Kristiansen

Kristian is Christian, the follower of Christ, and in Norway that was never only a font name. A line of Dano-Norwegian kings carried it, and Christian IV founded towns up and down the country and left his own name on Kristiansand and on Kristiania, the city now called Oslo. The patronymic built from it, the son of Kristian, therefore sat on an ordinary farm household and on the royal calendar at once. The one thing it never did was settle on a spelling.

In January 2020 Norway counted 22,751 people named Kristiansen and 3,735 named Christiansen, the second form down from 3,882 in 2009. It is one name in two orthographies, the Latin C and the K of plain Norwegian spelling. The split runs through families rather than between them, and the clearest case is the man who built the most famous business the name has ever carried. He was registered at birth as Ole Kirk Kristiansen and did business for the rest of his life as Ole Kirk Christiansen.

Ole Kirk Christiansen was born on 7 April 1891 at Omvraa Mark, Filskov, in South Jutland, 20 km northwest of Billund, one of thirteen children of a farm labourer named Jens Niels Christiansen. The household was poor and the schooling basic: from the age of six he was out as a farmhand, attending school two days a week and whittling wood in the hours between. In 1905, aged fourteen, he went as an apprentice to his older brother Kristian Bonde Christiansen.

Military service followed in 1911, then study at Haslev Technical School and carpentry work abroad in Germany and Norway. In 1916 he came home, settled at Billund and spent his savings on a carpentry shop that he named Billund Maskinsnedkeri og Tømreforretning. He married Kirstine Sörensen, a local cheese-maker's daughter, in the same year. Through the later 1920s the shop restored and put up buildings and turned out household goods for the district around it.

In 1924 his sons Karl Georg and Godtfred set light to a heap of wood shavings while trying to start a hot glue machine, and the fire took both the workshop and the family home. Christiansen's answer was not to rebuild what he had lost. He employed an architect and put up a larger workshop and a larger house, finished that same year on Hovedgaden with two stone lions at the door. By 1930 he had a small workforce keeping the business going.

Then the Depression reached Danish farming. Prices fell, his customers could not pay, and the ladders and ironing boards that were his main income stopped selling. In early 1932 he cut his staff to seven, and in the end he let the last man go. Kirstine died in 1932 after the birth of their fourth child; two years later he married Sofie Jörgensen and they had a daughter. He was a member of the Church Association for the Inner Mission in Denmark.

With the workshop sliding towards bankruptcy he turned to cheap wooden goods, toys among them, and in 1932 founded the still unnamed company that became Lego. His siblings offered him a rescue loan on the condition that he give up the toys, and he refused it. In 1934 he named the firm out of the Danish leg godt, play well, and the name was the philosophy: products aimed at the development of children. He put it plainly years afterwards. "Not until the day when I said to myself, 'You must make a choice between carpentry and toys' did I find the real answer."

The range was yo-yos, pull-along animals and trucks, and the specification was a joiner's rather than a toymaker's: birch cut from the forest, dried for two years, kiln-dried for three weeks, assembled, sealed, sanded, primed and finished with three coats of varnish. The district was too poor to buy much of it, and toys sometimes went out in exchange for food. By 1935 the catalogue included the pull-along wooden duck that has been made in one variation or another ever since.

The business came through the Depression and through the German occupation of Denmark, and then in 1942 a short circuit started an electrical fire that took the factory, the entire stock and the blueprints with it. He began again, and the reason recorded for it is obligation rather than ambition: a responsibility towards the people he employed. The replacement factory opened in 1944 with an assembly line in it.

After the war the traditional materials were scarce and manufacturers went looking at plastics. In 1947 Lego became the first toy maker in Denmark to buy a plastic injection moulding machine, at a price greater than twice the previous year's profits. For a man who had spent his working life in wood the change was hard, but by 1949 the firm was turning out a plastic article called the Automatic Binding Brick, and in 1950 his son Godtfred was made Junior Managing Director.

The decade that followed went on the brick itself, modified from a self-locking building brick invented by Hilary Fisher Page. Sales in the early 1950s were poor. What eventually worked was the material: acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, which gave the clutch power that makes two bricks hold each other. The design was patented in Copenhagen on 28 January 1958.

Christiansen suffered a cardiac arrest and died on 11 March 1958, aged 66, just before Godtfred took the Automatic Binding Brick as the basis of the System of Play that the modern toy is built on. Godtfred ran the company until his own death in 1995. Billund's central square is Ole Kirks Plads, and the Lego House standing on it keeps an exhibit to him; Ole Kirk's Foundation was established in his memory in 1964; and on 6 September 2023 a park in northwestern Rome was named, at an official ceremony, Parco Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the K of his birth certificate restored. The company's chief executive from 1979 to 2004, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, is listed under the K as well.

Sigurd Christiansen was born at Drammen on 17 November 1891 and died there on 23 October 1947, and for most of his working life he was an official at the Drammen post office who wrote around the job. He debuted with the novel Seieren in 1915, but the larger public did not find him until To levende og en død in 1931. He argued ethical questions in his fiction with a deep seriousness, and his own time counted him part of the culturally conservative circle.

The 1931 Nordic novel competition was run in two stages by the leading publishers of the Nordic countries: a contest inside each country, then a final between the national winners. A hundred and one Norwegian manuscripts came in. Christiansen took the Norwegian first prize and then the Nordic one, worth 10,000 kroner, with Sigurd Hoel second in both rounds for En dag i oktober. The format and the jury's ranking were argued about at length, but the striking thing was the machinery behind it, a working Nordic cultural collaboration long before the Nordic Council existed, with every finalist published across the participating countries. To levende og en død was filmed three times, in 1937, 1950 and 1961.

He kept writing to the end: the Jørgen Wendt trilogy of Drømmen og livet in 1935, Det ensomme hjerte in 1938 and Menneskenes lodd in 1945. Gyldendal's legat came in 1940 and the state artist's salary in 1945, which finally released him from the counter. His villa at Løkkebergveien 41, built in 1931 to a design by Christian Fredrik Arbo, was one of the first functionalist houses in Drammen.

Ragnar Karl Viktor Christiansen, born at Drammen on 28 December 1922 and died on 17 February 2019, joined Nedre Eiker municipal council in 1945 and sat on it until 1959, serving as mayor from 1955 to 1957 and on Buskerud county council in the same two years. He was a deputy representative in the Norwegian parliament for the terms 1950-1953 and 1954-1957, and when he took his seat as a deputy in 1950 at the age of 27 he was the youngest member parliament had ever had.

Elected outright for Buskerud in 1957, he was returned four more times for five terms in all. He was Minister of Finance in 1971-1972 in Bratteli's first cabinet, replaced in the chamber by Egil Solin Ranheim, and Minister of Transport and Communications in 1976-1978 in Nordli's cabinet, replaced by Olaf Øen. His salaried career ran alongside all of it and was spent entirely on the Norwegian State Railways, where he started as an errand boy in 1940 and left in 1977 as a managing clerk. He finished as County Governor of Buskerud from 1979 to 1989.

Lyle Stuart Kristiansen (1939-2015) carried the K to British Columbia and into the Canadian House of Commons for the New Democratic Party. He was an executive secretary, a financial secretary and a woodworker by career, and he lost twice before he won: Vancouver Centre in 1965, then Kootenay West in 1979. He took Kootenay West in 1980, lost it in 1984, and came back to Ottawa for Kootenay West-Revelstoke in 1988, sitting in the 32nd and 34th Parliaments before leaving federal politics in 1993. In his later years he represented BCFORUM on the Sunshine Coast Labour Council.

Svein Christiansen (1941-2015), known as Chrico, was central to the Oslo jazz scene from his teens, starting with the Hot Saints between 1958 and 1960. He drummed on records by Karin Krog, on Terje Rypdal's Odyssey in 1975, for Radka Toneff and on Dag Arnesen's Renascent in 1984, and well outside jazz for Bjørn Eidsvåg, Jan Eggum and Odd Børretzen. He was in the Norwegian Radio Orchestra from 1980 to 2003 and took the Gammleng prize in 1989 in the studio musician class. He was married to the actress Sidsel Ryen and died in Oslo.

The rest of the roll runs wide for a name this size. Ingrid Kristiansen is a Norwegian long-distance runner and Kåre Kristiansen a Norwegian politician; Henry Wilhelm Kristiansen (1902-1942) was a newspaper editor and Communist Party politician; Else Marie Christiansen (1921-2017) was a speed skater and Rune Christiansen, born 1963, is a poet and novelist. Jens Kristiansen and Johan-Sebastian Christiansen are both chess grandmasters, born in 1952 and 1998. The biathlon lists carry Elin Kristiansen, Gro Marit Istad Kristiansen and Vetle Sjåstad Christiansen; the drawing boards carry Teddy Kristiansen, a Danish comics artist, and Einstein Kristiansen, a Norwegian cartoonist, designer and television host.