Moen

Norwegian has a separate word for each shape the land takes, and mo is one of the plainest: a flat area, a plain, and characteristically a dry and sandy one. Moen is that noun in the definite singular, the flat, the one the farm sits on. It is not a father's name and not a trade. A household on a level open stretch was the household at Moen, and when Norway required its people to carry fixed surnames, that address is what a great many of them kept. In January 2020, 10,166 people carried it.

The consequence is that Moen identifies terrain rather than kinship. Norway has many places of the name, among them Moen in Hustadvika, Moen in Målselv and Moen in Risør, unrelated to one another in everything except the ground they describe. What a reader inherits is not a pedigree but a description, and a specific one: not the hill, not the valley, but the flat.

There is a second life to the word, and it belongs to the army. Dry, level, sandy ground is indifferent material for a plough, but it is precisely what a body of men needs in order to be drilled, marched, camped and shot over. Norwegian exercise grounds and military camps were so regularly laid out on pine moors and sand plains that mo'n became the ordinary nickname for them.

The list of them is the surname written across the military map of the country: Heistadmoen, Gardermoen, Setermoen, Gråtenmoen, Drevjamoen, Eggemoen, Evjemoen, Gimlemoen, Høybuktmoen, Jørstadmoen and Maukstadmoen. Eleven camps, from the far north to the south coast, each one a mo with something attached to the front of it. Norway had drawn its soldiers straight off the farms since the crown instituted a national army recruited from the estate of farmers in 1628, and the flat is where those men stood to be trained.

For most of Norwegian history a man's second name was rebuilt in every generation, a patronymic formed on his father's given name that described one relationship and then expired. Since that left a parish full of near-identical names, a third element was commonly added, most often the place, and it was the place that could harden into something a family kept.

The Moen record preserves an unusually exact instance of the switch. Lars Magnus Moen was born on 29 November 1885 in Lesja Municipality in Oppland to Tore Ingebrigtsen Moen and Marie Larsdotter Dale: a father carrying a patronymic on Ingebrigt with a farm-name behind it, a mother carrying a patronymic on Lars with a farm-name behind hers, the whole three-part system visible in a single line of a parish register. When the boy was four the family moved to the place called Moen, and it was from there, the account of his life says plainly, that he had his name.

That is what the surname is, stripped of romance: an address a household moved to and then would not give up.

After primary and secondary school, Lars Magnus Moen went to Lillehammer to train in tailoring, and it was probably there that he first met the young workers' movement, which had come to the town in connection with the building of the railway. He spent a period at Elverum, where he found his wife, and in 1911 he came to Dombås as a tailor. He lived there for the rest of his life.

From that shop he became central to the construction of the labour movement in Gudbrandsdalen, first through the local union and then through the district party in Nord-Gudbrandsdalen, and from 1932 to 1949 he was chairman of the Gudbrandsdalen Labour Party. He entered the Storting in 1928 and sat in it until 1957, thirty unbroken years, and from 1948 to 1953 he served as Minister of Education and Church Affairs.

He earned considerable respect in the post, for a reason that outlasted him: he put the country's central cultural institutions in place. Riksteatret, the touring national theatre, and Norsk Bygdekino, the travelling rural cinema, both date from his tenure, which is to say that a tailor from a village in Gudbrandsdalen arranged for plays and films to be carried out to villages like his own. He also proposed a ninth year of schooling. A stroke in 1953 ended his time as minister, but he stayed active in parliament to the end of the 1953-1957 term, and he died on 22 April 1964.

The name went west with the emigration and landed on farming ground again. Tollef Edward Moen, of Norwegian descent, was recorded as the first child born to the white settlers of Logan Township, Lyon County, Iowa, on 10 October 1870. He was educated in rural schools and then at Augustana College and St. Olaf College, and went into grain: fifteen years in the trade, a partner name in the Skewis-Moen Grain Company, and four years in the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce. Then he went back to Inwood, Iowa, and farmed.

Public office followed from the county up. He sat on the Lyon County Board of Supervisors from 1911 to 1919 and chaired it for four of those years, then served three terms as a Republican member of the Iowa House of Representatives for District 99, from 13 January 1919 to 11 January 1925. A special election in 1928 returned him to the legislature on the other side of the building, for District 49 of the Iowa Senate, and he was re-elected later the same year to a full term.

In 1932 he stood for re-election as a Democrat, having been sent to the House three times as a Republican, lost to Garritt Roelofs, and stepped down on 8 January 1933. He retired to South Dakota and died in a nursing home at Beresford on 26 September 1950.

Alfred M. Moen was born in Seattle on 27 December 1916, graduated from Franklin High School in 1934 and was a mechanical engineering student at the University of Washington. In 1937 he turned on a two-handle faucet and scalded himself, and over the next decade worked up a series of faucet designs and improvements. The war interrupted him: he worked as a tool designer at a military shipyard plant in Seattle, and could find no manufacturer with capacity to spare until it was over.

In 1947 he persuaded Kemp Hiatt at Ravenna Metal Products of Seattle to finance and build his latest design, a single-handled mixing faucet. It arrived exactly as the post-war building boom did, went into a great many of the houses that boom produced, and became Moen Incorporated. He ran the company's research and development until he retired in 1982, and held some seventy-five patents, a good many in fields with nothing to do with plumbing.

The verdict came from outside the trade. In 1959 Fortune listed the Moen one-handle mixing faucet among the hundred best-designed mass-produced products in the world, alongside Henry Ford's Model T and Benjamin Franklin's stove, on a survey of leading designers, architects and design teachers run by the industrial designer Jay Doblin. He was nominated for the National Inventors Hall of Fame, named to the Kitchen and Bath Industry Hall of Fame in 1993, and died on 17 April 2001.

In Norway the name stayed dense and stayed working, and it is thickest in sport. Anita Moen competed as a cross-country skier and Geir Moen as a track and field athlete; Sigurd Moen was a speed skater. Football takes the largest share: Petter Vaagan Moen, Christian Sæther Moen and Tor Erik Moen played it, Teddy Moen coached it, Svein Oddvar Moen refereed it.

Off the field the name runs through the professions. Lars Moen sat as a Labour politician and Ole Martin Moen in local politics; Ole Moen worked as a historian and a specialist on the United States; Ellen Moen practised as a defence advocate and journalist; Gunnlaug Moen drew as an illustrator and newspaper cartoonist.

It is a list without a castle, a chief or a coat of arms in it, and that is the honest shape of the name. A Moen tracing the line back is not looking for a seat. They are looking for a parish, a register and a flat piece of dry ground with a farm on it. The ground is a real place with a real location, and it can be found.