The meaning of names

1Choosing a name for a child can be quite challenging, as many new parents have realized. We may laugh at their doubts and discussions; but they have serious foundations. Giving a name is a responsible task, because we all feel that the name must be ’suitable’. Selecting a first name implies an interpretation of the world in which the child is going to grow up, because it is here that the name is going to suit or not. This means that the choice tells us a little about the world-view of the parents (or other people having part in the decision).

2The simple name reflects a complex social reality. This complicates the interpretation of patterns of choice. In European cultures it is further complicated by the fact that most names are without linguistic meaning to those who use them. They are chosen from a stock of names of ancient origin, and their original meaning is obscure. Names must be understood solely from the social context of their use.

3The basic question of this interpretation must be: who shares these names? Versions of that question have been put by historians, sociologist, anthropologists, and linguists1. Many studies have made use of names, either as a primary or secondary source of information. Generally the value of the results has depended on the additional information available besides the name. The more known about the persons involved, the more the name reveals.

4Prosopography rests on the use of names as a tool when linking together information on the individuals. My aim here is to demonstrate how those names may be used as a source of information in the study itself. The richness of information available in prosopographies makes the interpretation of the names more fruitful than in most studies; and the names supplement the dry facts of life and career with material about the perception of this social context. It is sparse; but still the names may serve as a link to the mentality of those whose life data are collected.

The example

5My example is a study of the army officers of the Danish state (the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway and the duchies Schleswig and Holstein) 1648-18642. This was a group of men defined by their public function Accordingly the family aspects, commonly important when giving names, are not well illustrated compared with studies based on e.g. church registration. On the other hand many prosopographical investigations deal with male groups of a like kind. So what can be done with the Danish officers may be done elsewhere, and where better information is available even more will be possible.

The army officers of Denmark-Norway

6The old Danish state was a multi-cultural unit. The two kingdoms of Denmark and Norway were close in language, but otherwise quite different. The elite of Schleswig and Holstein was mostly German in culture. The whole state had close relations with the rest of Germany. There was a considerable elite immigration which included many military men.

7This immigration was most intense during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century when the army expanded to a peace-time strength of about 70000 (about one third the French figure, based on one tenth the French population; or more than 3 % of the population of the Danish state). After this period of expansion recruitment of foreigners became rather unimportant. Gradually self-recruitment from the sons of officers came to dominate, supplemented by recruitment from a broad range of other elite and semi-elite groups in all parts of the state.

8This creation of a stable and partly self-recruiting ’officer class’ was a part of a larger process: the establishment of the class of state servants of Danish absolutism. This powerful class developed after the revolution of 1660, where absolute monarchy replaced the former domination by a privileged nobility. The state servants of absolutism included a quite large minonty of nobles, but the class was defined as something special and placed above the nobility in rank. The two thousand army officers were the larger part of this state servant class. Regardless of nation practically all officers were protestant and belonged to the Lutheran church. This excludes name choice relating to the cult of saints, an important mechanism among catholics.

9The most conspicuous protestant fashion, the introduction of a wider range of biblical names, had passed long ago. Usually studies of name-giving in Europe show that the influence of religion is considerable, but these accidental factors must have made it exceptionally low here. Consequently the importance of other factors must have been greater.

Preconditions and choices

10A certain standardization is necessary to prevent excessive effects from deviations in spelling. This is especially true when the inquiry reaches back to a period when orthography was at most a word. The basic principle used here is reduction to the common form of the last half century of the period3.

11Compound names, with or without hyphen, are not found in the data. But multiple first names are common, and more so with time. Those bom 1801-50 had on the average 2.4 first names, more than double the number of the generation 1601-50. In this article statistics dealing with the stock of names of each generation use the name and not the person as the statistical unit.

12Calling after somebody is defined in two ways. The soft rule means that at least one of the first names of the elder person is found among the first names of the younger. The hard rule demands that all the names of the elder are repeated.

13The period 1648 to 1864 mentioned above applies to the officers’ period of service. Their names had been given at some earlier date, so the period of investigation here is c. 1600 to 1850. It has been subdivided into nine sub-periods: the names of those bom 1601-25, 1626-1650 and so on4.

Using names as social data

14The basic question . who shares these names? can be translated into a number of practical possibilities. Several of these will be explored in this work.

15One is the comparison of name styles. Name style is the term I use for the pattern formed by the frequency distribution of names in a group. It may be used to characterize groups in terms of distance and closeness. The prosopographical study group may be divided in subgroups with different origin. In this way you get a sample of names from a number of elite groups. These may be compared with each other and with material from other sources. It may be presumed that divergence in naming style is an indicator of cultural divergence in general.

16A second possibility is comparison with the names of persons in a specific relationship to name-giver and child: family members, or real or potential patrons. This will normally only be possible for those bom into the group, as data on at least two generations are necessary. But self-recruitment is prevalent in elite groups (excluding the Catholic clergy), so such data will seldom be lacking. Here data may be found about patterns of power and feelings of affinity or dependency.

17Finally some names are known to be associated with different events, fashions and thoughts. Well known examples are the names of the reformation or the great French revolution. The spread of such names may serve as an indicator of the spread of the whole complex of ideas.

The names of the officers: a short survey

18The sample of about 3000 officers whose biographies have been coded had been christened with 305 different first names. Out of the 305 names, 96 are only met once and 45 twice. The three most common, namely Frederik, Christian and Johan, accounted for almost one quarter of all names This concentration was quite common in this age. Several studies show that a long range tendency towards a more restricted stock of names culminated in the eighteenth century5. The variety of names among the officers was approximately the same as among Danish nobles, clergymen and bourgeois of the eighteenth century. Diversity was much smaller among the peasants6. It is however remarkable that the dominance of the most common names was as great among the corps of officers as among the sons of the clergymen. This points to a relatively high cultural homogeneity in the different groups from which the officers were recruited.

19This relatively uniform name style of the officer corps had two mam characteristics: all the most frequent names were old and they were international. The frequent names had been known for centuries, both in Scandinavia and in Germany7. This means that specific Scandinavian first names were not usual, neither Scandinavian forms of common saints’ names (Niels [Nicolaus], Jens [Johannes]) or names of ancient Scandinavian origin (Oluf, Knud). Only Jens and Oluf reached more than 1 % of the names of the whole period. It also meant that a number of names well known in Germany, which had not come into wide use in Denmark earlier, remained infrequent The names of the officers reflected a compromise taste and style, neither strange to Scandinavians nor Germans.

20The predominance of a small number of names determines how the name styles of subgroups can be compared. Radical differences can not be expected, only variations in the relative popularity of a small selection of names. The divergence will not be immediately visible; but it can be calculated as an average difference of frequency. All the following statements about the degree of identity between name styles rest on such calculations8.

The names of the nations

21The Danish officers may be divided in nations according to their place of birth. There were four large ones: Danes (in the restricted sense), Norwegians, Schleswig-Holsteiners, and Germans, (i.e. the three cultural and political regions of the Danish monarchy, and the main group of immigrants .) They were not present in equal numbers all the time. The foreigners were few after the generation bom 1701-50, and the Norwegians after that of 1751- 1800, due to the separation of the two kingdoms in 1814. The largest nation was the Danish, with about half of all names for the whole period. The Danish name style will serve as the point of comparison for the others.

22Seen over the whole period the name styles of the Danish and Schleswig-Holstein nations were almost identical. A few names of Nordic origin were clearly more popular in Denmark9, and the name Detlef was number five in rank in the Duchies but rare in the kingdom. Otherwise the differences were not important.

23This uniformity developed during the seventeenth century. It did not exist in the generation bom 1601-50, but was clearly established a century later. The juridical relations between the kingdom and the Duchies were a tangle, and became more intricate than ever during the seventeenth century. But the message of the names is clear: the cultural distance between those elites from which the officers were recruited in Denmark and the Duchies was reduced. This happened in the wake of the enhancement of the royal authority (which was palpable everywhere no matter the legal status) and the growth of the state machinery during the latter part of the seventeenth century. The cultural conformity did not mean that the Schleswig-Holsteiners abandoned a German name style or adopted the earlier Danish one Instead the former styles both in the kingdom and the Duchies were replaced by new which were almost identical.

24The name style of the ’real’ Germans recruited to the Danish officer corps was quite different. This is hidden by the fact that for the period as a whole the same name was number one among them and among Danes and Schleswig-Holsteiners (Frederik/Friedrich). In fact it was only so because this name was a stable number two among the Germans. Their preferred name in the seventeenth century was Johann and in the eighteenth Carl. Farther down the list there was even greater deviation, with quite a number of the common names being more than three times as frequent in one nation than in the other10.

25Norwegian and Danish name styles differed in another way, as hinted above. Scandinavian names were more common in Norway. The ranking of the most usual names was almost identical, however. Only one name in each list was three times as frequent as in the other11. The distance between Danish and Norwegian probably decreased, but this is difficult to say for sure because the gap was so small from the start.

26Together the national name styles of those elite groups from which Danish officers were recruited formed a continuum: from Germany over Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark to Norway. A cultural shift coincided more or less precisely with each political border. The smallest gap was found between Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein, the second smallest between Denmark and Norway, and the largest between the Duchies and Germany south of the lands of the king of Denmark12. These proportions were conserved even as all the gaps decreased in size, especially inside the state.

27This pattern is quite surprising in two ways, both concerning the Schleswig-Holsteiners. It is not new that the cultural distance between the elites of Denmark and the duchies was rather small. But it is astonishing that it was smaller than between Denmark and Norway, and between Schleswig-Holstein and the rest of Lutheran North Germany.

Development in time

28The tendency towards a reduced distance between the name styles of the nations was not the only change with time. Fashionable names can be identified for each nation and period. Among the Danes Claus, Hans, Jens, Jacob were in vogue 1601-25, Emil, Valdemar, Edvard, Harald 1826-50, and others in each sub-period between. Those names which were markedly in fashion in one sub-period compared with the others did normally not reach a high frequency for the period as a whole. But long term trends can be seen in the use of the most common names. Scandinavian names in general slowly became less popular from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. So did e g Hans and Johan, while Carl and Wilhelm were used ever more.

29The popularity waves of the most frequent names were correlated by definition: when one declined the share of the others had to grow. So every sub-penod had its own name style, comparable to the name style of others. The differences between these styles can be measured, like differences between groups. This gives an assessment of the speed of change in style in different ages This name style of the period must of course be compared separately for each nation. Otherwise it will be distorted by the changing composition of the officer corps

30The rate of change was highly correlated in the non-foreign nations (Danes, Norwegians, Schleswig-Holsteiners). It was high and increasing during the seventeenth century, culminating around 1700. Then the rate of change from sub-period to sub-period began to fall, reaching a low point at the end of the eighteenth century, where it started to rise agin. In other words: an age of rapid change was followed by a rather stable name style. This style ruled during the eighteenth century, but began to break up around 1800. This rhythm differed totally from that found among the dominant class in Danish society, the peasants.

31The peasant stock of names changed so rapidly in the eighteenth century that the nineteenth seems quite stable in comparison, especially before the 1840s13.

32We have then two periods of rapid change in the name style of the Danish social elite. One fell in the later seventeenth and one in the early nineteenth century. The first was connected with the internationalization of the stock of names. The five most common names among officers bom in Denmark 1601-25 were Jørgen, Niels, Hans, Erik, Henrik, all Scandinavian forms. In 1726-50 the top five were Frederik, Christian, Johan, Carl, Hans, none of which was specifically Scandinavian. Those who know the history of the Danish monarchy will recognize the two leaders. Frederik and Christian were (and are) the royal names; kings christened like that alternated on the throne from 1513 to 1972. The popularity of these names increased enormously around the middle of the seventeenth century. Among officers bom in Denmark 1601-50 Christian is only number nine, and Frederik almost scarce; but then they jump to a position of clear leadership.

33The royal names lost some of their popularity in the second period of rapid change, starting around 1800. Carl did even supplant Christian as number two on the list of names given to Danish-born officers. The central trait of the stable elite name style of the eighteenth century was in decline. Otherwise this period of transformation was of another kind than the first. Then reasonably well known names had changed places on the ranking list. Now, in the nineteenth century, a large number of formerly unknown or very rare names became popular: Emil, Valdemar, Edvard, Harald, Ferdinand, Johannes, Anthon. This was a period of innovation rather than realignment14.

34The two periods of rapid change in name style in the Danish social elite should probably be coupled with the changes in the social and political system. Several links may be found. The most direct connects first names with the namegivers’ perception of the role of the monarchy. In the seventeenth century the royal names advance hand in hand with the royal power, while the changes around and after 1800 may be seen as part of that transformation of attitudes which undermined the legitimacy of the ancien regime15. But other less direct links were also active.

The names of the Danish estates

35Some of these concern the name styles in different parts of the Danish elite. Recruits to the officer corps came in the main from four subgroups of the elite: the officers themselves, the civil servants, the landowners and the bourgeois. Self-recruitment increased gradually, as has been mentioned. The same was the case with recruitment from other servants of the king (civil servants, navy officers). Part of the change during the seventeenth century was created by this increased self-recruitment, which reduced the share of other groups (notably the landowning nobility) with other name styles. The dominant style of the eighteenth century, distinguished by the position of the royal names, was the name style of the royal servants. But this style was also dominant in another sense. The name styles of the other elite groups -clearly the bourgeois, less clearly landowners and clergymen- approached the style of the royal servants. This spread of a new pattern revolutionized the bourgeois name style in the eighteenth century. The royal servants kept to their style, which had been established during the previous century, and which was now gradually extended to the whole elite. The formal and political dominance of the royal servants was shaping the mental sphere.

Relations and friends

36What has been said until now refers to the conformity within groups. Probably this conformity was partly conscious: a suitable name was one which was fitting for a member of a certain class16. But group styles might also be a by-product of other selection mechanisms, referring directly to known persons. The position of the royal names among the sons of the elite was of course an example of this.

37Another obvious example of the influence of naming on group name styles is the peasants. It seems to be a universal rule that their choice of names was quite rigidly determined by conventions of naming in the family. A typical pattern found in many places in Europe during this period (including Denmark) was eldest son after father’s father, second after mother’s father and so on alternating between families17. The end product of this was of course the perpetuation of the name stock of the region.

38The officer data permit testing of the most important of these links Because of self-recruitment a quite large number of officers’ sons can be linked to their (officer) grandfather. Comparison of the first names shows that among the army officers naming after paternal grandfathers was not that common. It can be calculated that only about half of those officers who were paternal grandfathers were honoured in this way18.

39This is an average for the whole period. When the calculation is made for each sub-period it appears that the distance in custom between the officers and rural Denmark did emerge gradually. Naming after the paternal grandfather was quite common among the officers in the seventeenth century, but dwindled over time. (See figure.) Presumably the same applies to all kinds of naming within the family.

40The decline of naming within the family is logical. Several studies have shown that such patterns are connected with patriarchal power and the transfer of property and position through inheritance19. But the officers did not live under such conditions. Of course the established men promoted their relatives; but essentially position in the state machinery could not be inherited. It had to be recreated by each new generation.

41Other men than relatives were important in this process. Especially two: His majesty himself, as the kings did their best to retain personal control with career decisions in the army20. And the commander of the regiment, who recommended for commission or promotion. Their patronage, or ’friendship’ in the current language of the period, was crucial.

42Some part of the spread of the royal name was not due to simple imitation, but to attempts to gain royal patronage. A former court chaplain solicited a commission for his son nahmens Friedrich Christian,

43"dessen Tauffe Ihro Mayt. selber in allerhöchster Persohn als Patze beygewohnet, und den er mit vielen Kosten zum Dienst der Kirche erziehen lassen, nunmehro endlich declariret, wie daβ er zur Theologie und dem Predig Amt eine unüberwindliche Abneigung, hingegen aber zum Militair-Etat eine grosse Lust habe".

44And the unsuccesful educator had success as client21.

45The effects of imitation and patron-client relationships cannot be separated clearly; but it can be seen that the royal names were more used for sons of officers the higher the rank of their father22.

46Naming after the colonel may be traced by following the link from son to father, and then identifying his colonel when the son was bom. In 7 % of the cases the names were the same according to the hard rule (all names of the coloned repeated). There is of course a chance that a name chosen for other reasons will be the same as the colonel’s. This can be calculated as the random probability of coincidence with all the names of colonels of the relevant time. Subtracting this reduces the raw figure to 5 %.

47Clientelistic naming practices then had a certain influence23. It was not extensive, but it seems to have increased over time. In a certain sense such practices were the natural replacement for naming in the family, as they reflected the new patterns of power in a class of paid officials emerging from a rural society. The shift from family to ’friends’ reflected the move from a mental world of lineage and inheritance to one of individual selection.

Name and text

48A first name is a word, and can be used to denote a person in a text. So ’who shares these names’ may include the individuals from fiction, history and so on. The wave of new names around 1800 included many of this kind.

49Interpretation of such names is relatively easy from the qualities of the literary character and of the work. The message is clear when early protestants promoted names showing their bible reading, or medieval noblemen christened their sons after the heroes of knightly romance24. The new names among Danish officers around 1800 fall in two groups. One consists of names from ancient, heroic Danish history. (Valdemar, Harald). A clear sign of the broad acceptance of the wave of patriotic sentiment, which from the 1760s was a prominent feature of Danish public life wit several officers as leading figures25. The names in the other group can be traced to a variety of literary sources. The two most popular (Emil, Edvard) reveal the increasing importance of France and Britain as direct sources of new thoughts (bypassing the traditional German channels).

50The wave of new names disclosed the increasing importance of ideas as a point of orientation in life, besides family and power. And it suggested what some of these ideas were, most prominently patriotism in a new and more conscious variant. Perhaps also a more conscious selection on aesthetic grounds, the dominant force in naming today26.

Conclusions

51The names of the Danish officers show many things: the degree of cultural integration in the elite of state servants in a monarchy which was otherwise divided by language; the importance of this elite as a pattern for others; the movement of an early group of salaried professionals away from the habits of an agricultural society. Other questions will be relevant when dealing with other groups; but the study of names may be fruitful in many cases.

52The name is an attribute of the individual, just like educational background or time in office. Like other attributes of the individual it may be turned into an attribute of groups. The procedure is a little more involved as names can not be ranked on intrinsic grounds or averaged But name styles and mechanisms of choice can be defined in practice and used in a fruitful way. Some possibilities are shown here, and surely more may be found

53The rank and file of a study group is often described as anonymous Not because they are nameless, but because those few words are thesole known to us which were spoken by or about them The study of names may remove a little ofthat anonymity. It is an attribute of another kind than those commonly used, and may throw light upon many points of central interest in the typical prosopographical venture.