Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson has to decide whether or not Cleopatra is Icelandic. It is, he knows, a decision which cannot be taken lightly: in the balance lies the future self-image of a couple’s newborn daughter. It is, furthermore, a decision which Jóhannes doesn’t take alone. He shares the little room in the capital’s three-story National Registry building with a senior lecturer in law and another academic working in Icelandic studies. The three, meeting monthly, compose Iceland’s Mannanafnanefnd, the Persons’ Names Committee, charged with preserving the nation’s ancient infant-naming traditions. Every month, sometimes six, sometimes eight, sometimes ten submissions from parents or prospective parents (along with checks in the amount of 3,000 krónur, about 25 dollars) reach the committee. On average, between one-half and two-thirds of the names proposed will be approved by the members and duly entered in the register, which presently counts 1,888 boys’ names and 1,991 girls’. The task is endless: parental creativity and the search for luckier names will always make the thousands already in circulation seem too few. In a country jostling with Jóns and Guðrúns and Helgas, a Bambi, a Marzibil, a Sónata, is an invitation to admire and remember. But occasionally parental creativity tries too hard. Then Jóhannes must send the submission back, telling the petitioner to pick another name and to be more careful about the rules that he and his colleagues are bound to enforce. It is with such a message that the committee replies, in May 2016, to the couple who wrote in with Cleopatra. The name is turned down on the grounds that the letter C has no place in the Icelandic alphabet.
If, politically, Iceland has long been one of the world’s most liberal nations—the first European state to give women the vote, an early adopter of marriage between same-sex partners, the sole to date whose government has been led by a lesbian—in matters of language it is highly conservative. Personal names—many of which date back to the sagas and comprise nouns and verbs and adjectives that speak of the long bleak winters communally, ancestrally, endured (Eldjárn, “fire iron”; Glóbjört, “glow bright”)—are thought of as an extension of the language, part of the national patrimony. So Icelanders preserve their names as the English preserve their castles: Icelandic names, like England’s historic buildings, are listed; the committee, like a heritage commission, is appointed every four years to supervise, adjudicate, oversee.
The present committee was appointed in 2014. Jóhannes, then forty-one, was young. But his credentials are impeccable. He has a doctorate in Icelandic grammar. He has authored many learned papers (in one, he categorized fifteen different sorts of hyphens: the hyphens that link compound nouns or digits written in words, that denote hesitation, that show elided pronunciation, and so on). And, perhaps most importantly, he has the best of all names. Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson. A name in keeping with his family tree. His grandfather—and not any old grandfather, a celebrated poet of children’s verse—had been a Jóhannes Bjarni; like many firstborn Icelanders, Jóhannes was named after his grandfather (who, to judge by the black-and-white photographs, he somewhat resembles—a resemblance the grandson, with his mousy hair worn short and his round glasses, cultivates). The poet’s daughter Þóra married a Sigtryggur, Jóhannes’s father. Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson: grandson of Jóhannes Bjarni, son of Sigtryggur.
Jóhannes is married and has three sons. When they became parents, Jóhannes and his wife stuck to tradition rigorously. They named their eldest son Guðmundur after the boy’s maternal grandfather; their second they named Sigtryggur in memory of Jóhannes’s father. Out of grandfathers to name their third son after, Jóhannes and his wife chose to call him Eysteinn in honor of Eysteinn Ásgrímsson, a fourteenth-century monk and poet known for the purity of his Icelandic.
Icelandic “pure”? To the tourist for whom the country is all fairy-tale elves and unpronounceable volcanoes, the idea will be surprising. To a sympathetic outsider like myself, friendly with Icelanders from various walks of life, familiar with their language and landscape, it is more than surprising: it is absurd. Many in Iceland are far too playful with their words to handle them reverentially. Like the easygoing Australians—those inhabitants of a hotter, vaster island—who, more than Britons or Americans, are fond of telescoping their commonest nouns (relly for relative, ute for utility vehicle, ambo for ambulance), Icelandic mouths are quick to dock lengthy words: ammó for afmæli (“birthday”), fyrró for fyrramálið (“tomorrow morning”). Readers of the popular broadsheet Morgunblaðið ask their newsagent for the “Mogga.” The same goes for names. In Iceland everyone is on first-name terms. A Guðrún—the most popular girl’s name in Iceland—is Guðrún even to five-minute acquaintances, even in the telephone directory (where Jóhannes Bjarni Sigtryggsson, Icelandic specialist, follows Jóhannes Bjarni Eðvarðsson, mason, and Jóhannes Bjarni Jóhannesson, engineer). But to her close friends and family, Guðrún (“Godly Mystery”) is too formal: with a brother she answers instead to Gurra; to a childhood pal she will always be Gunna; Rúna is how an aunt on her father’s side addresses her; another aunt, on the mother’s side, calls her Dunna. And if this Gunna or Dunna comes from a village in the north, or from the Vestmannaeyjar, an archipelago off the south coast, she might be known as Gunna lilla (“little Gunna”) if she is a short woman. Or if she is very thin, as Dunna stoppnál (“Darning needle Dunna”). If, working in a kitchen, she always has her sleeves rolled up, the villagers might call her Gunna ermalausa (“Sleeveless Gunna”). Our Jóhannes, the committee man, on the other hand, isn’t anyone’s Jói; and at the mere idea of Hannes, he frowns. Jói orðabók (“Dictionary Jói”) or Hannes nei nei (“No, No Hannes”) would make his thoughts crawl. To one and all, he is simply Jóhannes.
Jóhannes is a quiet man, a word puzzle fan, a vegetarian in a land of meat eaters. He wouldn’t swat a fly. So he is unhappy when a decision by the committee leads to a parent’s complaint in big and angry handwriting. He would like to tell the complainer, “I’m sorry. I didn’t make the rules.” The rules decide when he has to get out his red pencil. And Jóhannes is right. He didn’t make the rules; they were already in place, more or less as they exist today, in his grandfather’s time. The history of language purism in Iceland is long and complicated. Over the centuries, the form of this purism has changed. When Icelandic readers in the Middle Ages praised Eysteinn Ásgrímsson for the purity of his work, they meant to praise its Lutheran austerity, the spare lines shorn of affectation. Now when the academics praise someone’s speech or writing as “pure,” they mean it is an Icelandic unadulterated by foreign words, foreign sounds, foreign letters (like the C in Cleopatra). The shift requires a little explaining. To understand Icelandic purism in its modern form, with its strict rules and red pencils, it is necessary to look back to events in the early nineteenth century.
The young authors writing in Icelandic in the early 1800s wrote under the sway of Romanticism: they had a Romantic idea of their language’s past. In their imaginations, Icelandic was a once beautiful woman who had taken to her sickbed, laid low by an infection of Low German, Latin, and Danish loanwords. Danish, in particular, the language of the island’s colonizers, had weakened Icelandic. The authors, in their writings, sought to help their language convalesce. They mocked certain Danish sounds, the way the men and women in Copenhagen chewed their words. They lauded the old, weather-beaten farmers in the island’s faraway villages who, they said, couldn’t comprehend the slightest Danish. Soon, Danish became more than a word of nationalistic displeasure: to act Danish was to dandify your speech with Parisian salon talk, turn your back on the homeland, put on airs. To speak Icelandic in the capital, Reykjavík, while avoiding the temptations of fashionably French-sounding Danish, was to speak in the manner of an honest, upright man, sincerely and unself-consciously.
Iceland required the proud voice of a modern national poet, so the authors believed; the Germans had Goethe; the French had Molière; the English had Shakespeare. They promoted from their ranks a young naturalist by the name of Jónas Hallgrímsson. No one had written so beautifully about the island’s fauna and flora before, nor so deftly sketched the ironies of everyday life for the little farmholder:
Hví svo þrúðgu þú
þokuhlassi,
súlda norn!
um sveitir ekur?
Þjér mun eg offra,
til árbóta
kú og konu
og kristindómi.
[Goddess of drizzle,
driving your big
cartloads of mist
across my fields!
Send me some sun
and I’ll sacrifice
my cow—my wife—
my Christianity!]
Moreover, the naturalist showed a remarkable aptitude for inventing new words, words made out of existing words, without having to borrow sounds or notions from the obliging French, Greeks, or Danes. Aðdráttarafl (“magnetic force,” literally “attraction power”), fjaðurmagnaður (“supple,” literally “stretch-mighty”), hitabelti (“the Tropics,” literally “heat-belt”), and sjónarhorn (“perspective,” literally “sight corner”) are only a few of the hundreds with which he endowed the language. Then, in 1845, he died at the age of thirty-eight, and his naively bucolic vision of his countrymen as wise farmer-citizens became forever fixed.
Icelandic is self-sufficient: this became the cry of the nationalists seeking independence from Denmark. Poetry reduced to politics. In 1918, independence came. But the aftereffects of Hallgrímsson’s naive vision persisted. The national obsession with rooting out every trace of foreign influence in the language grew fierce. So fierce that from time to time government campaigns would lecture citizens on how to tell Icelandic, Danish, and other foreign words apart. Listen to tónlist (literally “tone-art”), newspaper readers were crisply informed, not músík. Take your shower in a steypibað (literally “pour-bath”), not in a sturta. Smart, the Danish way of describing someone or something as “tasteful,” was repudiated in favor of smekklegt. And as technology expanded and the world shrank, the purists’ efforts only intensified. The minting of brand-new words became a full-time occupation. Since the 1960s, the country’s universities regularly put their eggheads together to rationalize the work. (The minutes of their meetings, like those of the Persons’ Names Committee, are currently written by Jóhannes.) The work also includes keeping tabs on the media, lest a foreign word—these days, usually English—supersede any Icelandic coinages. Upbraiding fingers will be wagged at the television or radio presenter who forgets to say jafningjaþrýstingur instead of the current peer-pressure.
It is the paradox of the Romanticists’ struggle that, though it was supposed to free the Icelander of all anxiety to perform, as well as erase any standards of speech beyond those words and sounds that come naturally to mind and tongue, the result has been quite the opposite. The poet and his pastoral vision, creating the ideal speaker, also created a new linguistic standard and divided the nation’s consciousness. When those who live far from the countryside in the capital, as two-thirds now do, catch themselves saying something from an American film, or a British pop song, they cringe. Some undergo a linguistic crisis and yearn for the best, the purest Icelandic, that Icelandic of Icelandics still spoken out in the sticks, to communicate authentically. It is of this yearning, the narrator’s, that the popular, prizewinning novel Góðir Íslendingar (Fellow Countrymen), published in 1998, speaks: a forlorn young Reykjavík-dweller discovers a certain dignity—of speech, and thus of character—only among the isolated country folk (the translation is mine):
Up to this day the best Icelandic in the land was said to be spoken in Hali [a tiny farming community in the south-east of the country]. I was filled with admiration when I stepped inside this temple of Icelandic.… the woman went over to the stove, stirred a large pot and made coffee.… when I mentioned having heard that here was spoken the most beautiful Icelandic in the country, the woman called over from the kitchen, “I don’t know about that. Here we speak the East-Skaftafell dialect.… some men once came here and said that the folk over in Hestgirði spoke the purest.”… I have become so self-conscious about my own speech that I turn every sentence over three times in my mind before I dare let it out.
“The best Icelandic in the land”—but the narrator’s judgment isn’t aesthetic, only notional. Not so much as a sentence of this “purest” dialect does he hear, and it doesn’t matter. It is in this Icelandic-as-idea that the narrator, his author, and many readers feel great pride; in their own everyday Icelandic, many feel unsure. Somehow, the two Icelandics coexist.
It is in a present reflecting this history that the decisions of Jóhannes and his colleagues on the Persons’ Names Committee make news. Headlines like “Manuel and Tobbi get the green light, but not Dyljá” and “Yngveldur is allowed, but Swanhildi is banned” are common. The article under the former, published in May 2016, notes that the committee has adjusted the final names of four children of immigrant parents: “the son of Petar is now Pétursson, the daughter of Joao becomes Jónsdóttir, the son of Szymonar, Símonarson, and Ryszard’s daughter becomes Ríkharðsdóttir.” In the previous month, articles relayed the committee’s curious decision to authorize the boy’s name Ugluspegill (literally “Owl Mirror”)—an adaptation of a name for a prankster in medieval German folklore. “Whilst indications exist that the name has negative connotations in Icelandic,” the committee conceded in its report, “these are little known among the general public and aren’t for that matter particularly negative or derogatory.” The committee concluded, “A remote or uncertain risk that the name will cause its bearer embarrassment in the future is not sufficient reason to ban it. We therefore give the name Ugluspegill the benefit of the doubt.”
Reports like this have fostered anger toward the committee, which has been growing in some quarters of the country. Every now and then Jóhannes hears of a public figure who wants to see the committee closed down and Icelanders allowed to name their offspring however they like, but he only shakes his head doubtfully. He recalls what his colleague Ágústa says when she hears this kind of talk: wind us down and you’ll end up with families that give their children only digits for names, and others that will want to go by an appellation seventeen names long. Above all else, Jóhannes and his colleagues worry for Icelandic grammar. In Icelandic, nouns have gender. Boys’ names behave like masculine nouns, girls’ names like feminine nouns. But how to determine the correct declensions of names like Tzvi, Qillaq, Çağrı? What if immigrant parents bestow on their son a name which, to Icelandic eyes, has the forms of a girl’s? Jóhannes puts on a brave face, but he worries.
He has reason to worry. In 2012, an adolescent’s parents took an old decision by the committee to court in an attempt to overturn it. Jóhannes’s predecessors told the court they had simply followed the rules. They explained how the confusion in the case had all begun. One day, fifteen years ago, when they were in their little room at the registry building going through their post, a priest’s baptismal paperwork caught their eyes. They assumed that the priest had messed up the forms. They telephoned the parsonage. No, the priest responded, he had not. He had written Blær in the space for the infant’s name, and he had meant to write Blær, because it was thus that the baby girl had been christened. The committee members stopped him there. They were grammar-bound, they said, to invalidate the name: Blær, though the noun sounds sweetly, and though it means “gentle breeze,” is masculine. A masculine noun for a baby girl! What had he been thinking? The priest apologized: the name was so rare—apparently there are only five men named Blær in all of Iceland—that he hadn’t given the matter proper thought. He tried to broker a compromise; the priest and the parents talked. But when he suggested fine-tuning the newborn’s name to Blædís, a perfectly good girl’s name, the couple would not hear of it.
The mother, Björk Eiðsdóttir, told the court her side of the story. She said she had found the name Blær in the much-loved 1957 novel Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing), by Halldór Laxness. (Mischievous, prickly, gifted Laxness is the country’s only Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. As a young man, he changed his own name from Halldór Guðjónsson. As an author, he had no time for the language purists. The spelling in his novels had always been his own: he wrote leingi instead of lengi [“a long time”] and sosum instead of svo sem [“about, roughly”], adhering closer to how the words are pronounced. And his novels frequently mocked the purists’ naive Romanticism, tempering their pristine flower-colored valleys with tales of rural destitution and sheep diarrhea.) Laxness, in typical Laxness fashion, had made the Blær of his novel a female character; and Björk Eiðsdóttir decided that if she ever had a daughter she would call her Blær. In 1997 her daughter was born and baptized. When told by the priest that the committee was unhappy with her choice of name and had rejected it, she wrote pleading letters to the prime minister and the archbishop in vain. Five years later, when the family traveled to the United States, the girl’s passport gave her legal identity as Stúlka (“Girl”). It was like a game. Whenever she stood before a uniform she was Stúlka, but with her parents, teachers, and classmates she was always Blær. Her mother added, pointedly, that her daughter had often been complimented on her name. Now the girl was fifteen. Before very long she would marry and pass the name down to her own children. It was why mother and daughter had finally decided to sue.
When the solicitor general summed up on behalf of the committee, he allowed that Blær sounds less masculine than many other words. Even so, he said, it would represent a “big step” for the court to determine that nothing prevented Blær from belonging to a child of either sex.
The lawyer representing the girl and her mother replied with a flourish. He said that the step the court was being asked to take was really rather small, since, as it turned out, there existed precedent in Iceland for calling a girl Blær: a Blær Guðmundsdóttir, born in 1973 (only a few months after Jóhannes), already appeared in the national registry. This Blær’s mother had persuaded the committee there was a set of possible feminine declensions of the noun: if a woman called Blær gave you a gift, it would be from Blævi (whereas from a man called Blær it would be from Blæ); if you hadn’t seen the same woman for some time you could say that you missed Blævar (whereas if your absent friend was a man you would be missing, Blæs). Icelandic grammar, the lawyer concluded, was malleable. Societies change; their grammars change.
The court agreed. In January 2013 the judge, over the committee’s misgivings, awarded the girl the right to go henceforth by the name of Blær.
Societies change. A hundred years ago children born out of wedlock were a rarity in Iceland. Today the opposite is increasingly true. No stigma attaches to the Icelandic mother who raises a child by herself. For this reason, among others, more and more sons incorporate the mother’s name into their surname.
Grammars change. The obsolescence of the committee is only a question of time. Twenty years from now, or twenty-five, or thirty, a young man will walk among his country’s fjords, gullies, and glaciers. He will be called Antóníus Cleopötruson.