Olsson

Olsson is what the parish books made of Olof: a contraction of Olofsson, the father's name in the genitive with son fixed on the end, and now and then it stands instead for the shortened form Ola.

The register puts a figure on the result. On 31 December 2012 there were 108,065 people in Sweden spelling the name Olsson, with a long tail behind them: 4,559 Ohlsson, 834 Ohlson, 656 Olson, 79 Ohlzon, 70 Olzon, nine Ollson, two Olszon and six more written some other way again. That is 114,280 people, and the seventh commonest surname in the country.

A name carried by that many identifies nobody, so it is worth asking where its bearers turn up anyway. For a century and a half the answer is one room in Stockholm. The Riksdag of the Estates seated farmers in a chamber of their own, and this name runs through it from the back bench to the speaker's chair.

Jacob Ohlsson i Hästekälla was born on 14 September 1679 at the farm of Hästekälla in Morlanda parish on Orust, and died on 7 May 1738 on the same family farm. In June 1702, not quite twenty-three, he swore the nämndeman's oath to succeed his father Olof Rasmusson i Hästekälla, who was standing down from the district court of the Orust and Tjörn tingslag on grounds of age. He ran the farm and sat as a lay assessor beside it, and in time became häradsdomare of that court.

He married Johanna Knutsdotter, daughter of the shipbuilding master Knut Olsson i Mollösund; between 1711 and 1732 they had twelve children, of whom six reached adulthood. What took him off the island was that the härader of Orust and Tjörn sent him up as their man in the peasant estate for every assembly of the realm called between 1710 and 1723.

The first meeting he attended was not a full riksdag at all. The utskottsmöte of 1710 was convened in haste after the army's defeat at Poltava in 1709 and the flight of Karl XII to Turkey, and only three or four farmers were summoned from each län, against the two from every härad an ordinary riksdag could take. It was the first gathering of the estates since the coronation riksdag of 1697. The Danish threat to the Skåne lands then brought on the riksdag of 1713-1714, and the king's death at Fredrikshald on 30 November 1718 forced another the year after.

How he acted at those three meetings is not known, and the reason is itself a piece of parliamentary history. The riksdag of 1720 was the first at which the peasant estate kept minutes of its own; before that the record of the fourth chamber is too thin to say what any individual member did. So the earliest act of his career in Stockholm that can be vouched for is also the largest: at that riksdag of 1720 the estate elected him its talman, its speaker.

Lars Olsson i Groröd was born on 19 January 1759 at Groröd in Herrestad parish in Bohuslän and died on 10 September 1832 at his farm Åker near Uddevalla. He entered the peasant estate as deputy for Sörbygden and Lane at the riksdag of 1786 and was returned in 1789, in 1792 and in 1800, when he sat on the Hemliga utskottet, the Secret Committee. The ground he spoke for was redrawn almost every time: Lane alone in 1809, five härader in 1810, seven in 1812, a different six in 1815, Lane and Tunge in 1828.

He was called to the speaker's chair at the riksdag of 1809, and the record of him there is unusually warm for a parliamentary note: he steered the estate with a firm hand and spoke for it with dignity. He took the chair again in 1810, 1812, 1815 and 1817, and was a commissioner of the estates' bank from 1802 to 1829.

The office put his signature somewhere permanent. With the speakers of the other three estates he set his name to several of the fundamental laws Sweden adopted at the start of the nineteenth century, and that, rather than anything he said in the chamber, is where his name is best known now. He was given the Illis Quorum in gold, the eighteenth size, and made a Commander of the Order of Vasa.

Eljas Per Olsson, entered in the riksdag as Olsson i Björbo, was born on 17 October 1800 in Floda parish in Kopparberg county and died there on 14 July 1882. He farmed, and he was sent up twice: for Nås and Malung at the estates riksdag of 1853 and 1854, and for Nås, Järna and Floda together with Malung, Lima and Äppelbo at the estates riksdag of 1865 and 1866. That second one was the last of its kind, the reform of the Riksdag of the Estates in 1866 having swept the arrangement away.

The name runs the length of that chamber's history. Olof Olsson, who died in 1789, was its talman before Lars Olsson of Groröd took the chair, and Nils Olsson i Öslöv (1812-1896) and Olof Olsson i Slängserud (1811-1891) sat in it through its closing decades. Farmers of the name fill the lists afterwards under party colours instead of an estate: Olof Olsson i Kullenbergstorp (1859-1934) for the farmers' league, Carl Olsson i Järnsida (1863-1928) as a liberal, Carl Olsson i Mellerud (1881-1972) as a social democrat.

Not every Olsson of the farming country spent his life in a chamber. Lisserkers Olof Olsson was born in 1803 at Lisselskog in Rättviks parish, son of Knutes Olof Ersson and Brita Olsdotter, and he was a dalmålare, a painter. He worked several years in Västmanland before moving in 1834 to Lisserksgården in Altsarbyn, the farm whose name then attached itself to his own, and he died there on 29 April 1874.

A good number of his paintings survive, the last finished in 1872. The clothing is what stands out: his figures carry the dress elegance of both the Gustavian and the Empire fashions, and his own flourish is the vajande skruvax, the waving twisted ear of corn, worked in among the people. The Nordiska museet holds his painting of King Solomon waiting for the Queen of Sheba as she arrives in a carriage.

The name went into Swedish business at scale. Sten A. Olsson (1916-2013) was a shipowner and founder of the Stena sphere, and Dan Sten Olsson, born in 1947, leads and principally owns the Stena group. Tore Ohlson (1920-1999) ran Clas Ohlson AB, Hans-Olov Olsson, born in 1941, headed Volvo Cars, and William Olsson (1862-1923) founded the school at Lundsberg.

Emigration took the name across the Atlantic with everything else Sweden sent. Alexander Olsson (1868-1952) worked as a Swedish-American journalist, Carl Olson (1875-1952) as a Swedish-American painter and sculptor, Olof Olsson (1841-1900) as a Swedish-American theologian. Nils William Olsson (1909-2007) became an American literary scholar, a diplomat and a genealogist, a particular trade for a man whose surname was shared with a hundred thousand strangers.

One chair in the Swedish Academy is occupied by the name: Anders Olsson, born in 1949, is a writer and professor of literature at Stockholm University as well as a member of the Academy. Otto Olsson (1879-1964) composed and played the organ, Jan Olof Olsson (1920-1974) wrote and reported, and Vibeke Olsson, born in 1958, writes novels and serves as a Baptist pastor. Betty Olsson (1871-1950) was a suffragist and peace activist, Cilluf Olsson (1847-1916) a textile artist, Tage William-Olsson (1888-1960) an architect.

The modern roll spreads as widely as the count would predict. Ingela Olsson, born in 1958, acts; Göran Hugo Olsson directs films; Christian Olsson, born in 1980, competes in athletics and Johan Olsson, born in 1980, skis cross-country; Marcus Olsson, born in 1988, plays football, and so does his brother Martin.

None of them inherited anything from Jacob Ohlsson of Hästekälla except the word, and that is all a Swedish patronymic ever transmitted: a fact about somebody's father, repeated until a hundred thousand people shared it. What the men of the name did with it was to keep turning up in the one chamber of the Swedish parliament that belonged to people who worked the ground.