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.