Svalbard
Names

The name Svalbard was officially adopted for the archipelago by Norway under the 1925 Svalbard Act which formally annexed it. The former name Spitsbergen was thenceforth restricted to the main island. In 1827 Baltazar Keilhau first proposed that the Old Norse toponym Svalbarði, found in medieval Icelandic sources, referred to Spitsbergen. Keilhau's theory was revived by Gustav Storm in 1890 and Gunnar Isachsen in 1907, at a time when ancient Norse connection to the land would help modern Norway's contested claim to sovereignty. Svalbard is a modern Norwegian analogue of Svalbarði, which in turn derives from svalr ('cold') and barð ('edge', 'ridge', 'turf', 'beard'). The Icelandic Annals record that Svalbarði was discovered in 1194, while the Landnámabók places it four days' sailing north of Langanes. The word dægr "day" might mean either 12 or 24 hours; Isachsen took the latter interpretation, thus discounting Jan Mayen as Svalbarði. Cultural studies academic Roald Berg says Svalbarði more likely referred to part of Greenland, and the 1925 renaming cemented Norwegian sovereignty as recognised by the 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty (now the Svalbard Treaty).

The name Spitsbergen originated with Dutch navigator and explorer Willem Barentsz, who in 1596 described the "pointed mountains" or, in Dutch, spitse bergen that he saw on the west coast of the main island. Barentsz did not recognize that he had discovered an archipelago, and consequently the name Spitsbergen long remained in use both for the main island and for the archipelago as a whole. Later the main island was sometimes distinguished as West Spitsbergen. The spelling Spitzbergen, with z instead of s, derives from German.
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