Scandinavian baby names, and the naming laws behind them

Scandinavian and Nordic are not the same word

Scandinavia, used strictly, means Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The Nordic countries are those three plus Iceland and Finland, along with the Faroes, Greenland and the Åland Islands. The distinction matters for names because Icelandic naming works quite differently from Danish or Swedish naming, and Finnish is not a Germanic language at all — it belongs to the Uralic family, and Finnish names such as Aino, Eero and Onni come from a different vocabulary entirely.

Iceland: patronymics, not surnames

Most Icelanders do not have family names. A child takes a parent's first name and adds -son or -dóttir: the children of a man named Jón are Jónsson and Jónsdóttir. A married couple do not share a name, siblings of different sexes do not share one either, and the phone book is ordered by first name because the second name is not a family identifier.

Iceland also regulates which first names may be given. Registers Iceland maintains the mannanafnaskrá, the register of approved personal names, and its public guidance is explicit: a child must be named before the age of six months, and a name that is not on the register requires an application to the naming committee, the mannanafnanefnd. This is not folklore — it is the live administrative process, published by the registry itself.

Denmark, and the approved list

Denmark operates a comparable system with a lighter touch. Familieretshuset, the Danish family law agency, publishes a list of approved first names, and parents choosing a name from it need no further permission; a name not on the list can be applied for. The list is public and searchable, which makes Denmark one of the few countries where you can check in advance whether a name is allowed.

Norway and Sweden

Neither country runs an approved list in the Icelandic or Danish sense, and both publish detailed official name statistics instead. Statistics Norway maintains a name statistics service, and Statistics Sweden runs a searchable name database that will tell you how many people in Sweden carry a given name and when it peaked. These are the sources to use for current Nordic popularity; a British or American baby-name site guessing at Swedish rankings is guessing.

The names, and what they mean

Two of these deserve a flag. Astrid does not contain a word for star, despite the spelling; both elements are Norse and neither is astral. And fridr, the second element in Astrid, Ingrid and Sigrid, is cognate with the word for peace but had shifted to mean beautiful or beloved by the time these names were formed, so "victorious peace" for Sigrid is a false friend.

Modern Nordic names that are not Viking names

A great deal of what is sold as Scandinavian naming is Old Norse mythology, and it is not what Nordic children are actually called. The current repertoire is full of short, soft names with no mythological content: Liv, Ida, Nora, Elsa, Signe, Vera, Emil, Elias, Oscar, Lars, Anders, Bjørn, Espen. Liv is worth knowing about, because the two obvious derivations pull in different directions — Old Norse hlif, shelter or protection, and modern Norwegian liv, life. Both are defensible and reference works do not fully agree.

Finland, which is Nordic but not Scandinavian

Finnish is not related to Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Icelandic. It belongs to the Uralic family, alongside Estonian and Hungarian, and its names come from a different vocabulary and a different literary tradition. Aino, Ilmari, Väinö and Kyllikki all come from the Kalevala, the nineteenth-century national epic assembled from oral poetry, which gave Finland a name pool at the same moment it gave it a national literature. Onni means luck or happiness, Aurora is borrowed, Eero is the Finnish form of Eric, and Sisu — the word for stubborn endurance — is a national concept rather than a common name.

Finland also has a large Swedish-speaking minority with its own naming, which is why Swedish names appear in Finnish statistics. Filing Finnish names under Scandinavian is the single most common error in this area.

What the Norse names actually meant

Old Norse names were mostly compounds of two elements drawn from a fairly small pool, and the pool tells you what the culture valued: ass, a god; sigr, victory; gunnr and hildr, battle; bjorn, bear; ulfr, wolf; thorr, the god Thor. That is why so many of these names read as martial in translation. Thorbjorn is Thor plus bear; Gunnhild is battle plus battle, which is not a mistake but an intensifier of exactly the kind the naming system allowed.

Two of the most familiar are less martial than they look. Magnus is not Norse at all: it is Latin for great, brought north by King Magnus I of Norway in the eleventh century and naturalised so thoroughly that it now reads as the most Nordic name on any list. And Odin's name comes from odr, meaning frenzied, furious or poetically inspired, which is a great deal stranger than the war-god shorthand suggests.

Choosing one from outside

The Nordic names travel unusually well into English, because their sounds are close to English sounds and their spellings are short. Freya has already made the journey completely, and Astrid, Magnus and Erik are well established. The ones that will cause trouble are those with letters English keyboards do not have — Bjørn, Søren, Åse — which will be recorded without them, exactly as Hawaiian names are.