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Old Norse names, patronymics and bynames for fiction and games
Most Norse names in fiction get one thing right and two things wrong. They get the sound: hard consonants, a Thor or a Bjorn somewhere. They miss the structure, which is what made a saga name work as an address. A man in the sagas is rarely just Thorstein. He is Thorstein Egilsson, or Thorstein the White, or both, and each part tells you something.
Given names were built from parts
Old Norse given names are mostly compounds of two elements, each a word with its own meaning. Mix and match them and you get thousands of plausible names from a small stock of parts.
Common first elements include Thor- (the god), As- (a god in general), Sig- (victory), Gunn- (battle), Arn- (eagle), Hall- (rock), Ulf- (wolf) and Ragn- (counsel of the gods). Common second elements for men include -steinn (stone), -björn (bear), -ulfr (wolf), -geirr (spear) and -mundr (protection). For women, -hildr (battle), -gerðr (enclosure), -dís (goddess), -rún (secret) and -veig (strength) turn up again and again.
So Thor plus stone gives Thorsteinn, Arn plus bjorn gives Arnbjorn, Gunn plus hildr gives Gunnhild, Sig plus rún gives Sigrun. The meanings stack into something like "Thor's stone" or "battle-battle", and nobody at the time worried that the second one is redundant. The parts were chosen for family tradition and sound, not to form a sentence.
There were also plenty of single-element names: Bjorn, Ulf, Orm (serpent), Ketill (cauldron), Hrafn (raven), Helga, Ása. Mixing a few of these in among the compounds stops a cast list sounding mechanical.
The Viking and Old Norse name generator works from real given names rather than invented ones, which is what you want for historical fiction. For gods, giants and valkyries, the Norse mythology name generator leans on the same elements but pushes them further from the everyday.
Patronymics: the father's name, in the genitive
The second part of a Norse name is usually the father's name plus -son or -dóttir. This is not a family surname. It changes every generation: Egil's son is Thorstein Egilsson, and Thorstein's son is Egil Thorsteinsson.
The father's name goes into the genitive (possessive) form before the suffix, and that is where most modern attempts slip. A few patterns:
- Names ending in -r usually drop it and take an -s: Gunnarr becomes Gunnarsson, Óláfr becomes Óláfsson.
- Names ending in -i take an -a: Bersi becomes Bersason, Gísli becomes Gíslason.
- Some names take -ar: Sigurðr becomes Sigurðarson.
A daughter takes the same genitive with -dóttir: Gunnarsdóttir, Óláfsdóttir. A woman kept her own patronymic for life; marriage did not change it. That one detail does a lot of work in a story, because it means every woman's name tells you her father, and a household of several women can carry several different second names.
Iceland still uses this system, which is why an Icelandic phone book sorts by given name.
Bynames: what people actually called you
A patronymic is formal. In the sagas, people are just as often known by a byname, a nickname attached with "the" or simply added on. Bynames are where Norse naming gets its character, and they fall into a few rough groups:
- Appearance: Eirik the Red, Harald Fairhair, Ketil Flatnose, Thorkel the Tall.
- Body and injury: Önund Tree-foot (who had a wooden leg), Ivar the Boneless.
- Clothing and possessions: Ragnar Lodbrok, "hairy breeches".
- Character and deeds: Thorfinn Karlsefni, roughly "the makings of a man"; Eystein the Noisy; Harald Hard-ruler.
- Origin: someone from the Hebrides or from Sogn could simply be named for the place.
Bynames could be affectionate, mocking or both, and they were often given by other people rather than chosen. A character who hates their byname is a ready-made scene.
For a game, a byname is also the most practical part of the name. Players will forget "Thorstein Egilsson" by the next session; they will remember "Thorstein Ketil-killer".
Putting a full name together
A full name can carry all three layers, and you can use as many as the moment needs:
Gudrun Osvifsdottir, called Gudrun the Proud
In dialogue, people use the given name. In formal introductions, the patronymic. When telling stories about someone, the byname. Three registers from one name.
A quick checklist when you make one:
- Pick a two-part given name, or a single-element one for variety.
- Pick the father's name and put it in the genitive before -son or -dóttir.
- Decide whether this person has earned a byname, and who gave it to them.
- Check that the cast does not all start with Thor-. It was popular, but a whole village of Thorsteins is hard to read.
Gods, giants and the edges of the map
Mythological names follow looser rules. Valkyries have short, sharp names that are often plain words: Hildr (battle), Skögul (shaker), Göndul (wand-wielder), Mist (mist). Giants get names that describe weather, cold and rock. Dwarves in the old poems have long lists of names, many of them simple descriptive words, which Tolkien famously borrowed for Thorin's company.
Kennings, the poetic substitutions where a ship becomes "the horse of the sea" and blood becomes "wound-sea", are a good source of epithets for gods and heroes. They read as Norse in a way that a plain English title does not.
Neighbours on the map
If your setting has the Norse rubbing against Gaelic or British peoples, as the real Viking Age did in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, mixed names are historically sound. Norse settlers took Gaelic names and Gaelic families took Norse ones. The Celtic name generator gives Old Irish, Brittonic and Pictish names with their own patronymics (mac, ap, son of), so a character called Thorstein mac Néill has a believable family story already built in.
For the rest of the cast, from taverns to kingdoms, the Fantasy and RPG section collects the generators by people and setting.