Jensen

In Norse custom the word that followed a man's own name was not a family name at all. It was a statement of parentage, built with -son (later -søn and -sen in Danish, Norwegian and German) and with -datter for a daughter, and it renewed itself every generation. A Jens whose father was Jens was Jens Jensen and nothing more permanent than that; his son might be Peder Jensen and his grandson Jens Pedersen. Where a household wanted something fixed it added a third element, a byname taken from a place or a personal trait. That is the shape behind Thomas Hansen Kingo, son of Hans Thomsen Kingo: the patronymic in the middle, the durable label on the end.

Fixity arrived first for people with arms to draw it from. In 1526 King Frederik I of Denmark-Norway ordered noble families to take up settled surnames, and many lifted theirs straight off their shields: a wreath of roses on the torse made Rosenkrantz, a seven-pointed gold star made Gyldenstierne. Everyone else kept renaming themselves for three more centuries, until the Danish government outlawed the practice in 1856 and every Jensen then living stopped being a description and became an heirloom. The shortage was arithmetical: a country that had recycled a small stock of given names now had a matching small stock of surnames, and by 1904 the regulations had to be eased precisely because there were too few patronymics to go round. Norway, which had shared the 1526 crown, passed its own family name act in 1923 on the same reasoning: a rising population and a new set of last names every generation. Sweden held out until 1966.

The old three-part arrangement is legible in the bishop and politician Peder Jensen Lodehat: given name, father's name, byname, in that order, with Lodehat doing the work the Jensen could not. It was the only way to tell one Peder Jensen from the next, and when 1856 froze the middle element into an inherited surname it took that tool away at exactly the moment the country needed it most.

Danes rebuilt the third slot by other means, which is why so many bearers are known by what stands before the Jensen rather than by the Jensen itself. Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint, architect, designer and painter, hyphenated his; so did the Folketing member Claus Larsen-Jensen and the foreign minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen. Others let a middle name carry the load: the farmer and Folketing member Kristen Touborg Jensen, the musician and songwriter Nanna Lüders Jensen, the writer Kristian Ditlev Jensen, the poet Bo Green Jensen, the screenwriter and director Anders Thomas Jensen. The device does not always hold. Denmark has produced two well-known Henning Jensens, one an actor and one a footballer, and no amount of surname will separate them.

The making trades carried the name into work that outlived the maker. Georg Jensen was a silversmith. C.A. Jensen painted in the Danish Golden Age. Jensen-Klint drew as an architect and designer and painted as well, refusing to pick one of the three. Nothing but the 1856 law connects them to each other: after that date a shared surname stopped being evidence of a shared family, and three unrelated Jensens could stand in the same trade directory without a cousin between them.

The name then detached from its bearers altogether and went onto stock. Jensen is a mattress manufacturer and Jensens Bryghus a Danish brewery. Further afield the coincidence takes over: Jensen Motors was an English car firm and Jensen a maker of Italian loudspeakers, neither of them owing anything to a Danish farm boy renamed by ordinance. A surname held by that many people eventually becomes a word that any business may use.

The heaviest literary weight the name carries belongs to Johannes V. Jensen, the Danish writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Thit Jensen wrote too, and campaigned for the women's cause alongside it, a working author who spent her public voice on a political argument rather than only on the page.

Behind them the name keeps appearing wherever Danish print is made. Bo Green Jensen is a poet; Kristian Ditlev Jensen a writer; Carsten Bo Jensen wrote, played music and sat in the Folketing, three careers in one lifetime. Lasse Jensen worked as a journalist. K. A. Jensen was a chemist, the one hard-science Jensen in a list otherwise dominated by writers, players and politicians, which is itself a fair portrait of what a very common Danish surname does with its thousands of holders.

Anders Thomas Jensen worked as a screenwriter and director, which put the surname on the page and behind the camera at once. Tomas Villum Jensen acted and directed films. Flemming Jensen managed the same trio as Jensen-Klint had in the visual arts (actor, writer and director), and the pattern of one bearer refusing a single job description repeats often enough in this family to be a habit rather than an accident.

In front of the lens the name is older still. Arthur Jensen acted; Andrea Vagn Jensen acted; Henning Jensen (the actor, not the footballer) acted. Sara Indrio Jensen sings and acts, and is Italian-Danish. Nanna Lüders Jensen makes music and writes songs.

Uffe Ellemann-Jensen was a journalist as well as a politician and foreign minister, and his hyphen is the reason a reader can place him at once. Frank Jensen served as a politician and minister, as did Kristian Jensen. Three ministers, one surname, no relation asserted between any of them.

The benches beneath them held more. Mogens Jensen, Lene Jensen and Claus Larsen-Jensen all sat in the Folketing, as did Kristen Touborg Jensen, who farmed, and Carsten Bo Jensen, who wrote and played. Outside parliament Hans Jensen chaired LO, which put a Jensen at the head of organised Danish labour. A chamber drawing from a country where the name runs neck and neck with Nielsen at the top of the register was never going to seat only one.

John "Faxe" Jensen played football and then coached it, and the quotation marks around Faxe are the 1856 law being quietly undone. A crowd that cannot distinguish its Jensens does what Danish villages did before the ordinance: it hands the man a byname and uses it. Lodehat's byname did the same job by a different route.

He was not alone on the field. Claus Jensen, Daniel Jensen, Niclas Jensen and Henning Jensen all played football for a living, and Jesper Jensen played handball. Five footballers and a handball player, all sharing a surname, all needing first names, nicknames or shirt numbers to be told apart, the practical cost of a naming law that stopped the clock in 1856 and left a nation to sort out the collisions itself.

Because it belongs to everyone, Jensen has become the name a Dane reaches for when he wishes to belong to no one. In 2008 Lars Løkke Rasmussen used Lars Jensen when booking a hotel room, the surname chosen precisely because it identifies nobody and would raise no eyebrow at a reception desk.

It does the same work in commerce and on air. Jensens Bøfhus built a chain of family restaurants on the plainest surname available. Danmarks Radio launched the entertainment programme Jensen Tonajt in 1988, and Steppeulvene put a song called Jensen on the album Hip. A name that arrived by ordinance, applied to a farm boy whose father happened to be called Jens, ended as Danish shorthand for the ordinary man, which is the closest thing a surname this common has to a coat of arms.