Nilsen

Nils is Nicholas after centuries of Norwegian wear, and Nilsen is the son of a man who carried it. That second name was not originally a family name: it was rebuilt at every birth, so a Nils's boy was Nilsen and his own son was called something else. Three kingdoms then took one saint's name three ways. Swedish set a genitive -s before the ending and got the double consonant of Nilsson; Danish kept the ie of Niels and got Nielsen; Norwegian kept Nils and the single l, and got Nilsen, with Nilssen alongside it.

What separated them was legislation, and the dates do not line up. Denmark outlawed the revolving system in 1856, then eased its own rules in 1904, the frozen stock of patronymics being too small for the people using it. Norway's parliament passed its family name act in 1923, and that act still lets a Norwegian carry a patronymic as a middle name, the older shape that put Nilsen in the middle of Hans Nilsen Hauge. By 2010 there were 35,864 Norwegians called Nilsen.

Peder Nilsen was born at Tønsberg in Vestfold on 22 February 1846, trained as an engineer and graduated from the Norwegian Military College in 1871. His work was on the rails: assistant engineer on the Rørosbanen and other railway construction from 1872 to 1878.

From 1878 to 1893 he was district engineer and operations manager on the Hamar-Tønsetbanen, fifteen unbroken years on one stretch of railway in the interior. It is a plain line in a career list and it is the substance of the man: not the surveying of a route but the running of one.

In 1889 Nilsen was elected to the Storting for the Conservative Party, representing Lillehammer, Hamar og Gjøvik. He sat one term only, but what followed mattered more than the seat: on 2 May 1893 he was made Minister of Labour in the second cabinet of Prime Minister Emil Stang, an engineer handed the portfolio that covered his own trade.

When Stang's cabinet gave way to the first cabinet of Francis Hagerup on 14 October 1895, Nilsen kept his post across the change. He left it on 1 August 1897, appointed to the Council of State Division in Stockholm, the Norwegian ministerial presence at the seat of the union crown, and lasted there two months. Then he went back to the railways, managing the Hovedbanen from 1897 to 1911. He died on 25 July 1921.

Alfred Sigurd Nilsen was born in 1891 at Skånland in the Trondenes parish, his mother of Kven descent, and worked as a farmer and a construction labourer. He came to Narvik in 1922 and built his own house there in 1926.

His politics began in a hard year for the Norwegian left. In 1923 he edited the Narvik paper Fremover for a short period, as part of the reckoning between the Moscow communists and the Labour Party people. He sat for Labour in the Storting three terms, 1937 to 1945 and 1950 to 1957, representing the town constituency of Kjøpstedene i Nordland, Troms og Finnmark until the electoral reform of 1953 and Nordland after it.

Between those spells he ran his own town, mayor of Narvik for two terms, 1945 to 1947 and 1947 to 1951. He was an uncle of Rolf Nilssen, one of the few kinship links across this spread of the name that the record actually states. A second Alfred Nilsen, 1892 to 1977, sat a single Storting term from 1950 to 1954; the two are easily confused and were not the same man.

Adolf Gustinius Nilsen was born in Stavanger on 3 March 1895 and rowed in the Norwegian eight at the Antwerp Olympics of 1920. The crew was Theodor Nag, Conrad Olsen, Adolf Nilsen, Håkon Ellingsen, Thore Michelsen, Arne Mortensen, Karl Nag and Tollef Tollefsen, with Thoralf Hagen steering. Eight nations entered, and the regatta was rowed as a knockout on 28 and 29 August, two crews at a time.

Norway beat Czechoslovakia in the quarter-final, then lost the semi-final to Great Britain, taking the bronze behind the United States and the British.

Oliver John Nilsen was born at Collingwood in Melbourne on 17 August 1884 and schooled at Rathdowne Street State School in Carlton and at the Working Men's College. He married Ethel Margaret Williams at the Fitzroy Presbyterian Church in 1907, and in 1916 set up an electrical business, Oliver J. Nilsen and Co., which moved to 45 Bourke Street in 1924.

The wireless followed the wiring. Nilsen held an experimental receive-only licence in his own name in 1923, and his firm took the transmitting callsign 3UZ in 1924. That licence was withdrawn on 6 February 1925, when he was granted the first commercial broadcasting licence in Victoria, for station 3UZ. The family held the station until 1985, and the callsign is still on air, carried since 1996 by the identifier Radio Sport 927.

He was elected to the Melbourne City Council in 1934 for the Gipps Ward and sat on its electric-supply committee for thirty years, the obvious man for it. He was Lord Mayor of Melbourne from August 1951 to 1952 and retired from the council in 1964, made CBE in 1956, a Justice of the Peace, and in 1944 given the Australian Federation of Commercial Broadcasters' award. At Kooyong Road in Caulfield he lit an enormous tree on his lawn with electric lamps every Christmas, long before it was the fashion. He died at East Melbourne on 24 October 1977.

The name held its place in Norwegian public life after Peder Nilsen left it. Arne Nilsen (1924-2020) served as a government minister; Nils Emaus Nilsen (1886-1976) sat one Storting term from 1950 to 1954; Oddvard Nilsen (born 1940) sat three; Tom-Christer Nilsen (born 1969) came into politics from Hordaland.

In sport it concentrates where Norway does. Three Olympic boxers bore it: Kristoffer Nilsen (1901-1975), Einar Nilsen (1901-1980) and Erling Nilsen (1910-1984). Laila Schou Nilsen (1919-1998) competed as an Olympic skater and skier, Elin Nilsen (born 1968) and Harald Christian Strand Nilsen (born 1971) as Olympic skiers, Betty Ann Bjerkreim Nilsen (born 1986) as an orienteer and cross-country skier, Jeanette Nilsen (born 1972) as an Olympic handball player. On the football pitch: Olav Nilsen (1942-2021), Roger Nilsen (born 1969) and Steinar Nilsen (born 1972), who played and then managed.

The name's strongest cultural claim is a short life. Rudolf Nilsen, poet and journalist, was born in 1901 and dead by 1929, and Norwegian song has drawn on the name ever since: Lillebjørn Nilsen (born 1950), singer, songwriter and folk musician; Kurt Nilsen (born 1978), pop and country singer; Åge Sten Nilsen and Terje Nilsen singing after them. Hans Jacob Nilsen and Ole-Jørgen Nilsen (1936-2008) acted, Tove Nilsen writes, Gunnar Nilsen founded the Stabburet food centre, and Håkon Nilsen served as a torpedo commander and came through the war.

Emigration took Nilsen to the American Midwest in bulk, and it surfaces wherever that migration landed. Werner Nilsen (1904-1992) played soccer as a Norwegian-American, Spencer Nilsen (born 1961) composes video game music in the United States, Ida Nilsen sings in Canada. The spelling crossed back over the borders that sorted it too: B. J. Nilsen (born 1975) is a Swedish sound artist and Jimmy Nilsen (born 1966) a Swedish speedway rider, both carrying the Norwegian single-l form in the country of Nilsson. That is the practical lesson of the three spellings. They mark where a family's paperwork was kept, not a line anyone was forbidden to cross.