Isn’t it curious how few last names are insults?
The usual story: surnames came about when bureaucrats needed to identify people who they didn’t know personally.
In a village of 60 people, a single name is enough to tell who’s who. Everybody knows everybody. So even when people share a first name, it’s easy to tell them apart. Is it John the Miller? Or John from Harby? Or John, Peter’s son? Or little John?
It’s just the tax collector who doesn’t know who you’re talking about, and who needs an unambiguous name to write in his ledger. Or perhaps it’s the priest recording a marriage or a death. So John becomes John Miller, or John Harby, or John Peterson, or John Little.
And those are, roughly, the categories of surname which emerge in medieval Europe. Names come from professions, or jobs, or patronymics. Or from that last category (John Little), names based on some physical or personal characteristic of the person. Nicknames, basically.
The thing is that most of the nicknames are positive, or at least neutral. Wise is a common surname; Stupid is not. Strong is common, Weak is not.
If this doesn’t surprise you, you probably weren’t bullied in school.
Or, if you want a less immediate demonstration of the tendency towards cruelty in names, look at Norse “by-names”. These are another forerunner of surnames, but directed towards sagas and story-telling rather than to the tax collector.
And…they are brutal — but brutal in a style pretty close to what you’d expect to find in a modern school. Examples include “foul-fart” and “butter penis”, alongside less startling insults like “foolish” or “bald”. There were laws against derogatory nicknames, usually a reliable sign that something is happening frequently enough to annoy people.
I suppose it’s not hard to imagine villagers toning down their choice of names for the bureaucrats and the priests. Even if Eystein was willing to embrace his nickname “Foul-Fart”, he might have hesitated to tell it to the priest. Or the priest might have hesitated to write it down, and encouraged him to choose again. Or even if it survived into the first generation, perhaps his son managed to get himself re-named.