The Story of Solveig’s Name

Bjorn and I welcomed our precious baby girl into the world on Monday, October 16th! It was one of the best days of our life! Now we are settling in as a family of 3 and we’re soaking up every possible second of this sweet newborn phase.

If you saw our announcement on Instagram or the Facebook page, then you already know our daughter’s name! It has been so fun to FINALLY be able to share what her name is, since we generally didn’t tell people until she arrived. We do still call her “BB” a lot, too, because the nicknames you give your baby during pregnancy have the tendency to stick. 🙂

Solveig Brynn Olson (“Sophie” for short) has captured our hearts from the start – we love her so much we could burst!

Since Solveig is a pretty unique name, people have been asking about it. I wanted to take the time today to tell you the story behind her name!

First of all, let’s talk pronunciation:

Solveig is pronounced SOL-vay – the “SOL” syllable rhymes with “goal.” The silent letter “g” at the end is the traditional spelling of this name so we stuck with that instead of going with a different phonetic spelling.

We are calling her Sophie as a nickname for Solveig.

Brynn rhymes with the name “Lynn.”

The Story Behind Solveig’s Name:

One of the coolest things about our baby’s name is the fact that Bjorn and I both wanted to have a daughter called Sophie someday. We actually knew this about each other back when we were dating, before we were even engaged! Bjorn wanted a daughter someday named Solveig whom he would call Sophie, and I had always wanted (even had dreams about) our first daughter being called Sophie.

Solveig is a common name in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Denmark. It’s not as common in the U.S., and I know that some people might attempt to pronounce the “g” at the end, but we still decided to use the traditional spelling. The name Solveig has a couple meanings, but I’ve most often heard it means “the way of the sun” or “strong house.”

A little fun fact: Solveig is the name of the heroine in the Scandinavian play “Peer Gynt.” The “Peer Gynt Suite” music composed by Edvard Grieg is a well-known classical piece. There is even a song in it called “Solveig’s Song” about the heroine, which I love! I’ve definitely played it for our Solveig. 🙂

Listen to “Solveig’s Song” here!

Nickname-wise: I like how well the name Sophie works as a nickname for Solveig! It’s a lot like how the name William gets called Bill, Margaret gets called Meg, Charles gets called Chuck, James gets called Jim, or Amalia gets called Amy or Mollie. There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to nicknames and Sophie is the perfect somewhat shortened name for the more traditional name Solveig.

Bjorn and I wanted to highlight our heritages in Sophie’s name. Since Bjorn is so Scandinavian, we wanted her first name to point to her heavily Scandinavian heritage and her middle name to point to my heritage, which is a bit more mixed. I’m mostly German but according to heritage DNA testing I’ve done, I’ve also got British and Irish in my family line. Hence, Sophie’s middle name:

Brynn has more of an Irish background. It means “hill” or “from the hill.” We also love the fact that our daughter has a middle name that starts with “B” like both her mama and daddy! Our little Sophie B 🙂

There you have it! That’s how Solveig Brynn got her name. Do you have any fun explanations or reasons for why your parents gave you yours?