Viking Name Generator

Where the names come from

Landnámabók, the Book of Settlements, records the people who settled Iceland in the late ninth and tenth centuries: thousands of names with their parents, children and farms. We took our list from the person index of Finnur Jónsson's 1900 edition, keeping index entries whose patronymic or family role tells us whether the name is a man's or a woman's. The selection is ours.

We write the names in a simple English spelling: þ becomes th, ð becomes d, accents are dropped and so is the old nominative ending -r, so Þorsteinn becomes Thorstein and Ásdís becomes Asdis. A small model learns the letter patterns of the list and writes new names in the same style. Names labelled historical are in our list; invented ones are new. At most half of any list is historical. Invented names come with a pronunciation hint; historical ones don't, because how a real person said their name is not ours to guess.

Patronymics: -son and -dóttir

Norse people didn't have fixed family surnames. A man was his father's son and a woman her father's daughter: Helgi's son was Helgason, and his daughter Helgadóttir. The name changed every generation, and a woman kept her own patronymic when she married. The generator builds the father's name from the same model, then adds the ending with a simple rule, shown in the table below. Real Old Norse forms are often irregular (the son of a Bjǫrn was a Bjarnarson); our anglicised pattern keeps it readable.

By-names

The sagas are full of nicknames: descriptions, deeds and trades, which often became better known than the given name. We wrote our own in English in that style, such as the Quiet or Seal-hunter. The famous by-names of real kings and of television characters are deliberately left out, so you won't be handed one that belongs to somebody else. The list on this page begins with Alof Adalsteinsdóttir.