In Sweden, back in the olden
days, also known as the 1600s, your average Sven didn't really have a surname. There were some inherited family
names, placed after given names, as we know them today... but they were born by
a relatively small section of the population. The nobility, especially the
"uradel" or "original nobility", often had "adelsnamn" - "noble names",
according to their noble house. Some of these date back as far as the 1300s,
and many were based on the family crest. In the early to mid 17th century, the entire
nobility adopted surnames to distinguish them from the filthy commoners, reflecting their
status as the highest caste in Swedish society. Meanwhile, a lot of the clergy had
"lärda namn", literally "learned names", which had been in use since the Renaissance,
and were thus inspired by the classics. They often ended in "-ander",
from Greek or "-us", from Latin. In the latter case, the surnames
would often have to agree with the natural gender of its holder... "-us"
was, after all, the masculine ending, so the feminine "-a" was preferred for women. A lot of the Latin-sounding
names later dropped the "-us", leading to names ending in "-in" or "-ell". It's possible that this was done because
of fashionability: people didn't want to be "Lundinus" anymore - they wanted to be "Lundin",
so it looked like their name came from French, which was much more fancy than Latin
in the 1700s. But that's just a theory. Then there were the townspeople. Those who
were more well-off, like merchants would often take surnames in imitation of the noblemen,
possibly in order to imitate their status. These are known as "borgerliga
namn" - "bourgeois names". These were inspired by the
noble names and learned names, but also by German family names
and, importantly, place names. That's not to say that normal
people all just had one name. As was common all over Scandinavia
and beyond at the time, people tended to be referred to by
their given name and a patronymic. A patronymic is a name formed from the name of
your father - thus denoting whose child you are. For instance, if you take your average
heterosexual Swedes... um... Lars and Karin... and they had a boy, Nils, he would be
named "Nils Larsson", contracted from "Nils, Lars' son", and if they had a girl...
let's say, Sigrid, she would be named "Sigrid Larsdotter", from
"Sigrid, Lars' daughter". What makes this different from those gendered
surnames from earlier is that the next generation, say... Nils's children, wouldn't
carry this on as a family name. No, they would be called so-and-so
Nilsson, or so-and-so Nilsdotter. Another type of by name,
associated especially with the Dalarna region of Sweden, was "gårdsnamn". These weren't placed after
the given name, but before it, like in Chinese or Korean, and
they were closer to family names than patronymics in that they were usually
inherited from generation to generation. Some of these were fossilised
patronymics, with someone called "Persson" not necessarily being the son of Per,
but having a male ancestor somewhere called Per. Sometimes a man's ancestral name would
actually be replaced with his wife... like "Ingrids Johan" being a "Johan"
who had gotten married to "Ingrid". Other gårdsnamn were simply a person's
profession - like Smed Johan being "John the Smith" - something we can also
see as an origin for many English surnames. There were also those called after
the village they or their ancestors were born in... typically when
that family had moved village. So in the village of Nås, there
might be a family called "Utby" because of their origins
in the neighboring village. Though most famous are the bynames
that were taken from farms. For instance, if there was a farm called
"Östgården", the family living there might be called "Öst". Sometimes it's difficult to tell the
difference between one of these and a fossilised patronymic, since a farm might be called "Pers
gård" and then the family on that farm might be called "Pers" even if they themselves had in fact
bought the farm and were not descended from Per. But where this gets really interesting, is that a lot of the time, these
bynames weren't just inherited by blood. Buying a farm can change your by name. Of course, apprentices could inherit the
professional names of their masters. Families living on the same farm could all have
the same byname without being blood relatives. Over in Iceland, they still use
patronymics or, in the modern age, matronymics... but Swedish names are
now pretty much all ancestral surnames. So how did these old naming systems disappear? In 1901, the Swedish government passed a law mandating fixed ancestral surnames
for the entire swedish population. Why? Well, one thing to remember
is the rapid development of the state at this point in Scandinavian history. State records were becoming
increasingly important, replacing traditional church records which would
only record information within a certain parish. So having one standardised type of
byname throughout the whole country is easier for centralised documentation. Sweden wanted to quote unquote "modernise".
The Danes were doing it after all! In fact, Denmark had passed its first law making ancestral surnames compulsory
all over the country in 1828. The many failures of this policy
make up a whole story of their own... but it is likely that it had an
effect on the Swedish authorities. The Swedish policy was far more successful,
likely because many Swedes had already adopted surnames independently during the 19th
century in a kind of natural transition. Many of the surnames that
were assumed in the 1800s, and then after the law was passed in the early
1900s, were fossilised patronymics, though the "-dotter" ending pretty quickly
died out because of course it did. And that's why there's so many Swedes with
"-son" names. And it's the same reason why so many Danes have "-sen" names and there's so
many "-son" names in English-speaking communities. In fact, there were too many "-son" names.
This wasn't as much of a problem as "-sen" names were in Denmark at the time... but
it was still difficult to keep track of everyone in this rapidly changing
world when there were so few names. Nearly 3% of those listed in the 1901 Swedish
telephone registry had the surname Andersson. So then came a period in the
first half of the 20th century where Swedes changed their surnames like crazy. Part of this was probably because
of their own experiences in an increasingly urbanised Sweden:
being confused for the other "Lars Andersson in Stockholm" for the
third time this week would probably make anyone consider changing that annoying
frozen patronymic to something more unique. And, of course, from the government's perspective,
the point of making everyone get surnames in the first place was for easier documentation... so
unique surnames were all the better for them. They encouraged this practice by
making changing your name much easier, and even publishing official state
books of surname suggestions, the first of these being the 1921
"Svensk namnbok till vägledning vid val av nya släktnamn" - "Swedish name-book
for guidance at choosing of new family names". So loads of purely made-up
surnames turned up in the 1900s! In Sweden, several branches of my own
family changed their names in this period. One part of my ancestry changed their
names from "Pettersson" to "Wærnulf". This name is, linguistically speaking, ridiculous. This "w" was not used at the
time in Swedish orthography, making the name look German in origin? But German doesn't use this letter. Like
Swedish, it uses this symbol instead, making this look more like it
might be an antiquated Danish name. But what on earth does "wærn" mean? Is this supposed to be from Dutch? Middle English?
The answer is... it doesn't have a meaning. My great-granddad and his brothers made it up. It's a fairy tale name... and there's
loads of people in Sweden walking around with this kind of gibberish surname.
And you know what, I think that's cool! Of course, the policy was never going
to be a complete success. I mean, the government needed, or rather wanted,
a standardised way of recording names... and it's not exactly a coincidence that they chose
the way already used by the nobility and the rich. In the communities that were unused to "afternames", which were almost entirely
rural and generally quite poor, like in Dalarna where gårdsnamn were the main style of
surname, the 1901 law was met with resistance. In fact, some of them continued
to fight it for over a century, and laws protecting the use of
gårdsnamn were finally enacted in 2016. Wow, isn't it interesting how much
local culture and tradition is lost with the creation of the modern state,
and how the cultural practices of the rich and privileged are prioritised
over those of other communities... I mean, nah... what am I saying? Let's not get political here.
