Johansen

Johansen is the second most common surname in Norway. In 2009 it was carried by 52,023 Norwegians; by 24 January 2020 that number had fallen to 48,541, a loss of nearly three and a half thousand bearers in eleven years. The name means son of Johan, the Norwegian form of John, and it stopped meaning that when the Norwegian family name act of 1923 turned the patronymic into an inherited possession. That is the whole of the machinery. Everything else this name has to say is about the people who carried it.

The most celebrated Johansen of all shows the system in the act of stopping. Fredrik Hjalmar Johansen was born at Skien in Telemark on 15 May 1867, the second eldest son in a family of five, and his father was Jens Johansen. Under the old rule the boy would have been Hjalmar Jensen, because a son took the father he actually had; the fact that he was a Johansen means the name had already stopped moving and become a possession. His mother is the older world standing beside it. She was Maren Pedersdatter, Peder's daughter, the feminine form a Norwegian woman carried in her own right.

Few given names have been as productive across Europe as John. English built Johnson on it, Welsh built Jones, which is simply the Welsh for Johnson, and Italy is thought to hold over ninety separate surnames raised on Giovanni alone. Scandinavia divided on a single letter: the Swedish variant of this name is Johansson, the Danish and Norwegian one Johansen. The name is commonest in Denmark and Norway, and in the United States the usual spelling of it is a third one again, Johanson.

The result is a surname that records a first name, not a lineage. The Norwegian roll holds three men called Bjørn Johansen, a footballer, an ice hockey player and a jazz saxophonist, and three called Stig Johansen in the same three trades; it holds an Egil Johansen who was a Norwegian-Swedish jazz drummer, another who played football, a third who ran orienteering courses, and an Egil Borgen Johansen who shot with a bow. Nothing in the name itself says whether any of them are related. The register has to be read, not the surname.

Hjalmar Johansen went to the Royal Frederick University in Christiania to read law and did badly at it, attending few lectures; when his father died he was twenty-one, and he left. He had already made his name another way, as a skier and gymnast: Norwegian gymnastics champion at Fredrikshald in 1885, world champion in Paris in 1889. When Fridtjof Nansen's Fram expedition sailed in 1893 the only berth left for him was stoker, and he took it. Once the ship was frozen fast in the ice he became assistant to Sigurd Scott-Hansen on the meteorological work, and he was an expert dog driver.

That last was the skill that counted. In 1895 Johansen and Nansen left the ship and went north together on skis behind the dogs, reaching 86 degrees 14 minutes north, a new record for the closest approach to the pole. Getting home was harder than getting there. Their kayaks were badly damaged crossing open channels in the ice and the two were forced to winter on Franz Josef Land. Johansen went through the ice at one point and was barely pulled out by Nansen, and took a blow to the head from a polar bear. When the Fram parties came home, the crew were received as heroes; Johansen was promoted captain in the Norwegian infantry at the Tromsø garrison, and between 1907 and 1909 he went back to the ice four more times, to Svalbard.

In 1910 Johansen sailed south with Roald Amundsen, again on the Fram. Racing Robert Falcon Scott for the South Pole, Amundsen set out from the Bay of Whales too early in the season and the party had to turn back, an early start Johansen had argued against. On the return, with a storm closing in, Amundsen took the best dogsled and ran for camp ahead of his men, leaving Johansen and the inexperienced Kristian Prestrud with no tent and nothing to melt snow with, facing a dangerous descent in a blizzard at a windchill of fifty degrees below zero. Johansen brought Prestrud in alive, carrying him the last of the way.

The quarrel that followed cost him the pole. Amundsen dismissed him from the party making the attempt and sent him instead on a lesser journey towards King Edward VII Land, with Prestrud in charge; the main party went on to the pole. Johansen was awarded the South Pole Medal, the Sydpolsmedaljen, and went home. For a long time afterwards his name drifted out of the story of Norwegian polar exploration, and then it was put back. In 1997 Ragnar Kvam Jr. published a biography of him, Den tredje mann: Beretningen om Hjalmar Johansen, and in 2005 the International Hydrographic Organization approved Hjalmar Johansen Seamount for a newly found volcanic mountain on the floor of the Arctic Ocean northwest of Svalbard, at 82 degrees 57 minutes north, its summit 1,075 metres below the surface.

The name travelled east as well as west. Hermann Eduardovich Johansen, a Russian biologist and ornithologist of Baltic German descent born in 1866, took his zoology degree at the University of Dorpat in 1889 and moved to Tomsk in 1893, where he began by teaching German, physics and natural history at the Alekseyev school. From 1899 he taught zoology and comparative anatomy at Tomsk State University; in 1918 he was made full professor in the chair of zoology, and he held it until he died in 1930. His work was the faunistic survey of great stretches of Siberia, and above all its birds.

The man who inherited the chair was also a Johansen, and the two were not related. Russian wrote their names differently, Hermann's coming out as Ioganzen, so that in the Tomsk records the two men do not even look like one family. Hans Christian Johansen had arrived in the city in the spring of 1916 as a research-hungry student, met Hermann, and gone off with him on a bird-collecting expedition to the southern edge of the taiga between the Om and the Ob. He worked as Hermann's assistant from 1925, and succeeded him after his death.

Hans Johansen was born in Riga on 2 December 1897 to Danish parents and schooled at Reval. The revolution and the civil war cut him off from home and from his money, and he simply kept working: in 1917 he worked the Baraba steppe alone, and through 1918 and 1919 he travelled on foot through the Altai Mountains for nearly two years, coming out with a collection of some five hundred bird specimens. He took a doctorate in zoogeography at Munich in 1924, returned to Tomsk, went to the Ussuri in 1926 and the Narym taiga in 1927, and in 1928 moved to Kamchatka and then the Commander Islands, running the fur-animal operation there for three and a half years.

As professor he built a small group of ornithology students and sent them into unexamined parts of western Siberia; by 1937 the collection stood at about 4,500 specimens. In October of that year he was expelled from the Soviet Union with all other foreign citizens, and he carried Hermann Johansen's bird collections out with him; a good part of them are in the Zoological Museum of the University of Copenhagen to this day. He reached Denmark in May 1944, worked at that museum and ran its bird ringing centre until 1960, and published his full treatise on the birds of western Siberia, Die Vogelfauna Westsibiriens, in instalments from 1943 to 1961.

He read or spoke a dozen languages, Altai and Aleut among them, and used them to keep Russian and European ornithologists talking to each other across a closed border, going back repeatedly to the USSR for conferences. At the end of his life he bought a cottage on the bare island of Læsø because the landscape reminded him of Siberia and gave it to the University of Copenhagen, which made a field laboratory of it. Part of his library went back to Tomsk.

Helga Johansen was born in Copenhagen on 12 August 1852, daughter of the merchant Frederik Christoph Johansen and Camilla Petrine Jepsen, and sister of the painter Viggo Johansen. She qualified as a teacher in 1879 and taught intermittently while studying Hebrew and philosophy, the latter with the help of Harald Høffding. She did not begin writing until her mid-forties, and then produced three novels in seven years: Rids, tre monologer in 1896 under the pen name Et Fruentimmer, meaning A Woman, then Hinsides in 1900 and Brev til Menneskene in 1903 as Hannah Joël. They belong to the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough, and they draw hard on her own experience of hospital.

John Christen Johansen was born in Copenhagen on 25 November 1876 and taken to America as an infant. He studied under Frank Duveneck in Cincinnati and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught from 1901 to 1911 and met the portraitist M. Jean McLane, whom he married. He was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1915 and left Chicago in 1919 for Paris. At the end of the First World War the United States government commissioned him to record the signing of the Treaty of Versailles; the painting hangs in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian. He also painted the original presidential portrait of Herbert Hoover, and two of his works hang in the United States Capitol.

Gotfred Svend Kristian Johansen, born in Copenhagen on 4 May 1895, boxed lightweight for IF Sparta and won the Danish amateur title in that weight four times. At the 1920 Antwerp Olympics he beat Jean Nays of Belgium, Frank Cassidy of the United States and Clarence Newton of Canada to reach the final, lost it to Samuel Mosberg and took silver. He worked as a store clerk, and his son Eigil went to the 1952 Olympics as a wrestler.

In Norway the name runs through the public roll from the nineteenth century on. Jacob Lerche Johansen (1818-1900) served as Minister of the Navy; Johan Strand Johansen (1903-1970), whose own given name is the one the surname is built from, was Minister of Labour. Henry Johansen (1904-1988) kept goal for the Norwegian national football team. David Monrad Johansen composed, Leif Johansen worked in economics, Jahn Otto Johansen reported and wrote, Margaret Johansen wrote as a feminist, and Jon Lech Johansen, born in 1983, became known for reverse engineering data formats.

The name went out with the ships and the emigrant trains as well. Darryl Johansen became a chess grandmaster in Australia, Franz M. Johansen (1928-2018) sculpted in the United States, and both Ryan Johansen, born in 1992, and Lucas Johansen, born in 1997, play professional ice hockey in Canada. At home Bård Tufte Johansen is a comedian, Magne Johansen jumped on skis, and Marthe Kråkstad Johansen, born in 1999, races biathlon. Second most common name in the country, and there is no reason to think any two of them owe it to the same Johan.