Erling's Home

Photo of Bryne by Rune Sattler CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org

One of the most famous footballers today is the still very young Erling Braut Haaland, born in Leeds, but firmly rooted in his home town of Bryne, south of Stavanger, in the Jæren region of southwest Norway. Today's lecture is about his surname.

Like many Norwegians, Erling's surname derives from what was originally a farm-name. According to Wikipedia, his name was originally spelled Håland, which would be the normal modern spelling. Haaland is an alternative, usually older, way of spelling it, which was perhaps adopted by his father when working in Leeds so as not to scare the poor monoglot English with a foreign letter.

According to Rygh's Norske Gaardnavne, there are 31 farms in Norway called Håland or Haaland. The name itself means 'High Land' and it is interestingly quite common in Orkney, too, where it is usually spelled Holland.

Young Erling Braut Haaland grew up in the small town of Bryne, in the municipality of Time. One of the 31 Norwegian farms called Håland or Haaland is actually right on the edge of Bryne, to the southwest, and it is very likely that is where his surname derives from.

And how should it be pronounced? The closest I can get to how an English speaker can get it more or less right is 'Hawlund' ('haw' as in 'jaw' and 'lund' as in 'fund').

There is also a place called Braut, now subdivided into Nord- and Sør- (North- and South-), not far to the northwest of Bryne, which I'm assuming is where his middle name comes from, presumably from his mother's side as is often the custom in Norway nowadays.

So now you know.