From Iceland — Fun With Icelandic Names! - Ragnar Egilsson Explains Words!

Fun With Icelandic Names! – Ragnar Egilsson Explains Words!

Published January 16, 2016

Fun With Icelandic Names!  – Ragnar Egilsson Explains Words!
Ragnar Egilsson
Photo by
Inga María Brynjarsdóttir

Most Icelandic names have some cool, ancient symbolism. My name, Ragnar, means something like “Soldier of God” (no biggie). The name has some female variants and one of them, Ragnhildur, just means “War” (for real).

But you can Google all that stuff for yourself. Personally, I enjoy pretending I’m from Texas and I’m transcribing Icelandic names the way they sound to me. So you get:

Gissur: Geezer
Einar: A Nerd
Sæbjörn: Cyber
Gunnleifur: Gonna Leave Her
Heiðar: Hey There
Steinbergur: Stained Burger
Jóhannes: Yo, Honeys
Snæfríður: It’s Not Free Though
Ólafía: All Over Ya
Ásgeir: Assgear
Ásbjörn: Assburn
Áslaugur: Asslicker
Ásdís: Assdick
Áslaug: Assbastard
Haukur: Go to Hell For Making Me Write Another Stupid Word Article I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

It’s not my fault some of these sound a bit rude. Why, I’m just a humble word wrangler, I jus’ rope ‘em and write ‘em, jus’ like my grandpappy did… yessiree.
Please start doing that.

More fun words explained by our very own Ragnar:

FERTUGSALDRI“FERTUGSALDRI” – Ragnar Egilsson Explains Words!
When referring to a person’s age (the verb is “dilapidating”), we sometimes refer to the decade of existence that person is currently struggling through instead of using their exact age.However, the name of the age bracket is always dictated by that decade’s upper limit.

sheep - art bicnick“RASSGAT” – Ragnar Egilsson Explains Words!
So we have a word, which is this word: “rassgat”. It 100% literally means “asshole”, as in “the hole part of the general ass area”. But unlike “asshole” in English, the word is never used to refer to a person that is behaving like a jerk.

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