Johansson

Every Johansson alive is carrying somebody else's first name. The word means son of Johan, and it began as a fact about a father rather than a family. On 31 December 2019 the Swedish register held 226,490 people spelling it Johansson, and 614 more spread across Johanson, Johanzon, Johannsson, Joanzon, Joansson and Johannson, for 227,104 in all. Counting every variant together that made it the second commonest surname in the country. Another 8,690 bearers were registered in Finland in 2014.

What those numbers record is a rule of grammar rather than a lineage, and two families in this pack show the rule still running. Johan Fredrik Johansson, born at Skinnaryd in Eksjö in 1810, was the son of the farmer and miller Johannes Hansson and of Märta Johansdotter: three people, three different second names, one household. The wood carver Johannes Johansson of Mjöbäck, born in 1821, was trained by his father, the carver Johannes Andersson. The father's own name says his father was an Anders; the son's says his was a Johannes. The second name changed at every step, because it was never meant to survive one.

The habit of keeping the father's name as a fixed inheritance only became prevalent in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and when it hardened, every household that happened to hold a Johan at that moment was fixed as Johansson for good, which is how a quarter of a million people ended up sharing one man's first name. The crowd is thinning now, slowly: the following year the count had fallen to 223,196, part of a flight from the son-names that has been running for decades.

A name two hundred thousand people share is useless in a chamber where several of them sit at once, and the Swedish riksdag solved it by hanging a place on the end. The chamber did this formally: the grain merchant Johan Johansson appears in the riksdag, his biography notes, with the clarification i Stockholm. He was not alone in needing one. The parliamentary lists carry Anders Johansson i Fägerhult (1826-1875), Anders Johansson i Hässlås (1869-1938), Anders Johansson i Kråkered (1891-1975) and Anders Johansson i Lövåsen (1831-1908), four men of one name told apart by four farms.

The places are mostly small and the men mostly worked the land. August Johansson i Dingle (1844-1915) sat as a lantmannapartist and August Johansson i Lövholmen (1864-1939) was a farmer too, while August Johansson i Trollhättan (1875-1941) came in as a tradesman and a social democrat. Nils Johansson i Brånalt (1864-1941) sat for the farmers' league and Lennart Johansson i Fårekulla (1884-1974) on the right. Erik Johansson i Öckerö (1891-1945) and Olof Johansson i Öckerö (1897-1971) were both fishermen from the same place, one a social democrat and one a liberal, and Öckerö alone was not enough to separate them.

The habit reached past politics. Johan Johansson i Noraskog (1840-1905) was a mining man and a scholar of local culture as well as a politician, and the writer Kerstin Johansson i Backe (1919-2008) carried her place-name through a literary career. The suffix is the reason a common name did not collapse into anonymity: it gave every bearer a second address.

Pehr Christian Johansson was born in Stockholm on 1 June 1817 and made his debut on the stage of the Royal Opera House there. He entered the school of the Royal Swedish Ballet in 1829 and was a premier dancer from 1837 to 1840, named through that decade as one of the male stars of the company alongside Anders Selinder, Vilhelm Pettersson and Carl Wilhelm Silfverberg. Crown Prince Oscar paid for him to study under the Danish choreographer August Bournonville, and after two years in Copenhagen he had earned the right to call himself Bournonville's pupil, trained in the French classical style, la belle danse.

The proof of what that training was worth came from the ballerina herself. When the great Romantic dancer Marie Taglioni took an engagement in Stockholm she made it a condition of accepting that Johansson be her partner. He left for Russia in 1841, and partnered Fanny Elssler, Carlotta Grisi, Adèle Grantzow, Yelena Andreyanova, Tatyana Smirnova, Marfa Muravieva, Nadezhda Bogdanova and Fanny Cerrito in turn.

He went because St Petersburg was the one city that wanted him. Elsewhere in Europe the male dancer counted for less than the ballerina he carried; only at the Imperial Russian Ballet could a man dance his own solos rather than appear as an escort, which is why Marius Petipa, Jules Perrot, Arthur Saint-Leon and Johansson all ended up in the same theatre. His stage career ran four decades and hundreds of ballets before it closed in 1883.

Johansson began teaching in 1860, and by 1869 he was the leading instructor at the Imperial Ballet School on Theatre Street. He held the post until he died in 1903. By the end of the century there was not a ballerina appearing at the Maryinsky who had not been taught by him, either at the school or in the theatre's Classe de Perfection: Olga Preobrajenska, Mathilde Kschessinska, Tamara Karsavina, Agrippina Vaganova and Anna Pavlova all passed through his classroom, as did Pavel Gerdt and Nikolai and Sergei Legat.

Tall, thin and improbably upright in old age, he took class with a small violin and a thick stick, beating the time under his mumbled counts, and sometimes setting the stick down to play simple melodies from the ballets of his own youth. In the severe atmosphere of the Imperial school this was a novelty, and the students loved him for it.

Marius Petipa, the ballet master himself, used to sit in and watch. Johansson knew exactly what was happening and laughed about it: once again the old man is stealing something from me. In fact Petipa routinely sent his male dancers to Johansson to have their variations made, and it has been established that Johansson created most of the male variations in The Sleeping Beauty of 1890. His daughter Anna Christianovna Johansson (1860-1917) became a celebrated soloist of the same company and created roles in nearly every important premiere of the late nineteenth century: fairy roles in that Sleeping Beauty, Aurora in The Awakening of Flora in 1894, and the lead of the Waltz of the Flowers at the first night of The Nutcracker in 1892.

Johan Fredrik Johansson matriculated at Uppsala in the autumn term of 1828 and took his master's degree on 16 June 1836. He became docent in Greek there on 5 December 1837, lecturer in Greek and Hebrew at the Gävle gymnasium in 1844, and lecturer in Greek and New Testament exegesis at Linköping in 1846. In 1853 he was given leave to defend a theological dissertation before the cathedral chapter, was ordained priest on 20 November of that year, and before Christmas held the living of Slaka. He moved to Vallerstad in 1858, was made prost in 1859 and rural dean of the Gullberg and Boberg deaneries in 1870.

The work that outlived the offices was translation. His Odyssey of 1845 was the third complete rendering of Homer into Swedish and his Iliad of 1846 to 1848 the second, and he followed them with the nine books of Herodotus between 1850 and 1852. He also wrote on Pindar's diction and on Euripides, translated a grammar of the New Testament and worked on the Swedish edition of Passow's Greek lexicon.

He was also, from 1848, an inspector of schools: of the Linköping seminary, then of the Skänninge school, and from 1861 of the elementary schools. He was made a member of the Order of the Polar Star in 1866 and a doctor of theology at Lund in 1868. He died in the parish of Vallerstad on 4 March 1871 and was buried on 16 March by Bishop Ebbe Gustaf Bring, under a memorial that still marks the spot.

Johannes Johansson was born at Tokabo in Mjöbäck parish, in Älvsborg county, on 28 May 1821, and died in the same place on 7 July 1881. His father, the carver Johannes Andersson, worked from Ölsbo, and the son learned the trade from him and then took over the part of it that needed a pen: the long correspondence with parishes ordering church furniture. When his father died he moved the workshop from Ölsbo to Tokabo, his mother's parents' house, where he and his wife had lived since they married in 1845.

Single-handedly he made ten pulpits and nine altarpieces, and the list of them is a route across southwestern Sweden. Mjöbäck's own church took a pulpit and an altarpiece in 1855 and Värö an altarpiece in the same year; Skrea followed in 1856, Grimmared and Gällared in 1862, Kungsbacka and Släp in 1864, Frillesås in 1865, Gunnarp in 1866, Asige in 1867, Stråvalla in 1872, an altar rail at Årstad in 1873 and a last pulpit and altarpiece at Sällstorp in 1880, the year before he died.

His son Carl-Johan Johansson (1861-1934) was the third generation at the bench, a fine joiner who made furniture and longcase clocks, and the font in Mjöbäck church is his. None of the three lived by carving alone; all of them ran their farms as well.

Johannes Johansson was born at Uråsa on 28 February 1826, the illegitimate son of a maidservant, Maria Nilsdotter. He never went to school. At eleven he was working as an assistant at a paper mill and later as a farm labourer, and at twenty he set out for Stockholm, where he spent a year in hard conditions before finding work with a stadsmajor, E. Nordlander, who dealt in grain. He made himself noticed, and in 1854 was given a position of trust at Svanberg & Co., the owners of Eldkvarn, teaching himself in his own time what the schoolroom had not.

In 1859 he took out his burghership as a retail grain dealer in his own right, extended into the Norrland grain trade, and from 1885 called himself a wholesaler. He was director of the Uppsala steam mill's Stockholm office from 1867 and joint director of the Stockholm steam mill and timber sawing company from 1882.

He sat for the Stockholm city constituency in the second chamber of the riksdag from 1882 to 1887 and again from 1891 to 1896, served on the temporary committee in 1884 and the banking committee from 1885 to 1887, and from 1895 belonged to the liberal group Folkpartiet. Outside the chamber he chaired the order society W:6 for thirty years and the charity Jultomtarna for thirty-one. He also published songs, including a collection of Riksdagsvisor in 1884. He died in Stockholm on 6 January 1907.

The Swedish roll of notable Johanssons runs past a thousand entries, and more than forty of them are footballers. The pressure that puts on a name is best seen in the men called Lars Johansson, who need a page of their own to be separated: four politicians, a bandy player with a national title, an ice hockey goalkeeper born in 1987, a general manager at Skellefteå, an air force officer born in 1950, a film director, an actor, an author born in 1947, a wood sculptor of the 1600s named Lars Johansson Stockenberg and a poet of the same century.

Some bearers simply stepped out from under it. One footballer of the name became Lars Jangblad; another Lars Johansson works as a magician under the name Joe Labero. Others were pinned by a nickname instead, and the finest of them is the engineer and inventor Carl Edvard Johansson (1864-1943), known to Sweden as Mått-Johansson, the measure Johansson, a man distinguished from the rest by exactness.

The rest of the name goes everywhere and settles nowhere. Cyrillus Johansson (1884-1959) was an architect and Alma Johansson (1881-1974) a missionary; Greta Johansson (1895-1978) was a diver and swimmer and Elsie Johansson (1931-2025) a writer. There is no craft in it and no county, nothing to bind one bearer to the next, and that is precisely why it grew so large: any household in Sweden with a Johan in it could produce the name from scratch, and tens of thousands of them did. The Tokabo workshop, the classroom on Theatre Street and the second chamber of the riksdag have this and nothing else in common.