Thor fell, the hero became a farmhand – which Viking names live on?

Almost a thousand years after the last runestones were raised, 3,540 Swedes are called Torsten, 11,220 Torbjörn and 40,300 Ingrid. Thor fell when Christianity came. His name did not.

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It is one of few things from the Viking Age that have survived in everyday life: the names. We wanted to know how many – and whether it is chance which ones. Our hypothesis was that what belonged to power did not survive. The old elite, its titles, its law and its gods ought to have been replaced by the words of the church and the crown, while the everyday life of the family lived on. Half of the hypothesis held. The other half failed – in a direction we did not expect.

One name in five lives on

The runestones are full of names: those who raised the stone, the dead, sometimes the carver. We took every personal name that stands on at least three Swedish runestones – 391 names – and translated them into their present form: Þorsteinn becomes Torsten, Ásbjôrn Esbjörn, Sveinn Sven. Then we compared them with Statistics Sweden's list of first names that at least ten Swedes bear.

85 of the names live on today – 22 per cent. Counting by how common they were on the stones, it is 37 per cent, since the most common names survived more often. Ulfr, who took three payments in England, has 31,585 namesakes today. Helgi stands on 14 runestones and is Helge today (1,659 bearers); Rúni is Rune (6,603) and Kári is Kåre (577).

The kings' names nearly all made it: Erik (55,968 bearers), Björn (34,656), Sven (31,115), Håkan (25,508), Knut (4,473) and Harald (2,647). But most of the names died. Ônundr, Ingifastr, Freysteinn, Holmsteinn, Holmfastr, Guðfastr and Vébjôrn stood on many runestones and are borne by fewer than ten Swedes today.

The gods kept their names

If the power hypothesis were right, the names with a pagan god in them ought to have vanished first. It is the other way round. Names beginning with Þór-, Ás-, Frey-, Ingi- or Guð- live on in 39 per cent of cases, other names in 19 per cent. The difference is so large that it would arise by chance in about one case in seven hundred.

Torsten, Torbjörn (11,220 bearers), Tore (5,029), Tord (4,809), Ingvar (5,209), Ingrid and Åsa (26,936) – all of them carry a god or the word for god. The church took Thor out of the cult but not out of the names.

And the women? We expected women's names to have fared worse, since women in the medieval charters more often bore Christian names than men did. Here, too, it is the other way round: 33 per cent of the women's names live on, against 20 per cent of the men's. We did not test that in advance, so it is an observation to test further, not a result.

Part of the explanation is that many names have been revived. Of the 60 runestone names that also appear in the medieval charters of 1350–1450, 44 live on – three in four. Of the 331 that do not appear there, only 41 do. Names like Åsa, Tora and Runa thus seem to have been gone in the Middle Ages and to have come back with the interest in all things Old Norse in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The hero became a farmhand

The words for power are another matter. We took the words that stand on at least three runestones and checked whether they exist in today's Swedish with the same meaning. Of the words for kin and everyday life – stone, bridge, road, father, mother, brother, son – 23 of 27 live on. Of the words for power, law and faith, 9 of 17 do.

And among the words for rank and following only two of nine live on: kung and styrman. Þegn, the man of standing with a farm of his own, does not exist in Swedish. Nor does húskarl, the chieftain's bodyguard, lið, the following, or félagi, the comrade who shared ship and spoils. Dróttinn, the lord, lives on only in drottning, queen – and on the runestones it is already used only of God.

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The clearest example is drengr. On the runestones it is a title of honour: Ingvarr's men travelled drængila, like true drengir – bravely, like heroes. Today a dräng is a hired hand on the farm, and figuratively a henchman. The word for the hero became the word for the servant.

The church's words, by contrast, fared well. God, soul, spirit and holy already stand on the runestones and all live on. It was not the faith that lacked words, it was the old elite.

The king's men got new titles

The runestones are not only about families. They are also about power: who was whose man, who steered the ship, where the thing was held. So we went through every title and word for office that stands on Swedish runestones – 16 of them – and followed them into today's Swedish. We did that review after the locked plan, so it describes but tests nothing.

Four live on with the same meaning: kung, styrman, skeppare and ting – king, helmsman, skipper and thing. Drengr sank to dräng. Six survive only as historical terms: jarl, stallare, bryte, huskarl, hundare and drott. Five are gone altogether: þegn, landmaðr, hersir, þingalið and liðs forungi.

What survived is the king and the ship. What vanished is the following – the words for the men in a chieftain's service. And the titles nearly always stand with a lord. Ôzurr was skipari Haralds kunungs, King Haraldr's seaman (Sm 42, Tuna in Småland). Vrái was stallari Hákonar jarls, Earl Hákon's marshal (Sm 76, Komstad). Hæra was Sigrøðr's housecarl (U 335, Orkesta). Power on the runestones is personal: you were someone's man.

Þegn stands on 21 stones, 18 of them in Västergötland, where "a very good thegn" is one of the commonest ways of honouring the dead. The word lives on in English thane but not in Swedish. On the stone at Turinge church in Södermanland (Sö 338), Þorsteinn gets nearly the whole vocabulary at once. He fell in Garðar as liðs forungi, leader of the retinue, and landmanna bæztr, the best of the men of the land, and the brothers held their housecarls well. None of those words remain in Swedish. And Geiri from Kålsta in Uppland "sat in the west in the þingalið" (U 668) – probably the Danish king Knútr's guard in England. The word died with the guard.

The jarl stands on only 2 Swedish runestones, and both concern the same man: Earl Hákon, whose marshal Vrái got a stone at Komstad (Sm 76) and whose son Ôzurr got one at Bro church in Uppland (U 617). In Sweden the office of jarl lived on into the Middle Ages. The last great jarl was Birger jarl, who died in 1266, and the office was abolished in 1308. The jarl of the realm was called dux regni in Latin, the duke of the realm – and it was precisely the word hertig, duke, that took over. It is attested in Swedish from 1285, borrowed from Low German hertoch. The same happened to Vrái's title. The stallare, who led the king's following, was replaced in the 13th century by the marsk, a word from German Marschall.

The top changed language, the countryside kept its own

Look at the words power acquired in the Middle Ages, and at where they came from. The men of the crown and the nobility got words from outside: hertig, greve, marsk and riddare (duke, count, marshal, knight) from Low German, fogde (bailiff) from Latin by way of German, kansler from French and Latin. Riksdag is a translation of German Reichstag. Biskop and präst came with the church. All 9 are loans.

The words of the countryside are Norse. The ting, the härad, the lagman, the socken and the ledung – the shared duty to provide ships and men – all bear names that existed before Christianisation. Even frälse, the nobility's freedom from tax under the Statute of Alsnö in 1280, has a Norse name. And adel, nobility, is an old Norse word, aðal, that got its new meaning from German.

Here we interpret, and the interpretation is untested: power was replaced from the top. The new royal power and the church took their words from Europe, where they had learned to rule. The farmers went on gathering at the thing in their härad, and nobody needed to replace those words.

The Viking Age's own divisions fared worse. Jarlabanki had it carved on his stone at Vallentuna church (U 212) that he made the assembly place and æinn atti allt hundari þetta – alone owned all of this hundred. The hundred was Svealand's old division, tied to the levy. In the Union period the word was pushed aside by härad, already in use in Götaland and Denmark. Uppland's three folkland – Tiundaland, Attundaland and Fjädrundaland – became one province, Uppland, with the Uppland Law of 1296.

Sometimes the state went back to the old words. When the rural and town courts were replaced in 1971, the new courts were named tingsrätter, thing courts, and their presidents got the Old Norse title lagman, lawman. Until then they had been called häradshövding. The Vikings' thing, in other words, still passes judgement.

Garðar became Russia – and Svitjod became Sweden

The same pattern shows on the map. The runestones name 22 lands, peoples and places beyond the home district, on 91 stones in all. Eleven have the same name today: England, Denmark, Gotland, Skåne, Estonia, Finland, Tavastia and a few more. Two exist only as historical regions, Wierland and Livonia in the Baltic. But 9 have changed their name or no longer exist – and they stand on 45 stones, about half.

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They are the great realms far to the east and south. Garðar was the Kievan realm, which became the foundation of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine; Holmgarðr is Novgorod. Grikkland, on 24 stones, is not today's Greece but the Byzantine Empire. Langbarðaland is Italy – the name lives on only in Lombardy. Serkland, the lands around the Caspian Sea and the caliphate, has no present-day name at all. The realms fell or were rebuilt, and their Norse names fell with them.

One name was replaced by the church. Øystæinn, in whose memory Æstriðr raised the stone at Broby in Täby (U 136), sotti IorsaliR – made his way to Jórsalir – and died in Grikkland. The Vikings had a name of their own for Jerusalem. It vanished when the Bible's name took over.

And Sweden itself. Sveþiuð, Svitjod, stands on two runestones, both in Ludgo parish in Södermanland. On one, no one will bear a more able son in Svitjod (Sö 140), and the same stone perhaps calls on Thor. On the other, Ástríðr's sons were the ablest in Svitjod (Sö Fv1948;289, Aspa bridge). Svitjod means the people of the Svear. Sverige means the realm of the Svear – Swerike in the 13th century, Svearike in the 14th. In Icelandic the country is still called Svíþjóð. The country changed its name from a people to a realm, and that change holds the whole political shift.

How sure we are

Sources

• Scandinavian Runic-text Data Base (Rundata), Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University. Open Database License.
• Statistics Sweden, First names with at least 10 bearers among the registered population on 31 December (BE0001TNamn10), 2020.
• Svenskt diplomatariums huvudkartotek (SDHK), Swedish National Archives: personal names in the charters 1350–1450.
• Wiktionary (Swedish and English), the entries for the words' present meaning and origin.
• Wikipedia (Swedish): the articles Jarl, Stallare, Bryte, Hundare, Härad, Häradshövding, Tingsrätt, Frälse, Svitjod, Gårdarike, Langbardaland, Särkland and Uppland.
• Vitki's count, the locked analysis plan, the review of the titles and areas and all matches are open on GitHub.
• Images: Wikimedia Commons, with creator and licence in the captions.