people, whose phone book lists subscribers by their first name for the very sensible reason that the vast majority of Icelandic surnames simply record the fact that you are your father’s (or mother’s) son or daughter. Jón Einarsson’s offspring, for example, might be Ólafur Jónsson and Sigríður Jónsdóttir. The law dictates that the names of children born in Iceland must – unless both parents are foreign – be submitted to the National Registry within six months of birth. If they are not on a recognized list of 1,853 female and 1,712 male names, the parents must seek the approval of a body called the Icelandic Naming Committee. For the 5,000 or so children born in Iceland each year, the committee reportedly receives about 100 applications and rejects about half under a 1996 act aimed mainly at preserving the language of the sagas. Among its requirements are that given names must be “capable of having Icelandic grammatical endings”, may not “conflict with the linguistic structure of Iceland” and should be “written in accordance with the ordinary rules of Icelandic orthography”. What this means in practice is that names containing letters that do not officially exist in Iceland’s 32-letter alphabet, such as “c ”, are out. Similarly, names unable to accommodate the endings required by the nominative, accusative, genitive and dative cases used in