Rasmussen

Erasmus is Greek for beloved, the name of a saint and of the great humanist, and Denmark wore it down to Rasmus, one blunt syllable a parish clerk could spell without asking twice. Rasmussen is that man's son, minted fresh wherever a Rasmus had a boy, until the state outlawed the patronymic in 1856 and froze whatever each household was called that year. It is the ninth most common surname in Denmark, carried by about 1.9 percent of Danes.

The word did not stay in Denmark. It went north to the Faroes, where Rasmus Rasmussen (1871-1962) taught in a folk high school and wrote, and where Sunleif Rasmussen, born 1961, composes. And in a Danish missionary's luggage it went to Greenland.

Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen was born on 7 June 1879 at Jacobshavn, now Ilulissat, in Greenland. His father, Christian Rasmussen, was a Danish missionary and vicar; his mother, Lovise Rasmussen, born Fleischer, was Inuk and Danish. He grew up among the Kalaallit, learned Kalaallisut, and learned to drive a dog sled at the age other children learn to read. "My playmates were native Greenlanders," he wrote; "from the earliest boyhood I played and worked with the hunters, so even the hardships of the most strenuous sledge-trips became pleasant routine for me."

He was schooled at Lynge in North Zealand, and between 1898 and 1900 tried and failed at a career as an actor and opera singer. Then in 1902 he joined the Danish Literary Expedition with Jørgen Brønlund, Harald Moltke and Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen, two years of examining Inuit culture by a man who could hold the interviews in the language they happened in. He came home to a lecture circuit, to The People of the Polar North (1908), his combined travel journal and study of Inuit folklore, and to his marriage to Dagmar Andersen.

In 1910 Rasmussen and his friend Peter Freuchen set up a trading station at North Star Bay, near Mount Dundas, and named it Thule because there was nothing further north to trade from: the Ultima Thule of the classical geographers, turned into a shop and a base camp. Out of it ran the seven Thule Expeditions, between 1912 and 1933.

The first, in 1912, was the two of them alone, sent to test Robert Peary's claim that a channel cut Peary Land off from Greenland. There was no channel, and proving it took a journey of 1,000 kilometres across the inland ice that came close to killing them both. Clements Markham, president of the Royal Geographical Society, called it the finest journey ever performed by dogs. In 1915 Rasmussen translated Mathias Storch's Singnagtugaq into Danish, the first novel written in Greenlandic.

The Second Thule Expedition of 1916-1918 was a party of seven mapping a little-known stretch of Greenland's north coast, and it became his book Greenland by the Polar Sea (1921); it also carried the only two deaths of his career, Thorild Wulff and Hendrik Olsen. The Third, in 1919, laid depots for Roald Amundsen's polar drift in the ship Maud, and the Fourth put him in east Greenland for months near Angmagssalik gathering ethnographic material.

The Fifth Thule Expedition of 1921-1924 was the largest he mounted and the one remembered as his greatest achievement, designed to attack the great primary problem of the origin of the Eskimo race. The team of seven began in eastern Arctic Canada, collecting specimens, excavating sites and taking interviews; one was with the shaman Aua, who told him of Uvavnuk. The material filled ten volumes when it was published in 1946.

Then Rasmussen left his own expedition behind. With two Inuit hunters he travelled by dog sled for sixteen months across North America to Nome in Alaska, and on into Russia, where visa trouble held him to less than forty-eight hours; long enough to interview a few of the Yupiks and satisfy himself that they spoke the same language as the people he had grown up among. He was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage by dog sled, and he told it in Across Arctic America (1927).

For seven years he moved between Greenland and Denmark, lecturing and writing. The Sixth Thule Expedition, in 1931, was as much politics as science: it was meant to consolidate Denmark's claim to a portion of eastern Greenland that Norway was contesting. The Seventh, in 1933, was to carry that work on, and while it ran he wrote the screenplay for The Wedding of Palo, completed in 1934.

On that last expedition he ate kiviaq, took food poisoning from it, contracted pneumonia and died in Copenhagen a few weeks later, aged 54. The map kept him, in capes, glaciers and the Knud Rasmussen Range, and so did the Danish navy, in the Knud Rasmussen class of patrol vessels. The Royal Geographical Society had given him its Founder's Medal in 1923 and the Royal Danish Geographical Society its Hans Egede Medal in 1924. He is called the father of Eskimology, and he is still known in Greenland, in Denmark and among the Canadian Inuit.

Some households doubled the name back on itself, and Rasmus Rasmussen recurs in the Danish record often enough to need a page of its own to sort out. A striking number are farmers who ended in parliament: Rasmus Rasmussen (1810-1872), a gårdejer or farm owner who sat in the Landsting, another Rasmus Rasmussen (1869-1953) who sat in both the Folketing and the Landsting, and Rasmus Rasmussen Flemløse (1879-1939), a third gårdejer in the Landsting. Further back, a Rasmus Rasmussen who died in 1753 sat as a judge of the Danish supreme court.

Eiler Rasmussen Eilersen (1827-1912) is the surname caught in the act. His father was Rasmus Eilersen (1788-1869), a farmer and the parish constable, the sognefoged, at Østerby in what is now Faaborg-Midtfyn; so the boy was literally Rasmus's son, and when he began to exhibit he did it as Rasmussen. He took his first lessons in Faaborg, won the backing of the landowner Preben Bille-Brahe (1773-1857), and went to Copenhagen in 1847 to train as a landscape painter, only for the First Schleswig War to pull him into the army for two years. In 1858 the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts granted him a travelling scholarship, and in 1871 made him a member.

Jørgen Skafte Rasmussen (1878-1964) lost his father, a shipmaster, while he was still a small child, and his mother when he was nineteen. He apprenticed in Copenhagen in 1894, trained on with an engine maker at Nykøbing, and in 1898 crossed to Germany for engineering classes at the Hochschule Mittweida in Saxony. Thrown out two years later for inadequate results, he took his exams instead at Zwickau in 1902 and registered his first utility model, on a turning tool, there in 1903.

On that footing he built an industry. In 1921 he founded the Zschopauer Motorenwerke to make DKW motorcycles, added the Framo works, and in 1928 acquired a majority interest in Audi Automobilwerke. The crash of 1929 emptied the market for cars, and the Saxony Regional Bank which had financed him installed Richard Bruhn on the Audi board in 1930 and pruned the group hard. What came out of it in the summer of 1932 was Auto Union AG, built from Audi, DKW, Horch and the car-making part of Wanderer, which grew into Germany's second largest passenger car producer behind Opel. Rasmussen was removed from the board in 1934 and returned to Denmark in 1947.

Bjørn Vilhelm Ravn Rasmussen, born in Copenhagen in 1885 and dead at Aarhus in 1962, won a silver medal in football at the 1908 Olympic Games in London, playing two of Denmark's three matches. He watched Denmark's first official international from the bench as his side won 9-0, and he was on the pitch for the semi-final, won 17-1 and still Denmark's largest international victory. His fourth and last cap came in the final, lost 2-0 to Great Britain, and in club football he played on the wing for KB.

The column behind him is long. Mads Rasmussen, born 1981, rowed to two world titles in the lightweight double sculls, and Hans Kjeld Rasmussen (1954-2025) was a sports shooter and Olympic champion. The poet Halfdan Rasmussen (1915-2002) and the town planner Steen Eiler Rasmussen (1898-1990) carried the name in Danish letters and architecture, and Jesper Rasmussen Brochmand (1585-1652) had carried it, in the middle position where a Dane of his century put the patronymic, as a Lutheran clergyman and Bishop of Zealand.