Re: Naming customs (was Re: punctuated abbreviations)

On Sun, 20 Oct 2002 23:08:11 +0200, taliesin the storyteller
<taliesin@...> wrote:

>Up in currently cold and icy Norway, it is more and more common for both
>parties to keep their last names, or pick the rarest of them. The first
>might be because the process of legally changing one's name (last or
>first) is a non-trivial process, though the fee is quite reasonable.
>
>Both the forms of last and first names are restricted; fancy spellings
>are frowned upon, the first name must not be a burden for the carrier,
>and if a last name is not inherited it must be among the "common" names
>unless every single adult carrier of the rare last name agrees to the
>switch, in writing. When a pair of friends of mine married a few years
>back, he took her last name as it was the rarest; yes, they had to do
>the "begging" round to get it accepted but the name is so rare I guess
>it wasn't that hard to track them all down.
>
>Last names are important here still as they are traced to farms; if you
>buy and take over a farm you often also change your last name to that
>of the farm. (Norway might be a European country without aristocracy but
>instead we had thousands of very powerful, very independent stor-bønder
>(great-farmers) who basically were an aristocracy in everything but
>name. Which of course is why a rare last name for some reason is perceived
>as a Good Thing(tm).)
>
>t.
I am certainly no expert, but I believe that in Iceland, where most people
don't have surnames, it is actually illegal to change one's second name,
which is a patronymic.  The explanation that I read is that Icelanders are
deeply proud of the extensiveness their genealogical records, so that a
name change that would disrupt the record of the lineage is taboo.

Incidentally, there is an Icelandic violinist on the international circuit
whose stage name is Judith Ingolfsson.  I wonder if her real second name
is Ingolfsdottir but that her agent thought that it sounded just too
strange in other Germanic-language-speaking countries.

- Nat

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