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In a sentence from the 犬夜叉 comic book, an old lady from ancient times is speaking about her family. The context is that the speaker mentioned her sister 桔梗 in the previous panel, but the listener didn’t know who she was talking about.

わしの姉は…桔梗といってな、村を守る巫女だった。

The meaning of the sentence is quite clear to me, except for the な particle. My tip would be that it marks an explanation, something like „you know“. But I was unable to find any similar example attached to いって or て-form of any other verb.

What is the role of the particle in that sentence?

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Final particles (ね, よ, な, さ) can be thrown in the middle of a sentence in conversation as if fillers.

There are technically two types:

  1. follows the first word/chunk of the sentence

それがね、本物のマツタケなんです That one, see, is the real matsutake.

もしもね、ゾンビに襲われたら If, I mean if, you're attacked by zombies...

It is used to emphasize and draw hearer's attention. This can be also combined with sentence-initial interjections or conjunctions such as あのね, いやな, だけどさ etc.

  1. used as many as needed between phrases

君はね、責任というものをね、もう少し自覚してほしいんだ
I think you should... be a bit more conscious... that you have a responsibility.

それは少し違うね、タイプのゲーム機のね、話だと思いますが
You must be talking about... a kind of different... type of game console...

This type is often heard while the speaker is giving a long story (or explanation, persuasion etc.), like stopping at each corner to see if the hearer is following you. I can't think of a suitable English translation for this; close to "you see?" or "okay?" but much more lightweight to be used repeatedly.

The in-sentence final particles have no preference of words it attaches to, so you see it wherever after a noun phrase (i.e. after particles), a verbal complex (i.e. fully conjugated chunk of simple or compound verbs) or a free word. Though less revelant to Japanese learning, it is known that their insertable points denote breaking of 文節, a syntactic word in Japanese.

Back to the original question, I think this な belongs the second usage I described, and it has little grammatical meaning here except wanting to impress her name more to the hearer, if any. The choice of な represents a old-fashioned/rustic character, and it would sound rather blunt in everyday speech today.

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This な is a masculine filler particle meaning nothing. If you know ね, さ or よ used like this, this な works the same way.

Examples of filler-な:

Also related:

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