Olaf

Olaf reaches Poland with a Scandinavian sound and a Slavic root, and the meaning is plain: potomek przodków, an ancestor's descendant. The name points backward. It marks the line a child enters, the family standing behind the given name rather than the child alone.

The best documented bearer is Olaf II, king of Norway in the eleventh century, killed at the battle of Stiklestad in 1030 and later canonized as the country's patron saint. His feast falls on 29 July, and the Polish calendar keeps an imieniny for Olaf in that same late-July week.

In Poland the name stays whole. It has no everyday diminutive, no shortened pet form that slips loose from it, so the Olaf called out in a school register is the same Olaf written on a form at the urząd. What the name hands the boy is old and literal: the sense of a descendant, an heir of the ancestors.