Place-names can offer a vibrant glimpse into relationships between animals and humans.
While a few weeks ago I was focussed on the place-names in the Sagas of Icelanders, this time I've been looking hard at Swedish place-names from the Topographical register at the Swedish National Archives (TORA), and the Ortnamnsregistret.
TORA, headed by Olof Karsvall, contains collates details of villages and farms from early modern and medieval Sweden with their coordinates, and you can read more about the project in: Historical Settlement Units as Linked Open Data, in Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries, 2019, pp 259–269.
I ran a search for names containing björn as a first foray into the data:
One problem with the map interface is that the 'see results as a list' function didn't seem to work, so it would not allow me to see how many of these results were paired with farm/settlement words, which I considered very likely to be named after a person, rather than the animal. So I tried out the search interface:
This then allowed me to see where björn was paired with a landscape feature, which may have signified association with bears, rather than with a personal name (although given these were farm and village names, the risk of all being associated with a personal name must be considered as higher than I would like).
The search interface gave coordinates of the places, and so after excluding certain results as necessary, I was able to plot 83 place-names, which I turned into a heat map to see where the largest concentrations of these names occurred:
While the historic nature of the data in TORA is incredibly useful, it was frustrating that these were farm and village names rather than local topographical names (at least as I understand it so far). So, in search of other place-name types I turned to the Ortnamnsregistret to see what we could gather from this archive.
Disclaimer, I started the next piece of analysis using the Gamla Ortnamnregistret, which is an out of date version of the Ortnamnsregistret, hence why there will be a Part 2 to this blog where I delve more deeply into the up-to-date register, which seems to have at least 2000 more place-names, as well as coordinates.
With the Ortnamnsregistret, you can search specifically for Naturnamn, which while not excluding association with the personal name Björn, at least makes sure the names are referring to places in the landscape, rather than settlements.
Adding the results to an excel sheet, I was able to filter for landscape features, such as berg or holme, and gather data on how often certain elements were paired with björn.
I decided to do a pilot study on the naturnamn from Södermanland, seeing as though this was where the concentration of Björn- names from TORA seemed to fall.
So, what can we say about this so far?
What comes across from this initial limited study, is that in this area of Sweden, "bear" as a natural place place-name element is most often associated with islands and wetlands or waterscapes (ö [island], holme [island], mosse [bog], kärr [fen], udde [peninsula], kobbe [islet]).
After a little reading, I realised that historically wetlands are a habitat associated with Eurasian brown bears. I think that my assumption that forests and mountains would be a key feature of bear place-names was formed by my understanding of modern bear populations, which are often restricted to such areas.
However, I soon realised that I should look at the names from a northern county in Sweden as a point of comparison. I don't have a graph for these yet, but I quickly found that in counties such as Lappland, Norrbotten, and Ångermanland, numbers of place-names containing björn and berg (mountain) were much higher than in Södermanland - although wetland names were still high/sometimes higher than mountain names - interestingly in these three provinces myr (mire) was the element used, with much lower/no occurrences of mosse.
Clearly different areas of Sweden had not only different landscape areas associated with björn, but also (possibly) different terms for those landscape features.
Going forward, things to consider carefully:
age/historicity of the names
problem of bo (estate) and bo (den, cave) - pretty significant when looking at bear/Björn place-names
distinguishing between names for landscape features that might have indicated ownership, rather than association with bears
acknowledging that topographical names may have indicated a rock or feature looked like a bear, rather than an association with their presence
the similarity of terrain types - e.g. are mosse and myr representing the same terrain?
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