Today we've got another post from Colin, this time discussing Norwegian names, The Simpsons and speculation on Clancy Wiggum's heritage. Have a great weekend everyone!
We’ve already written about Sunday’s Simpsons episode marking Syttende Mai – click here to read it if you missed it – and that reminded us of my own (unproven, highly speculative) theory about the ethnic background of Springfield’s police chief. Namely, I think that Police Chief Clancy Wiggum is a Norwegian-American.
Here’s why. I read somewhere that Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons, is half-Norwegian. If that’s true, it must be on his mother’s side, since Groening doesn’t look like a Norwegian name to me. According to this article from the Oregonian, Chief Wiggum is named for Groening’s mother, whose maiden name was Wiggum. That name looks more Norwegian to me, (because of the “wig“ part, more on that later) but then again last names change a lot when people immigrate, so it could come from anywhere. According to Statistics Norway’s database of Norwegian names, there isn’t anyone in Norway today with the last name “Wiggum” with two “g”s, but I see in my dictionary of Norwegian last names that there’s a similar surname with just one “g.” When I look up “Wigum” in Statistics Norway’s database and gulesider.no, the online phone catalog, I get over 120 hits.
So, if Matt Groening’s mother is of Norwegian descent and her last name is Norwegian, then I think we can safely conclude that Chief Wiggum is a Norwegian-American.
And now that we’ve established that, let’s not tell anyone, okay? If they actually portrayed Wiggum as a Norwegian-American on the show, we’d never live it down.
In an effort to make this post a little more educational, let’s get back to why “Wiggum” looked Norwegian to me. The first part, “wig-“ is an old spelling of the modern Norwegian word “vik” meaning “bay” or “inlet.” Because of the many changes Norwegian has gone through in the last couple hundred years, Norwegian names use lots of ways to spell “vik” (Vig, Viig, Wig, Wiig, Viik, Wik, Wiik). Many Norwegians take their last names from the farms where they or their ancestors lived, and given that Norway has so much coastline the “vik” element (in various forms) is extremely common in surnames.