Sørensen

The name under Sørensen is Latin. Severinus travelled north as Severin and wore down in Danish mouths to Søren, and for a long stretch the two were one name: the astronomer Christen Sørensen Longomontanus is recorded as the son of a labourer called Søren, or Severin, the forms interchangeable in one line.

Søren never found an English door, which is why the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard is one of the few Danes whose given name reaches English untranslated. Its son, Sørensen, is the eighth commonest surname in Denmark as of 2022, held there by the outlawing of the living patronymic in 1856. Emigrants to English-speaking countries mostly filed the vowel off to Sorensen or Sorenson.

Anders Sørensen was born at Vejle on 9 November 1542 and took his byname from the town: Anders Sørensen Vedel. He studied at Ribe from the age of fourteen, reached the University of Copenhagen in 1561, and the year after was made tutor to a young nobleman named Tycho Brahe for Brahe's grand tour of Europe; the friendship lasted for life.

Denmark's great medieval chronicle, Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum, existed only in Latin, and Christiern Pedersen's Danish version had stalled. Vedel's learning was admired by the men who ran the country, Peder Oxe and Arild Huitfeldt among them, and he was judged the man to finish it. He began in 1570 and published Den danske Krønicke in 1575, less a translation than a rewriting of Saxo's Latin into Danish.

Made royal historian in 1584, he planned a continuation in twenty-two books and it defeated him: too few secretaries, too much care, his own slowness. The task passed to Niels Krag in 1594 over his protests, and much of what he had written burned in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. What lasted was the work he did on the side: Hundredvisebogen, a hundred Danish ballads published in 1591 with Queen Sophie's support, the foundation of later knowledge of the older Danish literary tradition. Peder Syv reprinted them in 1695, and in the Faroe Islands those texts are sung by folk singers still. Vedel died at Ribe on 13 February 1616.

Christen Sørensen was eight when his father Søren died, leaving the family working the fields at Lomborg. An uncle had him schooled at Lemvig, then after three years sent him back to his mother, who needed his hands; she let him study with the parish clergyman through the winters. In 1577 the ill-will of some of his relatives and his own appetite for learning made him run away to Viborg, where he attended the grammar school and worked as a labourer to pay for it.

He reached Copenhagen in 1588 with a reputation already made, and in 1589 Tycho Brahe engaged him as an assistant at Uraniborg, where he served eight years. He defended Tycho's system for life but would not follow him on one point: Longomontanus held that the earth turned, where his master insisted it stood still. He rejoined Tycho at Prague in January 1600 and completed the Tychonic lunar theory. When Tycho died in October 1601 he was his master's preferred successor as imperial mathematician to Rudolph II, but he was in Denmark and Johannes Kepler was in Prague, so Kepler got the post.

He took a master's degree at Rostock and found a patron in the chancellor Christian Friis. Viborg made him rector of its school in 1603, and the University of Copenhagen gave him the chair of mathematics in 1607, which he held until his death on 8 October 1647. Tycho had left his restoration of astronomy unfinished: the observations complete, their reading into planetary motions not. Longomontanus took that on and delivered Astronomia Danica in 1622, dedicated to Christian IV, who gave him the canonry of Lunden for it.

The book set the Ptolemaic, Copernican and Tychonic systems against each other and gave the earth a daily rotation borrowed from Copernicus; working Mars for it, he had brought his error in longitude below two arcminutes while Kepler, not yet using elliptical orbits, still stood at eight. Reprinted in 1640 and 1663, it went where the astronomers were: Christopher Wren owned a copy, and so did Christiaan Huygens and the Royal Greenwich Observatory. In 1632 he began the Rundetårn, the astronomical tower in Copenhagen, and did not live to see it finished. A crater on the moon carries his name, set beside the one named for Tycho.

Peter Sørensen Vig was born on 7 November 1854 at Bøgvad in Egtved parish in South Jutland, went to Askov folk high school from 1872 to 1877, and became one of the men who formed the Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America and the United Danish Evangelical Lutheran Church. He and C. X. Hansen decided the new church's first business was schooling. Dana College at Blair, Nebraska, began as a preparatory school; Vig was president of Trinity Seminary there and president of the college from 1897 to 1899.

He also wrote the emigration down while the people who had made it were alive: Danske i Amerika, Trinitatis Seminarium, a history of the United Church seminary printed at Blair in 1911, and Danske i Kamp i og for Amerika, published at Omaha in 1917, which followed Danish soldiers in and for America from 1640 to 1865. All of it in Danish, for readers who had not stopped being Danes. He died on 21 March 1929.

Hans Peter Sørensen was born at Silkeborg on 18 December 1886, the son of a labourer, N. Friis Sørensen, and worked as a labourer himself until 1917 while running union and political business alongside it: chairman of the Karl Marx discussion club from 1912 to 1915, editor of the Social Democratic youth league's paper Fremad from 1915 to 1917.

Editing carried him the rest of the way. He ran Klokken 5 from 1918 to 1924, joined Social-Demokraten in 1924 and became its editor in 1928, until a German demand forced him out of the chair in 1941, under the Occupation. He went into the running of the city instead: the municipality's old-age pension housing that same year, the magistracy's fifth department and its traffic portfolio in 1943, and in 1946 overborgmester, Lord Mayor of Copenhagen. He held it ten years, stood down in 1956, and died in the city on 29 May 1962.

Svend Erik Olaf Sørensen was born in Vestergade in Aarhus on 30 November 1917. He took up athletics at eighteen and ran for Skovbakken, holding his own in the Jutland elite over 5,000 and 10,000 metres, but he was nearly thirty-four before he ran a marathon. He won it: his debut, at the Danish championship of 1951, beat the favourite Henning Larsen of Helsingør by more than ten minutes in 2:40:41, the fastest he would ever run. He took the title again in 1952 and 1954.

Before the Helsinki Games of 1952 the Olympic flame was carried through Denmark for the first time, by a relay of runners, cyclists and rowers; in Aarhus the honour of running into the stadium with the torch and lighting the cauldron went to Olaf Sørensen. At Helsinki cramp caught him on the road and he fought his way home 48th in 2:55:21. He stopped competing in 1956, spent twelve years selling for Jyllands Papirværk, then helped found the Brabrand housing association and ran it, and kept the Mackenzie Pub with his wife Lizzie until 1999. He died at Aarhus on 25 May 2008.

The name turns up wherever Danish life is written down. Søren Sørensen (1868-1939) worked as a biochemist and Thorvald Sørensen (1902-1973) as a botanist; C. F. Sørensen painted the sea, C. Th. Sørensen (1893-1979) designed landscapes, and Villy Sørensen (1929-2001) wrote as an author.

Inge Sørensen (1924-2011) swam for Denmark at the Olympics, and Niels Holst-Sørensen (1922-2023) ran for it before ending as commander-in-chief of the Royal Danish Air Force. The road cyclists alone give Rolf Sørensen, Nicki Sørensen and Chris Anker Sørensen (1984-2021). Norway holds the artist Sigurd Torbjørn Sørensen (1901-1981), and Severinsen, the parallel form on the same Latin root, belongs to the American trumpeter Doc Severinsen, born 1927.