Norse and Viking Baby Names, With Meanings

Old Norse names and what they mean

Old Norse was the language of Scandinavia and the Norse settlements from roughly the eighth to the fourteenth century. Its personal names are unusually well documented, because they survive in runic inscriptions, in the Icelandic sagas and in the mythological poems, and because Scandinavian naming was largely compositional: two meaningful elements joined together.

The counts are from the Office for National Statistics datasets for England and Wales, covering births registered in 2025 and published on 9 July 2026.

Girls

Boys

Which of these are still ordinary names in Scandinavia

This is where the data is useful, because it separates names that living Scandinavians actually use from names that only English speakers think of as Norse. Statistics Norway published its 2025 name figures on 28 January 2026. In the Norwegian top 50 for girls that year, Astrid was tenth with 308, Ingrid sixteenth with 240, Solveig thirty-third with 180, Sigrid joint forty-second with 144 and Saga thirty-ninth with 152. Among boys, Olav was sixteenth with 285, Magnus twenty-third with 252, Håkon twenty-ninth with 202, Odin thirty-fourth with 195, Sverre thirty-sixth with 188 and Sigurd forty-ninth with 145.

Thor, Ragnar and Loki do not appear anywhere in the Norwegian top 50. They are Norse names in origin, but as baby names in 2025 they are mainly an English-speaking phenomenon, driven by television and comics rather than by continuity of use. Neither fact should stop you choosing them. It is simply worth knowing which tradition you are joining.

How Britain uses them

Freya is a mainstream British name; the rest are not

Freya went to 1,802 girls in England and Wales in 2025, sixth overall, and it led the whole girls' list in Scotland the same year with 268 babies. Nothing else on either table above comes close. Astrid, at 196 and rising from 182 in 2024, is the next most used, followed by Erik at 99, Magnus at 91, Odin at 84 and Ivar at 57. Everything below that is in double or single figures.

The Viking sound without the Viking baggage

If the appeal is the sound rather than the mythology, several names on this list carry it without announcing a theme. Torin went to 36 boys in 2025 against 17 in 2024, Alva to 16 girls, Runa to 15 and Thora to 10. Axel, a Scandinavian form ultimately from the Hebrew name Absalom rather than from Old Norse, went to 363 boys and is the most quietly Nordic-sounding name in common British use.

Choosing one

Watch the spelling drift

Freya is the English spelling. Norway generally writes Frøya, Sweden and Denmark Freja. If relatives abroad will be writing the name, decide early which spelling is the real one, because the ONS and its Scandinavian equivalents all rank spellings rather than sounds.

Some meanings are disputed and should be presented that way

Loki has no agreed etymology; proposals connect it to words for "knot", "end" and "air", and none is settled. Ivar's elements are read differently by different scholars. A name site that gives you a single confident gloss for either is overstating what is known. Where a source flags a meaning as uncertain, we have repeated the uncertainty rather than tidying it away.

Norse names in Britain are not only an import

Parts of England were settled from Scandinavia, and the trace is in the map rather than in the birth register: place names ending in -by, -thorpe and -thwaite across Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and Cumbria are Norse. Denmark's national statistics office publishes its own annual name figures, and Norway's and Sweden's do the same, so if a particular name matters to you it is worth checking the relevant office rather than a name site, because the three countries diverge more than outsiders assume.

The god names carry more weight in Britain than you may expect

Odin went to 84 boys in England and Wales in 2025 and 83 in 2024, so it is established rather than faddish. Thor, at five, is not. Freya has been a British top-10 name for years and reads simply as a name; Thor still reads as a reference. If you want the sound without the reference, Torin, Ivar and Alva do the same work more quietly.