Norwegian boy names
Old Norse built its names by welding two words together — a god and a bear, a stone and a guard, a horse and a stone — and Denmark and Sweden mostly let those compounds go. Norway did not. Vegard, Øystein, Håvard, Jostein and Torbjørn are living Norwegian names, given to men now alive, and that continuity is the single thing this page is about.
The ones that travel
Not one Norwegian name is inside the current U.S. top 100. These six are nonetheless the ones an English speaker can read aloud without help, and the ones that emigration carried furthest.
- ErikEH-rikScandinavian
Eternal ruler. The ríkr at the end is the same element that closes Fredrik and Henrik, and a distant cousin of Latin rex.
- LeifLAYFNorse
Heir, descendant — the one who remains. Leif Eriksson reached North America around the year 1000, five centuries ahead of everybody else.
- LarsLARSSScandinavian
Man from Laurentum. Latin Laurentius, worn through Laurens to a single syllable, and then completely ordinary for six hundred years.
- NilsNILSSScandinavian
Victory of the people. Nicholas reduced until only the consonants are left.
- AndersAHN-dursScandinavian
Manly, brave. Greek Andreas, flattened by Norse speech into something a Norwegian farmer would answer to.
- RuneROO-nehNorwegian
Secret, hidden lore. Before a rune was a letter it was a mystery: Old Norse rún meant hidden knowledge, and the alphabet was named after it, not the other way round.
The royal names
Norway elected a Danish prince as king in 1905 and he immediately took an Old Norse name. That decision is why the royal list here reads like a saga index rather than a European court almanac.
- HåkonHOH-konNorwegian
High son, highborn kinsman — hár plus konr, the word family behind English king. Seven kings; Håkon VII refused in 1940 to appoint a collaborationist government, and the present crown prince carries the name.
- OlavOH-lahvNorse
The ancestor's heir, from anu plus leifr. Norway writes it Olav and the world writes it Olaf; St Olav is the country's patron and Olav V reigned until 1991.
- HaraldHAH-raldNorse
Army ruler. Harald Hardrada was killed at Stamford Bridge in 1066; Harald V has been king of Norway since 1991.
- MagnusMAG-nusLatin and Scandinavian
Great. Not a Norse word at all — an eleventh-century Norwegian king borrowed it from Charlemagne's Latin title, Carolus Magnus, and it spread across the whole North from there.
- SverreSVER-rehNorwegian
Whirling, restless, from the verb sverra — almost no other Norse name is built on a verb. Sverre Sigurdsson took Norway with the Birkebeiner rebels by 1184.
- SigurdSIG-urdNorse
Guardian of victory — sigr plus varðr, the same element behind English warden. Sigurd the Crusader sailed to Jerusalem and ruled jointly with his brother Øystein.
- EirikAY-rikNorwegian
Ever-ruler. Erik is the pan-Scandinavian spelling; Eirik is the Norwegian one, and the spelling attached to the man who talked people into moving to Greenland.
The Old Norse compounds Norway kept
This is the heart of the page. Two elements from a closed stock of prestige words — gods, animals, weapons, hard materials — welded into one name. Most of these have no Danish or Swedish equivalent still in daily use.
- VegardVEH-gardNorwegian
The protection of the sanctuary. Vé was consecrated ground in pre-Christian religion and garðr the fence around it. Very few living names are this frankly pagan.
- ØysteinOY-staynNorwegian
Stone of good fortune. The ey in front is genuinely contested — luck, ever, or island — and the dictionaries lead with luck while admitting the rest.
- HåvardHAW-vardNorwegian
High guardian: the lookout on the ridge above the farm, or a guardian of high rank. Both readings were probably alive at once.
- JosteinYOO-staynNorwegian
Horse-stone, from jór and steinn. Nobody was composing a sentence; the parts are real and the sum is decorative. Jostein Gaarder wrote Sophie's World.
- HalvorHAL-vorNorwegian
Rock-guard. Oslo's coat of arms shows Hallvard, killed defending a stranger; Halvor is his name as ordinary Norwegian speech kept it.
- SteinarSTAY-narNorse
Stone warrior. Steinn attached itself to almost every element available — to Thor, to the bear, to the army, as here.
- AudunOW-dunNorwegian
Wealth-friend, open-handed. Audun and English Edwin are the same idea assembled twice by two branches of one language family that had stopped talking.
- ThorbjornTOR-byurnNorse
Thor's bear. Thor compounds are the largest single group of personal names in the Icelandic settlement records — and not one of them is simply Thor.
- AsbjornAHS-byurnNorse
Divine bear. Áss is a member of the Æsir in general rather than a named god, and it was one of the busiest openings on the shelf.
- RagnvaldRAHNG-valdNorse
Ruler by the counsel of the gods. Regin means the ruling powers taken together — a way of invoking divine authority without naming anyone.
- EgilAY-gilNorse
Uncertain. The usual reading ties it to egg, the edge of a blade; a competing account makes it a worn-down Agi- name. Neither is secure.
- TerjeTAIR-yehNorwegian
Thor's spear, worn by centuries of Norwegian speech until no trace of the god shows. It is also the sailor in the poem Norwegians learn by heart.
- TrygveTRIG-vehNorwegian
Trustworthy, dependable — the Old Norse adjective, given straight. Trygve Lie became the first Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1946.
Everyday Norwegian now
What a Norwegian classroom actually sounds like: short, hard, unornamented names, several of them a single Old Norse noun handed over without a second element.
- AkselAHK-selNorwegian
My father is peace. Hebrew underneath and Nordic on the surface — Absalom, whose name is one of the sharper ironies in the Old Testament.
- EspenES-penNorwegian
God-bear. It packs a deity and an animal into two flat syllables and hands them to Espen Askeladden, the ash-lad of the folk tales who wins by picking things up.
- SindreSIN-drehNorwegian
A dwarf-smith's name, linked to the sparks of a forge. Not a god but a craftsman — and the objects off his anvil include Thor's hammer.
- StianSTEE-ahnNorwegian
The one who strides on. Old Norse formed it as a present participle, so the name describes motion rather than a thing, which almost nothing else here does.
- OyvindOY-vinNorwegian
Traditionally, winner of the island. Written Øyvind in Norway, and one of the oldest names still in everyday use: a tenth-century court poet wore it.
- OlaOO-lahNorwegian
The ancestors' heir — the everyday Norwegian Olav. Ola Nordmann is Norway's John Doe, which tells you how ordinary the name has always been.
- VetleVET-lehNorwegian
Bear cub — and it refuses to say the word bear. Old Norse Vetrliði means winter-traveller: the cub that has come through its first winter.
- OddODNorwegian
The point of a spear or blade. An ordinary Norwegian name and an English adjective at the same time, which is worth thinking about before you emigrate with it.
- GeirGAYRNorwegian
Spear. Norse names are usually two words bolted together; this is one word, and it is a weapon handed over undisguised.
- KjellSHELNorwegian
Cauldron — specifically the sacrificial cauldron of Old Norse religion, worn down over a thousand years into one of the plainest men's names in the North.
How Norwegian naming works
Norway spent four hundred years under Denmark and then ninety under Sweden, and it came out of that with two written standards for its own language and a strong appetite for anything demonstrably Norwegian. The names show it. The spelling reform of 1917 brought in the letter å in place of the old Danish aa, so Haakon became Håkon and Haavard became Håvard — though the king himself kept the old spelling and signed as Haakon VII to the end. The same period sent parents back to the farm registers and the sagas for first names, which is how a stock of tenth-century compounds ended up on twentieth-century birth certificates. Norwegian farm names became surnames rather than patronymics in much of the country, so a Norwegian family name is very often a place: a headland, a slope, a clearing in the trees.
Two letters do most of the work of making these names look Norwegian, and neither is decoration. The å is a long open o, so Håkon begins like the vowel in law; the ø is a rounded front vowel with no English equivalent, which is why Øystein starts nearer the oy of boy than anything else on offer. Web addresses cannot carry either letter, so this site files them at /hakon/ and /oystein/ while the pages themselves spell them properly. Beyond the letters, the compounds are the thing to understand: families chose elements that alliterated with a grandfather's name or repeated half of a parent's, so a boy could be called horse-stone without anyone pausing over the image. The neighbouring pages are built on different foundations on purpose — Danish around the royal alternation and the consonants Danish will not pronounce, Swedish around the Vasa and Bernadotte kings and the Yngling dynasty, and Scandinavian around the names all three countries genuinely hold in common.