If there’s one thing I’ve learned from foraging through the green leaves on my computer screen, it’s that Norwegian surnames are a bitch to track. Prior to the 1860’s, Norwegians didn’t use fixed surnames, children did not carry on their father’s last name. Instead, they used a patronymic pattern where children were still named after their father, adding in -sen (for boys) and -datters (for girls). Girls carried the -sen ending as well, but it was common for a sister to have a different surname from her brother.
I trace the birth of my fourth great grandmother to Stavanger, Norway on November 1st, 1857. She arrived in the United States in 1882, she was most likely 24 at the time. She came with her father and probably one or two of her siblings. Norway was their home, but a home shrouded in the death of their mother and various other siblings. It held no more happiness.
I imagine the smell of the sea water as they came into port somewhere on the East Coast. New York City. While Stavanger was a city, it’s few thousand people, was nothing compared to New York’s nearly one million. Her eyes wide like a child’s, at the scale of the city and her ears taking in languages she’s never heard before.
***
The Norns are three women in Norse mythology—who much like the Fates of Greek and Roman fame—decide the fate of men. Like their other European counterparts, they spin threads, weaving fates together and pulling them apart just as easily. However, unlike the Fates, the Norns don’t just dictate the fate of humans, they also decide the fate of the Gods.
It is only three Norns with power over the Gods. Most Norns are simply fairy godmothers. They visit newborn children and bestow their fate. They are known for the greatest triumphs in history and the greatest tragedies. Norns are as diverse as humans themselves—some good, some evil—some look like elves, others giants, and others dwarves. Yet, they all hold undeniable power. Power that not even a God can overpower.
***
Her name was Severine. I wonder how she got this name. The name is French—the feminine form of Severus—and it means stern. Was her family simply a fan of foreign names? Was there perhaps a French woman who’d immigrated to Norway? Did they just like the way it rolled off the tongue?
As I look at her photo, her parents seemed to have unfailing intuition. Her lips are stiff, and she doesn’t smile (although this wasn’t particularly unusual), she wears a simple black dress and her hair is smoothed against her scalp, but her eyes are soft. Despite the photo being black and white, I know her eyes are a blue. They appear almost white in the photograph, like an otherworldly being.
Three years after her arrival, she marries a man named Hans Olsen—also an immigrant from Norway—in Canton, South Dakota. He was fourteen years her senior and had been in the US for nearly twenty years.
The marriage was advantageous. I imagine he had a better grasp on English than she did and was used to the new culture of the US. It’s only later that I notice their first child was born only a few months after their marriage. So, was it simply a marriage of etiquette? So that their daughter wouldn’t be born a bastard?
***
I grew up believing that I was nearly fully German. I grew up eating lefsa (which I did not realize was actually a Norwegian cuisine) and smelling fermented cabbage in our garage. My mother’s maiden name was infallibly German and so was her mother’s maiden name. It all seemed obvious that I would trace most of my ancestors to Germany and surrounding countries. I knew there were a few Norwegian ancestors, but it was in the back of my mind.
When I asked my grandmother about her Norwegian heritage, she recalled her great grandmother’s maiden name—Olsen. Marie Anne Olsen—Serverine’s first daughter—who died in 1977, three years after my mother was born.
Her and her husband were the ones to move to Ashland, Oregon where my own great grandmother—Betsy—would be born just a year after they arrived.
We took Betsy back to Ashland a few years ago. We drove past the house she was born in and the graveyard just down the road where Marie and many other family members are buried. I don’t think I’ve seen my great grandmother so happy as she remembered the early childhood she’d spent there. Despite being born in the middle of the Depression and WWII having taken up a vast majority of the first ten years of her life, it seems nothing makes her happier than returning to what just looks like large hills covered in long tan grass.
While I didn’t know anyone, my great grandmother spoke of, she speaks almost like a child—still referring to her parents as if she were one—and using honorifics when she spoke of her family members. I guess that’s probably pretty normal, but it still felt odd for my nearly eighty-year-old great grandmother to refer to people as Aunt this and Uncle that, or grandma and grandpa. I felt an odd connection to the graves we passed. Parts of my DNA were buried there after all. It was almost as if I could feel the strands of my DNA recognizing their dead kin beneath the grave stones.
***
Severine was widowed only five years after she got married. She’d had five children in those five years—one of which died when she was six months old. I can only imagine what she thought. Norway was shrouded in the death of her mother and her siblings, only for South Dakota to be shrouded in the same cloth.
The record goes nearly black after that until her death in 1917. It appears she lived with her father for the rest of her life (he would outlive her and most of his children). She stayed put when Marie and her husband left for Oregon. She went by Christine (her middle name) after she immigrated, probably because English speaking citizens couldn’t pronounce her French name. She was buried under that name in South Dakota.
***
It seems Severine did not fall victim to the patronymic surname. Storhaug did not have either gendered ending. Looking back at her father, Storhaug was not the surname he was born with, it was tagged on to his former surname that contained the -sen ending. He’d chosen the name for himself and his family. However, the origin of the name remained a mystery. The only certainty was that it was Norwegian.
I liked to think the Norns planned this all along. Their fingers weaving threads together haphazardly, the truths becoming woven together, but not immediately viewable unless you wanted to spend hours untangling the mass of string.
That’s when I am met with a story—or possibly legend—of a king buried in a ship somewhere in western Norway. His burial mound bore the name, Storhaug. He was buried with various riches and the word itself meant—Great Mound.
It was only later that I learned Storhaug is also a borough of Stavanger. Severine’s father most likely pulled it from the borough they lived in, possibly not even aware of the history. But, to me, everything had already come together.
***
The Mima Mounds are a series of mysterious mounds that jut out of the prairie in nearly uniform shapes and spacing. They vary in size and shape occasionally, but from above it looks like a sheet of candy dots.
On a school trip to the Mounds in eighth grade, our teacher turned us loose and allowed us to wander around the Nature Preserve. I stuck mostly to the carved dirt path that led around the mounds, only occasionally climbing atop them to dig up camas or inspect the native flora. The camas tasted like a watered down onion and I pretended to like it much more than I did, but it all seemed part of the experience.
Part of me felt like I needed to solve the mystery of the Mounds. Were they Native American burial grounds like the kids at school said? Or, were they simply carved by icebergs like our teacher thought? As I approached one of the larger mounds, I stopped to inspect it.
The mound was partially covered in prairie grasses and plants, but some of the smooth, rocky earth was exposed. I pushed my finger into it. It felt cold and soft and like any other dirt from the area. But, as I pulled out my index finger, a shiver ran down my spine.
The largest mound is within walking distance of my elementary school. To passersby, it probably looks like a normal hill with a house on top, hidden among the trees. But, if you strip away the vegetation, you’ll notice how the hill is perfectly dome shaped. It’s not oblong and uneven like it’s supposed to be but shaped like the perfect hills children draw. If you drive towards the school, you’ll notice a stone monument at the bottom of the hill commemorating this fact.
My town—like Severine—has two names and I can only think that the Norns wove it perfectly. Severine’s family left one Great Mound, only to find a Grand Mound on the other side of the world a hundred and fifty years later.
Alisan Keesee 