I think I just had my last
interview of the year. It’s the last one I have scheduled, anyway, and I want to keep it
that way and hoard these last few days all to myself. I still don’t know what (if anything) is to
come of all of the conversations of this year or of my own relationship to this
research and to this topic. I seem to fluctuate wildly between thinking I should
go home and write a book with all of it immediately, and wanting to shut the
cover of my black notebook and lay it to rest as this year comes to an end.
And it
has. When Katie and Isa were visiting me at the very beginning of my time in
Iceland, we talked about how this topic is impossible to study without talking
to people. You can’t (usually) learn someone’s name through observation alone.
It requires a conversation, and, if the conversation is to be at all
interesting or revealing, it requires a connection. Studying names has given me a reason to talk
to people, and a reason to travel. Even if those were the only reasons for
studying names, they’ve made it a worthwhile topic.
My last few weeks in Iceland have
been filled by a steady flow of these conversations. I’m still working on how they
all fit together, but I also think that in some ways, that’s what the Icelandic
naming committee is currently figuring out too--how these different aspects of
a changing Icelandic population work, where the lines are between cultural
insularity and cultural acceptance, what it means to carry a name that breaks
linguistic and grammatical rules, and if that even matters. I’m breaking down
my recent interviews (the ones I haven't written about yet) into brief descriptions of what I think were their most
interesting moments below. Hopefully
this gives you a sense of the questions that arise in discussing what constitutes
an Icelandic name in 2012.
Outdoor art in downtown Reykjavik
Monument to civil disobedience outside the parliament to commemorate the protests following the 2008 economic crash.
Sara & Olga
Sara &
Olga are two sisters who live out in Hafnarfjarðar. I met with them a few weeks ago
and they kindly gave me breakfast and some pretty adorable babies to hold (it
was all in all a great morning). They have three daughters between them and we
talked about how they chose their names.
Sara’s daughter, Rafnhildur
Sjorn, is six weeks old. She was going to be called “Marta” or “Isabella” until
Sara took a look at her jet black hair and fierce, determined eyes. Rafnhildur
is an old Valkyrie name that comes from the words “raven” and “battle.”
The name “Sjorn” is Sara’s mother’s name.
Olga has two daughters, four
year-old Úlfhildur Sjorn (the
Sjorn again after her mother, and Úlfhildur meaning “battle of the wolves”),
and one year-old Salvor Vega (Salvor meaning “sun season”). She told me it’s
taken her a while to decide on both of her daughters’ names. (Úlfhildur wasn’t
named until she was six weeks old). She
felt it was a great responsibility, she told me. She said that she kept
wondering, if “a baby makes a name, or a name makes a baby.”
Sara and Olga spent a large part
of their childhoods in Sweden, and they said that at times their Icelandic names
posed challenges. Like in most Icelandic
families, their names followed the patronymic system, which meant they all had
different last names. In Sweden, their whole family decided to go by their
father’s last name to make things less complicated. Olga also told me that in
school she was self-conscious about being the only girl with her first name. “I
really hated it,” she told me. “But then I started realizing that teachers
always remembered it. I was the only Olga, and I got to make up what that name
meant.”
We talked a bit about the patronymic
system and how it worked. It struck me for the first time that Iceland was a
place where, if you took your mother’s name, it was quite obvious. In the states, if you go by your mother’s last
name instead of your father’s, it can easily go unnoticed (“Smith” and “Garcia”,
for example, are genderless, and could have come from either parent). In
Iceland, however, since surnames are derived from first names, and first names
are regulated by gender, a baby named with the last name “Helgasdottir” as opposed
to “Jonssdottir” would clearly be going by her mother’s name. There may be some
stigmas surrounding this (stigmas that are starting to change as more and more
people are opting to use the matrynomic). Traditionally, however, having your mother’s
last name could be an indication either that you have a radical feminist for a
mother, or, to the delight of the gossiping Icelandic countryside, the father’s
identity is unclear.
I recently heard a story that during
World War II when there were many American and British soldiers in Iceland, many
babies were being born to Icelandic women with the last name “Hermatthson” or “Hermathsdottir.”
In Icelandic, “hermaður“ is the
word for soldier, so these invented surnames conveinently left the identity of
their non-Icelandic fathers unknown.
We got on this topic because
Sara is raising Rafnhildur Sjorn on her own. Her full name is Rafnhildur
Sjorn Sarasdottir. We wondered whether
Rafnhildur would face people making assumptions about her based on her surname,
or whether by the time she’s going to school, it will be more commonplace.
Sara and Olga are fiercely
against the regulations on names in Iceland. They think they’re arbitrary and feel that
often the reasons behind the naming committee’s decisions are vague and
illogical.
“A society is only a living society
if it is willing to change,” Sara told me. She foresees many changes in Iceland’s
near future.
Maria
I’ve already
written a bit about my conversation with Maria, a Columbian woman who has been
living in Iceland for the last twenty-two years. I wrote about her parents emigrating from Columbia to Iceland to join her, and about the pumpkin
soup and sunshine in her backyard on a Monday afternoon.
She told me about choosing names for her three
Icelandic-Columbian children that would work in both places (Michael Luis, Sara
Isabel, and Gabriel). Her Icelandic
husband had many traditions in his family about passing on names, but he
insisted that they break them. “He wanted the kids names to show that they
weren’t only Icelandic,” she told me. “He wants them to be proud of all parts
of themselves.”
One experience that was
particularly interesting to her as an outsider was following the Icelandic tradition
of not revealing the baby’s name until the baptism. “I didn’t get it at first,”
she told me. “I didn’t see what the big deal was.” She told me that in
Columbia, the baby is usually named in utero, spoken to by that name, planned
for. It seemed so strange to her to wait for months after the baby’s birth to
reveal the name. “But I loved it.” She told me. “I did it with all my kids. It
was such a fun surprise. Everyone was just so happy, and that way, no one can
say they don’t like the name. When the priest says it, it’s there.”
Like Lani, Maria arrived in Iceland
before the law changed that forced immigrants to choose Icelandic names for
themselves in order to gain citizenship. Unlike Lani, she was one of the lucky
ones. “Maria” worked perfectly in the Icelandic language and is on the approved
list of names. “Maria” could cross cultures.
Maria knows lots of people who
decided not to get citizenship in Iceland before the law changed. She has a
friend from Bolivia, for example, who only recently got citizenship after
twenty-eight years in the country. Before the law changed, he would just
continually get his visa renewed, rather than change his name.
She told me about one time when she
was in line at a government office watching a Vietnamese women in front of
her. The Vietnamese woman was asked her name and told the official at the desk,
“one second, I have to look it up.” She started shuffling through her purse,
and Maria realized she must have adopted an Icelandic name formally, but had to
look it up to remember what it actually was. It was an identity that existed on
paper alone.
Maria thinks the regulations about
names have gotten more and more flexible each year that she’s been here. She
has started an organization for families who are new to Iceland, and she always
finds it interesting what choices they make in terms of changing or keeping
their names. Many of their Icelandic-born children’s names are approved, names Maria
thinks would never have been approved when she first arrived.
“More Icelanders are traveling and
that makes them think,” she told me. “They realize that they can travel around
the world with their Icelandic name and people will call them by it. It doesn’t
make sense that they wouldn’t do the same for foreigners coming to Iceland.”
Tryggvi
On
the drive to Thingvellir National Park last week, I interviewed Tryggvi, my
landlady’s partner and the namesake of his grandfather, a former prime minister
of Iceland. He passed on the Icelandic tradition of choosing names for your
kids after your grandparents. His three children are called Hildur Jacobina, Guðrún
Lillja, and Agnar Björn, all names from his family or
his ex-wife’s family.
The
Icelandic tradition of naming your children after your grandparents was so
popular in his family that he has five cousins who are named Tryggvi as well. We talked about this tradition and how Tryggvi
thinks that when he was growing up in Iceland, families were more like clans.
The names indicated who was related to who, and how they were related, and
everyone knew what family was known for what. Traditionally in Iceland, these names became
important for questions of inheritance and marriage and family relationships. “Icelandic
families had their own little mafia,” he joked.
I’m starting to get a handle on
just how small the population of Iceland is. Its one thing to know the number,
and it’s another to be here and see how people operate in a place where everyone
is so inter-connected. I realized today for the first time that the population
of the state of Vermont is double that of Iceland.
Tryggvi
told me that the tradition of passing on names from within your family is dying
out a bit, something that he thinks is quite sad. He thinks that more people
are traveling and coming back to Iceland, and choosing not to use names from their
families for their own children. He
believes names should continue to be regulated here. He doesn’t want all of
these traditions to die out.
I tend to be skeptical about the
Icelandic name regulations, but I sympathized with Tryggvi on the rainy drive.
At the heart of it all is the importance of a sense of belonging and of
community, of a big Icelandic family. There’s a sadness that comes from
realizing maybe today people are less interested in where they came from, more
interested in where they are going.
Auður Eir
My last interview was with Auður
Eir, who happens to be Iceland’s first female priest. She’s somewhat of a
celebrity here, but it’s a small country, and it turned out she knew
Steingurther, who put us in touch. Auður kindly picked me up at my apartment on
her way to work and we went to the “Kvenna Kirkjan” ("Women’s Church"), that she runs downtown. She talked to me about her four daughters’
names: Dalla, Yrsa, Elin Þöll, and Þjóðhildur. Dalla was chosen because it’s Auður’s
mother's name and the name of the wife of the first Icelandic Lutheran Bishop.
Yrsa is named after her sister, Þöll is the name for a small tree, and Auður thought it was very pretty combined with Elin. By the time Þjóðhildur came
around, her oldest daughter, Dalla, was reading Icelandic history in school. She wanted
to name her new baby sister Þjóðhildur after Leif Eriksson’s mother. Auður told
her, “that is such a big name for such a little girl,” but now, she loves it. She thinks Þjóðhildur has grown into her name.
For Auður, the naming committee is
a gift. She told me that before it formed, she had to act as an informal
committee herself.
“Before, I had to be the one to tell parents
yes or no about whether they could have a name. I had to read the law and
decide whether I could baptize a baby with that name or not.” She was ordained in 1974, 17 years before the foundation
of the naming committee. “It was really
hard to face the parents and tell them I couldn’t baptize the baby with that
name, but it was my responsibility as an official.”
A few times, if she refused, the
parents decided to go to another priest instead (some of them tended to be more
flexible than others). She told me that in a few heartbreaking cases, she had
been baptizing babies in a family for years, but then when someone came to her
with a name she thought didn’t meet the standards, she had to refuse them.
There have been three cases that she remembers where this happened and the
family stopped speaking to her. She remembers every one.
The committee makes her job easier.
There is a higher authority that approves or rejects a name, and she can turn
to them to ask whether a name will go through—it is not up to her interpretation
of the law alone. But when I asked Auður
about if she thought names here should be regulated, she wasn’t sure. She thinks it’s important for names to work
properly in the Icelandic language, and to preserve a kind of cultural
identity, but she wonders if perhaps, people would self-regulate. She wonders
if the rules should be there or if, as she put it, they could just “let it be.”
She thinks that right now more international sounding names are popular, but
she thinks these trends move in a circular fashion. She thinks that maybe as
people become more global citizens, they might actually choose more Icelandic
names for future generations. It might
happen on its own.
Auður confessed to me that baptisms
are her favorite. “Weddings and confirmations are nice too,” she told me. “But
baptisms are smaller. You can be with the whole family, talking, singing hymns.
And then of course, there’s cake and coffee.” She told me that she loves
hearing names, of seeing the happiness in families as they learn what their
newest member will be called. “You hear your name so many times a day,” she
told me. “People need to love their name.”
These conversations all happened individually, in different
contexts; a woman’s church, apartment buildings, a car ride. Most of these
people do not know each other, but their words may be most interesting when put
in dialogue with each other, like most of the conversations I’ve had this year. These names have become part of an Icelandic cultural
landscape, and the onomastic landscape that this year has been to me.
I don’t think this will be the last
time I write something about names. I might try to write some more overarching,
cross-cultural posts when I get home about what I’ve learned about names this
year in general.
Or maybe not.
It’s the last name post for now. I’m so grateful I had a reason to meet these
people, people who have now defined who a Tryggvi or an Auður is, who
have showed me the ways a Maria can cross borders, how a Sara and an Olga think
and behave, how we all somehow ended up in this place, introducing ourselves to
each other by name, and all that they encompass.
