﻿You can be Aagot, Arney or Ásfríður; Baldey, Bebba or Brá. Dögg, Dimmblá, Etna and Eybjört are fine; likewise Frigg, Glódís, Hörn and Ingunn. Jórlaug works OK, as do Obba, Sigurfljóð, Úranía and – should you choose – Vagna. But you cannot, as a girl in Iceland, be called Harriet. 
“The whole situation,” said Tristan Cardew, with very British understatement, “is really rather silly.” With his Icelandic wife, Kristin, Cardew is appealing against a decision by the National Registry in the capital Reykjavik not to renew their ten-year-old daughter Harriet’s passport on the grounds that it does not recognize her first name. 
Since the registry does not recognize the name of Harriet’s 12-year-old brother, Duncan, either, the two children have, until now, travelled on passports identifying them as Stúlka and Drengur Cardew: Girl and Boy Cardew. “But, this time, the authorities have decided to apply the letter of the law,” Cardew, a British-born cook who moved to Iceland in 2000, said. “And that says no official document will be issued to people who do not bear an approved Icelandic name.” 
The impasse meant the family, from Kópavogur, risked missing their holiday in France until they applied to the British embassy for an emergency UK passport, which should now allow them to leave. 
Names matter in Iceland, a country of barely 320,000 people, whose phone book lists subscribers by their first name for the very sensible reason that the vast majority of Icelandic surnames simply record the fact that you are your father’s (or mother’s) son or daughter. Jón Einarsson’s offspring, for example, might be Ólafur Jónsson and Sigríður Jónsdóttir.