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There is no Jónsson family in Iceland’s phone book — not really. Look one up and you will find a Jón Einarsson living next door to an Anna Einarsdóttir who is not his wife, sister, or any relation at all, simply another Icelander whose father happened to share a first name with his. Icelanders are listed in the phone directory not by surname but by first name, because for most of the population, the surname on their passport was never meant to identify a family. It was built, fresh, every single generation.
That single fact — that most Icelanders don’t have a family name at all — sits underneath one of the most distinctive naming systems left in Europe, backed by an actual government committee with the power to reject a name outright. It has produced court cases, a girl who spent a decade legally listed only as “Stúlka” (Girl), and a national register with thousands of pre-approved options parents can choose from without a fight. Here is how it actually works, and which names Icelanders are choosing right now.
Why Most Icelanders Don’t Have a Family Surname
Iceland is one of the last countries in the world where patronymics — and, increasingly, matronymics — are the default rather than a quirky exception. Instead of inheriting a fixed family name, most Icelandic children are named after a parent, and that name changes with every generation.
The formula is simple: take a parent’s first name, put it in the genitive (possessive) case, and add -son for a son or -dóttir for a daughter. So Jón Einarsson’s son, if named Einar, becomes Einar Jónsson — “Jón’s son.” His daughter, Guðrún, becomes Guðrún Jónsdóttir — “Jón’s daughter.” Neither child carries Jón’s father’s name, or his grandfather’s; the chain resets every time. A small but growing number of parents now build the name from the mother instead, giving children a matronymic ending in -dóttir or -son attached to her first name, and a smaller number still use the gender-neutral ending -bur (“child of”) for children who don’t identify strictly as a son or daughter.
The practical result is that siblings in the same household routinely carry different “surnames” if they have different fathers, married couples never share a name, and everyone — from schoolteachers to the President — is addressed by their first name as a matter of course. Iceland does have a small number of genuine hereditary family surnames, grandfathered in from Danish colonial rule or foreign ancestry, but a 1925 law banned any new ones from being created; today they belong to under ten percent of the population, and the ordinary patronymic system remains the rule for everyone else.
The Committee That Approves Icelandic Names
Choosing what to call a newborn isn’t a free-for-all, either. Since 1991, new given names not already in use have had to pass review by the Mannanafnanefnd, the Icelandic Naming Committee — three appointees, serving four-year terms, nominated by the Icelandic language council and the University of Iceland’s philosophy and law faculties.
Their job is narrower than it sounds. A name doesn’t need to be beautiful or popular; it needs to fit Icelandic grammar (so it can take Icelandic case endings), use only letters that exist in the Icelandic alphabet, and match the gender it’s being registered for. The committee also weighs whether a name might embarrass the child who has to carry it for life. Clear it, and the name joins the Mannanafnaskrá, the official personal name register, where it becomes available to every parent in the country from then on without further review. Names already on that list — and there are roughly 1,900 for boys and nearly 2,000 for girls, by some counts several thousand once every registered spelling variant is counted — can be used freely.
When the Committee Says No
The most famous test of the system involved a teenager named Blær Bjarkardóttir. Her mother had registered her as Blær — “light breeze” — at birth, but officials later discovered the name wasn’t on the approved list and had, in fact, been explicitly rejected years earlier as too masculine for a girl (Halldór Laxness, Iceland’s Nobel laureate, had used it for a female character in one of his novels, but that literary precedent hadn’t been enough). For years, Blær existed in Iceland’s national registry simply as “Stúlka” — Girl — a placeholder that followed her onto school rolls, bank paperwork, and passport renewals. In 2013, at fifteen, she and her mother sued, and the Reykjavík District Court ruled in her favour, finding that the rejection violated her constitutional rights. Blær has been a legally approved girls’ name in Iceland ever since.
It’s not an isolated case. Parents have fought, and sometimes lost, over names ranging from foreign spellings to invented ones the committee judged incompatible with Icelandic grammar. The friction is exactly the point of the system: it exists to slow down naming decisions that would otherwise erode a language with a famously small and tightly maintained vocabulary, at the cost of occasionally overruling a parent who just wanted something different.
Iceland’s Most Popular Names Right Now
Despite the gatekeeping, Icelandic naming trends move just like anywhere else — new favourites climb the register every year, tracked closely by Registers Iceland (Þjóðskrá). The most recent national figures put Matthildur and Birnir at the top for girls and boys respectively, with names like Emilía, Aron, Mikael, Aría, and Jökull (“glacier”) among the fastest climbers.
Some enduringly popular Icelandic names, old and new, and what they mean:
- Guðrún — “God’s secret lore” or “God’s friend,” one of the most common women’s names in Icelandic history, borne by saga heroines and modern presidents’ wives alike.
- Jón — the Icelandic form of John, historically the single most common male name in the country by a wide margin.
- Sigrún — “victory rune” or “secret victory,” an Old Norse compound still popular today.
- Björn — simply “bear,” a name that has barely changed in a thousand years.
- Kristín — the Icelandic form of Christina, “follower of Christ.”
- Ólafur — “ancestor’s descendant,” a royal Norse name carried by kings, poets, and Iceland’s own modern presidents.
- Katla — named after one of Iceland’s most active volcanoes, now also a popular girls’ name in its own right.
- Snorri — forever associated with Snorri Sturluson, the 13th-century historian who wrote down much of what we know as Norse mythology today.
What This Means If You’re Not Icelandic
Foreign nationals who become Icelandic citizens are generally exempt from adopting the patronymic system for their own name, but their children born in Iceland are not automatically exempt, which occasionally puts newly arrived families in direct contact with the Naming Committee for the first time. It’s also why you’ll never hear an Icelander introduce themselves with a surname the way a Swede or Dane would — ask for “Mr. Jónsson” in Reykjavík and you are more likely to get a puzzled look than a phone number, because nobody thinks of “Jónsson” as a family identity to begin with. First names are the whole show, from the school playground to the president’s own listing in the phone book.
Continue the Story
Iceland’s naming system is one small piece of a much older Norse naming tradition that spread across the whole region. See where these patronymic patterns originally came from in Viking names: The most interesting old Norse names and their origins, browse specifically female Old Norse names in Female Viking names: The best Norse names for girls, or use the site’s own Scandinavian Baby Name Finder to search across the whole region at once. And if this is your first stop on Iceland itself, start with Best Things to Do in Reykjavík, Iceland: The Complete City Guide.
