Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel looks at some of the new baby names to make the headlines this week–with several surprises.

Being a name nerd used to be hard work.

Do you remember paging through lists of Olympic medalists in the paper, gazing at name plaques in art museums, seeking out family trees in history books at the library?  Did you know exactly which days the local paper ran birth announcements?

Then you must be a thirty-something or better name nerd.

I borrowed my mother’s only baby name book and kept it on my bookshelf, between Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew.  I read it obsessively, even the small print listing nicknames and foreign variants.  That long lost book is where I fell in love with Libby and Nan, Katrinka and Alexei.

So many stories about twenty-first century baby naming trends are dismissive.  They claim parents are trying too hard for their children to stand out and be unique.

Maybe that happens some of the time, but to me it seems straightforward.

With access to all of these fabulous names, why wouldn’t we consider a wider range of possibilities?

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Scandinavian names have been slow to enter the American stockpot of names.  Maybe it’s because they’re not as romantic as the Italians, as genial as the Irish, as energetic as the Russians, or as instantly chic as the French.

But there are a lot of great, neglected Swedish, Norwegian and Danish names to be discovered, and those of internationally known Scandinavian celebrities have provided a pathway in.  Here are the names of some such notables, both past and present, which are both appealing and accessible– and definitely worth considering.

Astrid—the prolific Swedish author Astrid Lindgren is best known as the creator of Pippi Longstocking.  Her royal Scandinavian name has been neglected here in favor of the more familiar Ingrid, but is just as attractive.

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