellings in Tudor times were not as standardized as they are now, and Holbein probably wrote the name as he heard it pronounced. As the artist's surname also ends in 'ein' this could mean that it was pronounced the same way. So Anne Boleyn was either pronounced 'line' rather than 'lin' or Holbein was pronounced Holbin. The other alternative is that they both, or one or the other, were pronounced 'ane' as in lane.
    That's interesting in itself, but how does the difference in pronunciation of the name affect perceptions of the person to whom it belonged? The conventional pronunciation of Boleyn sounds more exotic than 'Bolline', which seems more English and ordinary. It would lose some of the romance attached to it. The difference is so small, it demonstrates how careful writers have to be when naming characters. Choose badly, and you could prejudice readers against your heroes, but you could also use a name to subvert their expectations. Fantasy authors making up names have to be particularly careful that there might not be a way to pronounce them that they hadn't though of. If the way to pronounce your characters' names is ambiguous, it could really put readers off. I suppose, the shorter they are, the safer, but sometimes one syllable simply isn't enough.
    The result of all this is that I'm not going to be able to rest now until I've gone through all my work and tried saying the characters' names every way I can.