Andersson

Anders is what Sweden made of Andrew, the apostle's name worn down to two syllables and handed to farm boys for as long as there have been parish books to write them into. Andersson means Anders's son and nothing more elaborate: the father's name put in the genitive with son fixed on the end, which is where the doubled s comes from, and that one extra letter is still what separates a Swedish name from the Danish and Norwegian -sen at a glance.

The register puts a figure on it. On 31 December 2019 there were 227,036 people in Sweden spelling the name Andersson, with a thin tail behind them: 1,043 Anderson, 153 Anderzon, 22 Andersohn, 5 Anderszon, 2 Andherson and three more written some other way again, which brings Statistiska Centralbyrån's count to 228,264. In 2012 Andersson passed Johansson and became the commonest surname in the country.

What that leaves is a name that identifies nobody. The Swedish roll of notable Anderssons runs past a thousand entries, thick with people who had to be told apart by something else: the farm they worked, the fiddle they played, the plate they engraved. This page is those distinguishing marks, and the people wearing them.

In Dalarna the problem was solved long before any registry noticed it, by putting the farm ahead of the man instead of after him. Back Olof Andersson (1767-1820) and Back Erik Andersson (1778-1847) were the painters of Backgården; Krång Anders Andersson (1726-1799) made Mora clocks; Altsar Per Andersson (1797-1857) farmed, sat as nämndeman and drew portraits; Graf Olof Andersson (1829-1873) preached; Tin Erik Andersson (1803-1849) carved; Ifwares Daniel Andersson (1799-1870) and Mats Olof Andersson (1798-1870) painted in the same country. Farm first, christened name second, father's name last.

The point of the arrangement is that the farm name belonged to the ground and not to the blood. When Back Olof married a second time at forty-eight and came through the marriage to live at Övermo, he stopped being Back and used the farm name Hjerp instead. What a man was called could change with the house he slept in, while the patronymic he was stuck with told a listener only that his father had been an Anders.

Where the farm went on the end instead, it was parliament doing the sorting: the riksdag lists carry Anders Andersson i Hakarp, i Nyckelby, i Olsbenning and i Valla-Sörgården, thirteen men of one name pinned to thirteen holdings.

Back Olof Andersson was born in 1767 at Ullvi in Leksand parish and spent the greater part of his life in relative poverty on Backgården there. The church books record him as ofärdig, disabled, and he went about on a wooden leg. After his parents died it was his younger brother Back Erik, a dalmålare as well, who was husbonde of the farm, so the painter lived in a house he did not hold. He married in 1795 a woman fifteen years older than himself; that marriage was childless and she died in 1814. He married again at forty-eight, moved to Övermo, and died in 1820 at fifty-three of what the record calls slag.

The work is why he is remembered. He was among the earliest of the dalmålare, the peasant painters of Dalarna, and he is held to be the first of them to combine the two elements that defined the tradition afterwards: the biblical subject and the decorative rosmålning. He painted cupboards and he painted paper wall hangings, some eighty of his paintings survive, and he signed them OAS.

He worked the way a country painter had to, walking. His journeys took him around Dalarna and out into Härjedalen, Hälsingland and Västmanland, and in one recorded instance he worked alongside another painter, Jufwas Anders Ersson. He does not appear to have painted with his brother at all, which for two men of one trade on one farm is worth noticing.

Two books tie the man to the pictures. A copy of the Gustav Adolf Bible of 1618 that belonged to him was found at Ullvi, with notes of his in it and, drawn in among the printed illustrations, horsemen of exactly the kind that ride across his paintings. A copy of Johann Hübner's illustrated Twå gånger twå och femtio utwalda Bibliska berättelser has also turned up, carrying both his signature and his brother's.

Roloff Andersson was born on 11 April 1744 at Östra Skrevlinge in Husie parish, ground that lies inside Malmö today, the son of the farmer Anders Knutsson and of Bengta Larsdotter. He called himself Schrewelius to begin with, and the name he ended up with was not his father's at all: he took Andersson from his stepfather, Anders Mattsson, who was speaker of the peasant estate.

He was schooled in Malmö, entered Lund university in 1761 and was ordained priest on 17 December 1763 at nineteen years and eight months old, which makes him the youngest priest Sweden has ever had. He was made kollega at the Landskrona school in 1765 and kollega superior there in 1769, took his master's degree in 1768, sat his pastoral examination in 1771 and was appointed a serving court preacher in 1779.

The book outlasted the offices. In 1777 he published Genwäg til borgerliga räkne-konsten, a short road into everyday reckoning, and it was thought so useful that it went through no fewer than eight editions; his Arithmetica tironica of 1779 was an enlarged and improved version of the same thing. He became kyrkoherde of Glimåkra and Örkened in 1781, prost in 1792 and kontraktsprost of Östra Göinge härad in 1808, was made a knight of the Order of Vasa in 1818 and jubelmagister at Lund in 1820, and died on 8 April 1828.

Samuel Anderson was born in Stockholm on 10 October 1773, the son of Anders Christoffersson and of Anna Samuelsdotter Kumlien, and married Charlotta Christina Lindius in 1797. He was entered at the Academy of Art's principskola under the name Samuel Kumblijn, he worked and was known as Anderson, and his son signed himself Carl Christoffer Kumlien. Three names in one household, and the patronymic only one of the choices on the table.

He was employed as engraver to the Vetenskapsakademien from 1805 to 1829 and afterwards as a type-founder at the bank of the estates. His plates took him a long way from Stockholm without his leaving it: St Paul's Cathedral in London, St Peter's in Rome, the Colosseum, the mosque of Achmet, engravings to go with landscape poems, and title pages for works including those of Johan Gabriel Oxenstierna. With his son he carried out the illustration work for a new edition of David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl's Certamen equestre.

He died in Stockholm on 10 September 1857. The Nationalmuseum holds some fifty of his sheets, in original drawing and in engraving, and Uppsala university library holds more.

The name sits heavily on Swedish folk music. Gössa Anders Andersson (1878-1963) and Gammelbo-Lars Andersson (1820-1907) were fiddlers; Gyris Anders Andersson (1822-1909) was a painter and a fiddler both; Gulis Erik Andersson (1885-1961) played and composed; Höök Olof Andersson (1860-1936) and Ekor Anders Andersson (1898-1983) carried the rank of riksspelman. Ored Andersson (1820-1910) was a folk musician, Johan Andersson (1834-1915) a spelman, and Olof Andersson (1884-1964) cut hair and played.

The tunes survive because somebody sat down with a pen. Nils Andersson (1864-1921) was town notary in Lund and a folkmusikupptecknare, a collector and transcriber of folk music, and that work was the difference between a repertoire and a memory.

The same country produced its healers under the same name. Britta Lena Andersson (1824-1904) was a klok gumma, one of the wise women people went to before they went to a doctor, and Kristina Andersson (1837-1912) practised as a naturläkare and was known across her district as Prekebogumman.

The earliest bearers in the Swedish record are scattered across the estates with no thread between them. Knut Andersson, who appears with the arms name Lillie, was a nobleman and died in 1546. Erik Andersson, dead in 1563, was a prost and is remembered as the reformer of Jämtland. Nils Andersson, who appears as Lilliehöök, lived from 1561 to 1618 and sat in the riksråd, the council of the realm. Olof Andersson was a burgomaster of Stockholm and died in 1622.

Sten Andersson, dead in 1665, was bergmästare and burgomaster at once. Alexander Andersson, a colonel who died about 1669, was a Swedish officer of Scottish descent, one of the soldiers the seventeenth-century wars drew into Swedish service from across the North Sea. Vittus Andersson, who died in 1688, was a farmer, and it is the farmers who fill the parish books.

None of these men had a surname in the sense a reader has one. Each is simply a man whose father was called Anders, which is why they belong to no one family, carry no common arms and hold no seat between them. The name was a fact about a father, renewed from nothing every generation, and it stayed that way until the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

When Anderssons went out of Sweden they went a long way. Charles John Andersson (1827-1867) travelled in Africa as a naturalist and is set down in the Swedish register as a Swedish-English man; Nils Johan Andersson (1821-1880) was a botanist; Gunnar Andersson i Djursholm (1865-1928) was a geographer and botanist, a professor and a liberal politician. Johan Gunnar Andersson (1874-1960) was an archaeologist, geologist and palaeontologist, and Sweden knew him by a nickname that says where he spent himself: Kina-Gunnar, China-Gunnar.

Others went for the mission field and the emigrant ships. August Andersson (1860-1944) was a missionary in Alaska for Svenska Missionsförbundet and Arvid Andersson (1898-1983) worked the same society's field in the Congo. In America the name turned up on bridges and in print: John Fredrik Anderson (1848-1927), a Swedish-American bridge builder; John Alvin Anderson (1869-1948), a photographer; Mina Andersson (1867-1955), a writer; Oscar Andersson (1873-1953), a landscape painter; Mary Anderson (1872-1964), a trade union leader.

The women of the name went at the closed doors. Hedda Andersson (1861-1950) practised medicine and is recorded as a pioneer for her sex; Maria Andersson (1837-1922) was a businesswoman, a philanthropist and a pioneer of mental care; Elsa Andersson (1897-1922) was an aviator and a parachute jumper.

The modern register keeps the spread and loses the anonymity. Dan Andersson (1888-1920) was a poet; Arne Andersson (1917-2009) ran middle distance and taught in an elementary school; Bibi Andersson (1935-2019) and Harriet Andersson, born in 1932, acted; Roy Andersson, born in 1943, directs films; Benny Andersson, born in 1946, made the music of ABBA. The last word belongs to Thorsten Andersson (1923-2018), who spent a career as a toponymist, a scholar of where names come from, while carrying the commonest one in Sweden.